My Dark Places (book)
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| My Dark Places | |
 First U.K. trade edition cover |
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| Author | James Ellroy |
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| Cover artist | Jacket design and front cover photograph uncredited |
| Country | Author: United States First Edition: England |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | True crime, autobiography |
| Publisher | Century Books |
| Publication date | October 1996 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) and audio cassette |
| Pages | 355 pp (first trade edition, hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-7126-7588-4 |
My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir is a 1996 book, part investigative journalism and part memoir, by American crime-fiction writer James Ellroy. Ellroy's mother was murdered in 1958, when he was 10 years old, and the killer was never identified. My Dark Places is Ellroy's account of his attempt to solve the mystery by hiring a retired Los Angeles County homicide detective to investigate the crime. Ellroy also explores how being directly affected by a crime shaped his life, often for the worse, and led him to write crime novels.
Ellroy's mother's strangled body was found by the roadside in El Monte, California. She was found by children in Babe Ruth baseball with their adult coaches, on June 22, 1958. The road lay beside the playing field at Arroyo High School. Officers from the El Monte city police department handed over the investigation to the L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau. They chased down leads gathered from the scene and from anonymous tips sent in by citizens in the area. The newspaper accounts about the murder were scarce, as well as the television news accounts. There were three murders that occurred in El Monte by that time in 1958, and all had been resolved very quickly. After all the leads went dry, the case was eventually abandoned and never solved.
Ellroy’s mother's name was Geneva Ellroy. She was more commonly called Jean Ellroy. Her murder later contributed to his fascination with another unsolved murder in Los Angeles: The January 15, 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, later called The Black Dahlia case, had some similarities to Jean Ellroy's murder. Both had been dumped by the roadside to be found by the next passerby. In his book, My Dark Places, James Ellroy describes the discovery of his mother’s body as a "classic late night body dump." [1]
Jean Ellroy’s murder would not be remembered because it lacked the media attention that followed the Dahlia murder. Elizabeth Short’s body was found cut in half, and the newspaper accounts—describing Short as a beautiful Hollywood aspiring starlet—drew more interest and attention, including Ellroy's.
In The Black Dahlia, Ellroy created a fictional story around the murder of Elizabeth Short. In My Dark Places, Ellroy writes a true-crime memoir, chasing down the facts and information of his mother's murder as a cold case. Bill Stoner is the retired LA investigator that assisted Ellroy in his search for the killer. Ellroy had never seen the police file of his mother’s murder until he decided to write this book in the mid 1990s. After fifteen months of investigation, the crime remained unsolved, and any potential suspects are believed to be dead.
[edit] Publication history
- Blakeney, Gloucestershire: Scorpion Press, 1996. Signed, limited edition.
- London: Century Books, October 1996. First trade edition.
- New York: Alfred A. Knopf, November 1996. First American edition.
- For this edition, Ellroy signed (or rather initialed) 50,000 blank pages that were bound into each copy of the first printing.
- London: Arrow, June 1997. First British trade paperback.
- New York: Vintage, August 1997. First American trade paperback.
[edit] References
- ^ James Ellroy, My Dark Places, page 23. Knopf, 1996
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