Dark rooms. Beethoven. Dogs. Red-haired women. Oedipal fantasies. These memories and constituent parts of childhood became the baggage Ellroy carried into his new adopted family: the fraternity of detectives. “I very simply gave my heart to the police officers on the occasion of my mother’s death,” Ellroy told me. He never took it back. It lives and breathes in the friendships he enjoys with cops and in the avatars he created in his fiction, from The Black Dahlia (1987) to the recent novels Perfidia (2014) and his most recent, This Storm (2019). The discipline of writing, from age thirty, became a lifejacket that kept Ellroy afloat above the tide of decrepitude that shaped his early years.
Source : Ellroy Confidential
