Ellroy said he fantasized and longed for women but admitted, “I was the acquired taste that nobody ever acquired.” He upped the drinking and the Benzedrex until a doctor told him that if he continued he would be gone in a week’s time. Destination: Morgue! is not only the title of Ellroy’s latest work; it was also the conceivable future of the author when he was only 28 years old.

“Live or die,” Ellroy writes, “an easy choice once it confronts you.”

Ellroy cleaned himself up and began writing while caddying at a country club. He said he had always wanted to write and obsessed about it, even before his mother’s death.

Ellroy said a few books “profoundly affected” him, including Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions. On the whole, though, “I don’t read much,” he admitted. “I like to brood, I like to think.”

Ellroy ordered a T-bone steak for dinner and attacked it with the intensity he brings to his writing. I was only halfway finished with my meal, when he was done with his, though he had managed to simultaneously expand on various aspects of his writing. He then picked up the bone and began gnawing on it.

After the publication of his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, Ellroy’s success continued, climbed steep and his L.A. Quartet series—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz—were all international bestsellers.

But then the past came back to him. “For Christmas of ’93,” Ellroy explained, “my wife got me a copy of the photograph of me taken on June 22, ’58, the day my mother was killed…I hadn’t thought of that aspect of my mother’s death in years, and there it is in my face.”

From there, Ellroy decided to exorcise the memory of his mother, and expanded what was originally to be a magazine article into a full-length crime memoir. “The dramatist in me knew that I could write a book that would describe the arc of my relationship with my mother very well,” he said.

That he did. The resulting effort, My Dark Places, is a heartfelt, gut-wrenching 427 pages of coming to terms. “I understood that I would learn things about my mother, and I learned great things about my mother…and myself,” Ellroy said.

Ellroy wrote the book in seven months, an incredible feat for so involved and complicated a work. He wrote it quickly, he says, because the material was already inside of him. “Shit was coming out of me that I had been repressing for years,” he remarked. “It was easy.”

The memoir details not only the murder and subsequent investigation of Ellroy’s mother—Geneva Hilliker Ellroy—but also a new investigation, undertaken by a homicide detective named Bill Stoner from the L.A.P.D and Ellroy himself.

Though Ellroy admitted it was unlikely that they would find the killer 35 years after the fact, he knew the real investigation was of his mother’s life and his relationship with her. “She’s out there in the big spiritus mundi,“ he mused. “I’d give anything to hear her voice.”

RIFFS ON CRAFT

What Ellroy is most famous for is his crime novels—huge, sprawling works with hitmen, thugs, pimps, whores, victims and perps. His most recent series—The Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, which includes American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and a not-yet-published third installment—fictionalizes American history in the from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It covers a variety of events including the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination and will conclude just prior to Watergate.