James Ellroy has 12 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 16 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 55 ratings. The most-rated is The Black Dahlia.
The Black Dahlia
Summary
On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history. In this fictionalized treatment of a real case, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both LA cops obsessed with the Black Dahlia, journey through the seamy underside of Hollywood to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.
©1987 James Ellroy (P)2006 Random House, Inc.
The Big Nowhere
Summary
Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents: the commie scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name as a cop...and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is DA's bureau brass. He's climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks - bagman, ex-narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes - is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare.
©1988 James Ellroy (P)2015 Hachette Audio
American Tabloid
Summary
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination - in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC.... Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy.... Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty.... Where three renegade law-enforcement officers - a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents - are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history.... James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.
©1995 James Ellroy (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved
L.A. Confidential
Summary
Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three LAPD detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.
©1990 James Ellroy (P)2015 Random House Audio
The Cold Six Thousand
Summary
The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid.... James Ellroy's high-velocity, best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us within inches of the dark realities of America's recent history. In The Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time. It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. The heart of the American Dream detonated. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around Kennedy's assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy. Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's ride: Dallas back to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches.... Tedrow stands witness, as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. His story is ground zero in Ellroy's stunning vision: historical confluence as American nightmare. The Cold Six Thousand is a masterpiece. Please note: This 2001 recording represents the technology of the time when it was produced. This is currently the best available source audio from the publisher.
©2001 James Ellroy (P)2001 Random House, Inc. Random House AudioBooks, A Division of Random House, Inc.
Blood's a Rover
Summary
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover's pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover's racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow - ex-cop and heroin runner - is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan - and each of them will pay "a dear and savage price to live History."Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it - our recent past razed and fully reconstructed - Blood's A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
©2009 James Ellroy (P)2009 Random House
White Jazz
Summary
Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns - it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer, a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat", and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, and from racketeers and drug kingpins, all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "42 and going on dead", it's dues time. Klein tells his own story, his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing, taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.
©2007 James Ellroy (P)2007 Books on Tape
My Dark Places
Summary
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy LA suburb.Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was 10 when his mother died, and he spent the next 36 years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to LA, to find out the truth about his mother - and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten - and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
©2009 James Ellroy (P)2019 Random House Audio
This Storm
Summary
January '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A. '42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno - This Storm is James Ellroy's most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.
©2019 James Ellroy (P)2019 Random House Audio
Perfidia
Summary
Los Angeles, veille de Pearl Harbour : la découverte des cadavres d'une famille d'origine japonaise, les Watanabe, incite le LAPD à fabriquer un coupable pour se débarrasser du problème. Dudley Smith, l'inoubliable "méchant" du quatuor de Los Angeles, est sur l'affaire. Une affaire qui s'annonce lucrative, tant l'hystérie du climat de guerre se prête aux machinations au détriment des citoyens américains d'origine japonaise... Après la trilogie Underworld USA, James Ellroy entreprend son projet le plus ambitieux : un nouveau quatuor de Los Angeles, qui forme un extraordinaire prélude au mythique Dahlia Noir. "C'est mon roman le plus ample, le plus détaillé sur le plan historique, le plus accessible sur le plan stylistique et aussi le plus intime." James Ellroy.
©2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2019 Alfred A. Knopf, New York / James Ellroy Editions / Payot & Rivages, Paris (P)2020 Audiolib
The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, Volume 3
Summary
Breathtaking suspense, cold-blooded crime and challenging twists of plot make this collection a chilling audio experience. Featuring the finest short story mystery fiction by the most acclaimed writers, past and present, including: "The Perfect Crime" by Ben Ray Redman, "Quitters, Inc. by Stephen King, "High Darktown" by James Ellroy, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch, "Clerical Error" by James Gould Cozzens, "The Gettysburg Bugle" by Ellery Queen , "Last Spin" by Evan Hunter, "Karen Makes Out" by Elmore Leonard , "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle.
©1998 Otto Penzler (P)1998, 2017 Dove Audio / Phoenix Books
Perfidia
Summary
It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans - but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls - comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.
©2014 James Ellroy (P)2014 Random House Audio