The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan Miles for Men's Journal after he punched an editor at a staff party. But this year's edition includes a bonus -- an original essay by James Ellroy detailing his fascination with Joseph Wambaugh and how it fed his obsession with crime -- even to the point of selling his own blood to buy Wambaugh's books. Smart, entertaining, and controversial, The Best American Crime Writing is an essential edition to any crime enthusiast's bookshelf.

The Best American Crime Writing 2005 (Best American Crime Reporting)

Literature & Fiction

Ellroy,James

United States

Harper-perennial

Set in 1950s L A CLANDESTINE follows Frederick Underhill of the Los Angeles Police Department as he pursues his dream to become the most celebrated detective of all time. The death of a lonely woman gives him his chance. As an ex-lover of the victim, Underhill soon gets on the case with L A's most feared interrogator Lieutenant Dudley Smith. But instead of finding his career on the way up, he finds his life about to take a fall...

Clandestine

Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House

James Ellroy is a unique and powerful writer with a tough and explosive voice. His obsession with the dark side of L. A. is personal and vital, triggered by the murder of his mother when he was ten. This defining event spawned an early addiction to paperback crime novels, and Ellroy's own writing is saturated in an often violent underworld of bent cops, politicians, stars, sleeze and rumour. Ellroy exploits memory, history, fact and fiction with relentless energy and panache. What emerges is an intense, mythical version of tinseltown in the second half of the twentieth century.

Crime Wave

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Cornerstone Digital

The Black Dahlia

Genre Fiction

Arrow Books

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.

L.A. Confidential

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Arrow Books, Ltd.

Dick Contino - 50s accordian player, a star in the making, is destroyed by a draft-dodging scandal. His life is on the skids until he comes up with the idea of resurrecting his career with a fake kidnapping scam. Meanwhile a serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles...a killer who is closer to Contino than he suspects - a killer who wants in on the kidnap - for real...Plus five previously unpublished short stories.

Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Random House, Inc.

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia-and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history.Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia-driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches-into a region of total madness.

On 11th January, 1947 in Los Angeles, a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.

Contemporary

Perfidia

WINDMILL

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'Ellroy writes with raw power … undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time' THE TIMES\n'a tangled fever-dream … Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA' SUNDAY TIMES 
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A brilliant historical crime novel, set in Los Angeles and Mexico during the pulse-pounding aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.\nJanuary, ’42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park.\nThe cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early-warning signal of Chaos.\nThere’s a murderous fire and a gold heist exploding out of the past. There’s Fifth Column treason – at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. 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.\nElmer 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 a 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.\nL.A., ’42. Homefront madness ascendant. Early-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. 
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‘Epic crime writing from a master’ DAILY MAIL\n‘Ellroy is unique. There is nobody writing this way … Nobody has done or is doing what he is doing’ BOOKMUNCH

This Storm

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ellroy,James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ellroy,James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ellroy,James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Best American Crime Writing 2005 (Best American Crime Reporting)

Clandestine

Crime Wave

The Black Dahlia

L.A. Confidential

Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories

The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia

Perfidia

This Storm