Hollywood Nocturnes

James Ellroy

MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, Aug 30, 2011 - Fiction - 232 pages

In “Dick Contino’s Blues,” a novella inspired by the real-life entertainer, a serial killer on the loose in West Hollywood gets tangled up with a fake kidnapping; the collection also includes five stories of corrupt cops, goons with guns, and mobsters, all set in the fading glory of 1950s Los Angeles

Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest borscht belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he’s slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He’s too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino’s Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957—a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera. Included along with the novella are five short stories, all in the author’s inimitable tough-bitten style.

About the author

With his outsize personality and distinctive prose style, James Ellroy (b. 1948) is one of the finest modern authors of hard-boiled fiction. His mother was murdered in 1958, and in his twenties Ellroy moved from job to job, finally finding steady work as a caddy, an experience which formed the backdrop for his first mystery, Brown’s Requiem. Among the many honors and accolades he has received for his work, the Mystery Writers of America named James Ellroy a Grand Master in 2015.

He drew a cult following with his first books, which included the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy of police novels, and found widespread fame with 1987’s The Black Dahlia, a meticulously researched account of Los Angeles’s most famous unsolved murder.That novel and 1990’s L.A. Confidential, both of which were adapted for the screen, cemented his notoriety as an author of historical crime fiction. Ellroy lives and works in Los Angeles.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Hollywood Nocturnes
• Author: James Ellroy
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2011
• ISBN: 1453229167, 9781453229163
• Length: 232 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Collections & Anthologies; Fiction / Noir; Fiction / Thrillers / Historical