L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors. (124,000 words)
"The Real L.A. Confidential" by Pete Noyes covers more than a half-century of investigative reporting by one of the nation's most honored newsmen. It provides startling new information about some of L.A.'s most notorious cases including the "Black Dahlia," "Bugsy" Siegel, Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson murders. Noyes tells how a bribe paid to a high government official got a condemned rapist off "Death Row." How a serial killer who worked for the Los Angeles Times was a winning contestant on TV's "Dating Game." Noyes takes a hard look at the Roman Polanski child-rape case and the death of Michael Jackson. He tackles the thorny issue of corruption at City Hall and tells how one of the world's richest men bought himself an L.A. mayor. Equally intriguing is the story of a con man who dressed up as a beautiful redhead, did his spiel on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" and charmed investors into pouring millions of dollars into a bogus three wheel car. He tells the spellbinding story of the beautiful actress at Columbia Studios, the personal friend of a future President, who vanished in 1947. And he writes about L.A.'s own version of the disaster at Three Mile Island, a nuclear meltdown in the hills north of L.A.that was covered up by the government for 20 years. Noyes was honored with TV's highest award, the Peabody, as well as 10 Emmys, and two Edward R. Murrow citations. His 1973 book, "Legacy of Doubt" was widely acclaimed as the first work to link organized crime to the assassination of President John Kennedy. Pete began his career on the military newspaper, Pacific Stars and Stripes during the Korean War. He has worked for several newspapers and all of the four of the major TV networks.
From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine. Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS. “I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.” In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between. Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.
Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.
The D. A.'s brass, a sheriff's deputy, and a rough-and-tumble bagman are unknowingly chasing a nightmare in this thrilling novel from the author of "some of the most powerful crime novels ever written" (New York Times). 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 D.A.'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.
Los Angeles, 1956. Glamorous. Prosperous. The place to see and be seen. But beneath the shiny exterior beats a dark heart. For when the sun goes down, L.A. becomes the noir city of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential or Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels. Segregation is the unwritten law of the land. The growing black population is expected to keep to South Central. The white cops are encouraged to deal out harsh street justice. In L.A. '56, Joel Engel paints a tense, moody portrait of the city as a devil weaves his way through the shadows. While R&B and hot jazz spill out of record shops and clubs and all-night burger stands, Willie Fields cruises past in his dark green DeSoto, looking for a woman on whom he can bestow the gift of his company. His brilliant idea: Buy a tin badge in the five-and-ten to go along with his big flashlight and Luger and pretend to be an undercover vice cop. The young white girls doing it with their boyfriends in the lovers' lanes dotting the L.A. hills would never say no to a cop. Into the car they go for a ride downtown on a "morals charge," before he kicks out the young man in the middle of nowhere and takes the girl for a ride she'll spend a lifetime trying to forget. There's a bad guy on the loose in the City of Angels. Enter Detective Danny Galindo-he'd worked the Black Dahlia case back in '47 as a rookie. The suave Latino-one of the few in the department-is able to move easily among the white detectives. Maybe it's all those stories he's sold to Jack Webb for Dragnet. When Todd Roark, a black ex-cop, is arrested, Galindo knows he's innocent. But there's no sympathy for Roark among the white cops on the LAPD; Galindo will have to go it alone. There's only one problem: The victims aren't coming forward. The white press ignores the story, too, making Galindo's job that much more difficult. And now he's fallen in love with one of the rapist's first victims. If he's ever found out, he can kiss his badge good-bye. With his back up against a wall, Galindo realizes that it will take some good old-fashioned Hollywood magic to take down a devil in the City of Angels.
The highly acclaimed novel based on America's most infamous unsolved murder case. Dive into 1940s Los Angeles as two cops spiral out of control in their hunt for The Black Dahlia's killer in this powerful thriller that is "brutal and at the same time believable" (New York Times). 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.
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.
Humphrey Bogart said of Confidential: “Everybody reads it but they say the cook brought it into the house” . . . Tom Wolfe called it “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world” . . . Time defined it as “a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction, and plain smut . . . dig up one sensational ‘fact,’ embroider it for 1,500 to 2,000 words. If the subject thinks of suing, he may quickly realize that the fact is true, even if the embroidery is not.” Here is the never-before-told tale of Confidential magazine, America’s first tabloid, which forever changed our notion of privacy, our image of ourselves, and the practice of journalism in America. The magazine came out every two months, was printed on pulp paper, and cost a quarter. Its pages were filled with racy stories, sex scandals, and political exposés. It offered advice about the dangers of cigarettes and advocated various medical remedies. Its circulation, at the height of its popularity, was three million. It was first published in 1952 and took the country by storm. Readers loved its lurid red-and-yellow covers; its sensational stories filled with innuendo and titillating details; its articles that went far beyond most movie magazines, like Photoplay and Modern Screen, and told the real stories such trade publications as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter couldn’t, since they, and the movie magazines, were financially dependent on—or controlled by—the Hollywood studios. In Confidential’s pages, homespun America was revealed as it really was: our most sacrosanct movie stars and heroes were exposed as wife beaters (Bing Crosby), homosexuals (Rock Hudson and Liberace), neglectful mothers (Rita Hayworth), sex obsessives (June Allyson, the cutie with the page boy and Peter Pan collar), mistresses of the rich and dangerous (Kim Novak, lover of Ramfis Trujillo, playboy son of the Dominican Republic dictator). Confidential’s alliterative headlines told of tawny temptresses (black women passing for white), pinko partisans (liberals), lisping lads (homosexuals) . . . and promised its readers what the newspapers wouldn’t reveal: “The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce” . . . How “James Dean Knew He Had a Date with Death” . . . The magazine’s style, success, and methods ultimately gave birth to the National Enquirer, Star, People, E!, Access Hollywood, and TMZ . . . We see the two men at the magazine’s center: its founder and owner, Robert Harrison, a Lithuanian Jew from New York’s Lower East Side who wrote for The New York Graphic and published a string of girlie magazines, including Titter, Wink, and Flirt (Bogart called the magazine’s founder and owner the King of Leer) . . . and Confidential ’s most important editor: Howard Rushmore, small-town boy from a Wyoming homestead; passionate ideologue; former member of the Communist Party who wrote for the Daily Worker, renounced his party affiliation, and became a virulent Red-hunter; close pal of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and expert witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, naming the names of actors and writers Rushmore claimed had been Communists and fellow travelers. Henry Scott writes the story of two men, who out of their radically different pasts and conflicting obsessions, combined to make the magazine the perfect confluence of explosive ingredients that reflected the America of its time, as the country struggled to reconcile Hollywood’s blissful fantasy of American life with the daunting nightmare of the nuclear age . . .
