Here in one volume is James Ellroys first great body of work an epic reenvisioning of postwar Los Angelesetched in red and black and filmnoir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lustcrazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cops rogue investigation is a oneway ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter 1950and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. Its a reverential shuckand 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 alltheway bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandalrag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an allnight 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. Hes a slumlord a killer a parasitic exploiter. Hes a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that hes being had. Hes just met a woman. Thus hes determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world hes createdand hes determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction. show more