A remarkable portrait of “true L.A. noir” with archival photos from the Los Angeles Police Museum and text by legendary crime writer James Ellroy (Los Angeles Times). James Ellroy, the undisputed master of crime writing, has teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Museum to present a stunning text on 1953 L.A. While combing the museum’s photo archives, Ellroy discovered that the year featured a wide array of stark and unusual imagery—and to accompany the pictures, he has written text to illuminate the crimes and law enforcement of the era. Ellroy offers context along with wild detail and rich atmosphere—this is the cauldron that was police work in the city of the tarnished angels seven decades ago, revealed in more than 80 duotone photos throughout the book. “These crime images resemble the work of photographer Weegee, but, Ellroy argues, they’re superior because they resist artistry; they were taken by police officers doing their jobs.” —Chicago Tribune

When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.

This collection contains never-before-published images of seminal LAPD cases, including the Black Dahlia murder, the Onion Field case, the Watts riots, the Manson murders, and more. Captions are culled from original police logs and newspaper accounts.

The strange and gruesome crime-scene snapshot collection of LAPD detective Jack Huddleston spans Southern California in its noir heyday. Death Scenes is the noted forerunner of several copycat titles.

James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981, Ellroy’s eccentric “Demon Dog” persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy’s fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy’s two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy’s fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse “peeping tom” into a recognizable, contemporary “social type,” a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory ”cinematic” world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of “ocularcentric crisis” in Ellroy’s texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroy’s works—particularly his later novels—are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

This comprehensive guide to James Ellroy's work and life is arranged as an encyclopedia covering his entire career, from his first private-eye novel, Brown's Requiem, to his 2012 e-book Shakedown. It introduces new readers to his characters and plots, and provides experienced Ellroy fans and scholars with detailed analyses of the themes, motifs and stylistic innovations of his books. The work is a tour of Ellroy's dark underworld, highlighting the controversies and unsettling questions that characterize his work, as well as assessing Ellroy's place in the annals of American literature.