James Ellroy

Author Information
James Ellroy's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    35 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1982
  • Latest Book:
    June 2026
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Full Series List in Order

L.A. Quartet

The Black Dahlia (Sep-1987)
The Big Nowhere (Sep-1988)
L.A. Confidential (Jun-1990)
White Jazz (Sep-1992)

Lloyd Hopkins

1 - Blood on the Moon (Mar-1984)
2 - Because the Night (Feb-1985)
3 - Suicide Hill (Apr-1986)

Underworld USA

1 - American Tabloid (Feb-1995)
2 - The Cold Six Thousand (May-2001)
3 - Blood's a Rover (Oct-2009)

Books in Order: 35 titles

The book list is sorted in publication date order - newest first. You can sort the list by clicking on the Sort button. To see a simple list or a cover view list, click on the icons below.

  • Red Sheet

    Turn to the first page and disavow what you think you know. This is 1960s Los Angeles like you’ve never seen it before, in a daring work of historical fiction from bestselling author of The Enchanters and Widespread Panic.It’s late October 1962. ...

  • The Enchanters

    AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy -- Demon Dog of American Letters -- goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.Los Angele...

  • Widespread Panic

    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 ...

  • American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand

  • This Storm

    A massive novel of World War II Los Angeles. The crowning work of an American master. It is January, 1942. Torrential rainstorms hit L.A. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They're grievously wrong. ...

  • California Noir

    Two gritty hard-boiled mysteries of the criminal underworld by a New York Timesâ€"bestselling author and a CWA Gold Daggerâ€"winning author.
     
    A modern master of the noir novel, James Ellroy is “one of the great American writers...

  • Destination: Morgue

  • Perfidia

    Los Angeles. December, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. War fever and racial hatred grip the city. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. LAPD captain William H. Parker is superbly gifted, cor...

  • Shakedown



  • Shakedown: Freddy Otash Confesses

    James Ellroy is an American original of the most profane order. The bestselling author of the noir classics "L.A. Confidential," "The Black Dahlia," and "The Cold Six Thousand," he has been hailed by the "Los Angeles Times" as "one of the best writer...

  • Dick Contino's Blues And Other Stories

  • The Best American Noir of the Century

    James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's "Pastorale," and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan H...

  • The Hilliker Curse

  • Blood's a Rover

    Underworld USA - 3

    The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.A rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960's. It...

  • Destination: Morgue!: L.A. Tales

    Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first ti...

  • Fallen Angels

  • The Best American Mystery Stories

    The acclaimed author of L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid serves as guest editor for this new collection of the finest mystery tales of the year, in an anthology that incorporates pieces of short fiction by Robert B. Parker, Joyc...

  • The Cold Six Thousand

    Underworld USA - 2

    In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and ...

  • The Dudley Smith Trio

    The Big Nowhere: In 1950s L. A three men are drawn into the shadow of communist witch hunts and violent killings that force each one to confront his own personal darkness. But none will be prepared for the maelstrom that awaits them. L. A. Confidenti...



  • My Dark Places

    The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a...

  • Crime Wave

    Los Angeles.  In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field.  And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy.  With this fever-hot collection of reportage a...

  • L.A. Noir

    A single-volume edition of three of the novels featuring Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of Los Angeles. The first involves the apparently random killings of 20 women, the second a multiple murder committed with a pre-Civil-War revolver, and the thi...

  • American Tabloid

    Underworld USA - 1

    We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, ...

  • Hollywood Nocturnes

    Set in Los Angeles from 1947 to 1959, Hollywood Nocturnes gives us an afterword and six stories set in the same crime-ridden, sex-crazed period of history of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet novels (which include L.A. Confidential and The Big Nowhere).Dig...

  • White Jazz

    L.A. Quartet

    The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedur...

  • Silent Terror

  • L.A. Confidential

    L.A. Quartet

    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 ...

  • Brown's Requiem

    Beneath the slick, glittering surface of L.A., an underworld of depravity and wickedness reins. Fritz Brown is a part-time private eye and full-time repo-man who gets his kicks listening to classical music. But the waters get too deep for Brown ...

  • The Big Nowhere

    L.A. Quartet

    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 crosscu...



  • The Black Dahlia

    L.A. Quartet

    On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in Cal...

  • Killer on the Road // Silent Terror

    Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.'s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to t...

  • Suicide Hill

    Lloyd Hopkins - 3

    Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and one of its most troubled. In his obsessive mission to protect the innocent, there is no line he won’t cross. Estranged from his wife ...

  • Because the Night

    Lloyd Hopkins - 2

    Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins' brain--a sinister foreboding that w...

  • Blood on the Moon

    Lloyd Hopkins - 1

    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...

  • Clandestine

    Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950's -- a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a po...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

James Ellroy has published 35 books.

The next book by James Ellroy, Red Sheet, will be published in June 2026.

The first book by James Ellroy, Clandestine, was published in January 1982.

Yes. James Ellroy has 3 series.
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