James Ellroy

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One of the quintessential Mad Artists of the 20th century, James Ellroy was born in 1948, and had a troubled childhood due to his parents' highly dysfunctional relationship that ended in their divorce. The key event in his life happened when he was just ten years old, when his mother was raped and murdered. The crime was never solved and Ellroy went to live with his father, who died seven years later. From there he dropped out of school and became a homeless, drug-addicted thief. After spending some time in jail he began to turn his life around by quitting drugs and getting a job as a caddy. However, his true passion became writing. His mother's murder had left him with a fascination of violent crime, much of it centered around the similar murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, popularly known as the "Black Dahlia" case. One of his novels is a fictionalized account of the case to give Short a bit more closure than she received in real life, one of the biggest cases of Creator Breakdown in a career full of it.

His books include lots of Black and Grey Morality and Deliberate Values Dissonance, as well as Loads and Loads of Characters.

James Ellroy provides examples of the following tropes:

• Alliterative Name: He loves these. Wendell White, Ed Exley and Pierce Patchitt in LA Confidential, Bucky Breichert in Black Dahlia.
• The Atoner: Wayne Tedrow Jr and Dwight Holly, after his nervous breakdown.
• Author Appeal: Peeping.
  • Incest and serial killers. For a given value of appeal/horrified fascination.
  • Clandestine features pages and pages of golf, and it turns up in several other novels. They say "write what you know". The man knows Golf.
  • Homesexual rape is an almost disturbingly recurring motif.
• Ax Crazy: Most of the characters to some extent, but Jean-Philippe and his Cuban mercs stand out.
• Berserk Button: Do not beat up women when Budd White is around.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Don Crutchfield and Karen Sifakis.
• Crapsack World: Notable as his books, from The Black Dahlia on, are intended to tell the secret history of 20th century America
• Cold War: The setting for most of the Underworld Trilogy, specifically the early 60s-70s.
• Creator Breakdown: As noted above Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was young. As well as providing impetus and material for The Black Dahlia Ellroy wrote an autobiographical account of the effect it had on him in My Dark Places.
• Dirty Cop: It's fair to say that most of Ellroy's characters are either dirty cops or former dirty cops.
• Fate Worse Than Death: The methods by which many of the characters are killed (although they do end up dead... eventually).
• Genre Shift: White Jazz and Blood's a Rover both end up in some very strange places for books that start out as hard boiled detective novels.
• Hollywood Voodoo: In Blood's A Rover, though to be fair the focus is mostly on herblore and drugs, rather than zombies and magic. Plus it's an Ellroy book, so everything is shown as being bizarre and outlandish.
• Ho Yay: Quite a bit of it occurs between Danny Upshaw and Mal Considine. Not that surprising if you consider Danny's in the closet...
• Kill'Em All: There's pretty much no one left standing by the end of Blood's a Rover.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: This happens a lot. For example, in The Cold Six Thousand Wayne Tedrow Jr is trying to get away from the shadow of his father - a racist who has made a fortune publishing hate literature. He is dispatched to kill an unarmed black man, who has offended the wrong people in Vegas, for the titular amount of money. He cannot bring himself to do it. The man he was sent to kill ends up raping and murdering Wayne's wife. A similar thing happens in Bloods a Rover where Wayne goes to warn a black man that he is to be framed for a murder Wayne committed and he ends up having to kill him and an innocent bystander after the guy attacks him. He goes on to steal from the Mob and uses the proceeds to fund leftist causes in the Dominican Republic after seeing how minorities are treated there. He is randomly murdered while walking among the people he is trying to help. Dwight Holly is murdered by Scotty Bennett when he tries to prevent Bennett from killing Crutch.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: A very common weapon in his books.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Blood's a Rover comes very close to this. As one of the (very few) surviving characters notes towards the end of the book, having gone through hell and finally uncovered the conspiracy: "He had [the] story now. Facts clicked into place, redundant. Who gives a shit?"
• Took a Level in Badass: Don Crutchfield overcomes voodoo drug induced paralysis through sheer force of will, bites the head off a live rat just to prove he can and kills the two guys who did this to him and were about to murder him. He later kills Jean-Philippe and the mercs with a flamethrower and is responsible for the death of J. Edgar Hoover and the destruction of his blackmail files. He is the only main character to survive the book and at the end it is revealed that, following the events of the novel, he became a Hollywood power broker. This character is the Chew Toy for much of the story and his mob nickname is Dipshit.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Notably Dudley Smith, although most of Ellroy's cop protaganists are this to some extent.
• Who Shot JFK?: and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand.