>
> On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 09:00 AM, RARA-AVIS
Digest wrote:
>
> > And part of what makes Ellroy
> > great is that he's creating his own archetypes,
in his own image.
>
> Oh Gawd, I'm afraid John Lau and Kerry Schooley are
both right about
> the bloody man. I'm about to phone the local book
store and order My
> Dark Places and one or two of the others. Yes, at
inflated English
> prices. Curses.
Although I think that phrases such as "archetypal" are rather
high-fallutin' when discussing the works of James, Ellroy, I
will say that I think if one is going to venture into his
work, that "My Dark Places"
(which is, to my knowledge, his only non-fiction work, a
memoir of the mother who was a murder victim while he was
still a boy/investigation of the evidence surrounding her
still-unsolved murder) and "The Black Dahlia" are the closest
things to 'must reads' in the Ellroy Canon. I'm sure others
(Kerry and John, for example) will disagree. That's part of
what makes the world go around. I, for example, wouldn't
open
"White Jazz" again unless you paid me a *lot* of money.
Maybe I'm just too pedestrian and plebeian in my approach to
high-fallutin' literature, though. After all, I think Larry
Flynt's a jerk, too.
Brian
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