Destination: Morgue - Softcover

Ellroy, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712662634 ISBN 13: 9780712662635

Publisher: Century, 2004

Synopsis

Destination Morgue is James Ellroy's first book since the bestselling The Cold Six Thousand, published in 2001. Hollywood Fuckpad, Hot Prowl Rape-O and Jungletown Jihad are vintage Ellroy: starting in 1983 and ending in the present day, they are interlinked novellas telling the story of a bad cop, Rick Jenson, and his twenty-year obsession with Donna Donahue, a beautiful Hollywood actress. The only way Rick can get close to Donna is by bringing her into investigations of the teeming Tinseltown underworld: psychopathic killers, stalkers and terrorists commingle in an unholy cocktail of sex, sleaze and violence. Jenson and Donahue cut a swathe through the cases, treading a high wire of danger and a fatal sexual attraction. The book also contains eight previously unpublished non-fiction articles ranging from cases from the Los Angeles Police Unsolved Homicide files to the first article Ellroy has ever written on his imaginative process: Where I Get My Weird Shit. This is James Ellroy's second collection of short pieces following on from Dick Contino's Blues.

About this title

Review:

The fragments of memoir, and three stories, which make up Ellroy's Destination Morgue share the same high-octane nervous jabber, the same noir world of amphetamines, neon and women brutally killed. Ellroy has never entirely got over the murder of his mother--he says so a lot, but that is no reason not to believe him--or a youth of bigotry and petty crime which made him rather more likely to end up a lifer than a best seller. If, at times, he is a bit too keen to tell us how street smart he is, he has nonetheless earned much of the right to do so; pieces here about a pornography obsession or dead killers he quasi-identified with have a scary honesty to them. It is shocking that a man is prepared to say such things about anyone, let alone about himself.

The novellas--collectively 'Rick Loves Donna'--anatomize the thoroughly and entertainingly unhealthy obsession across the decades of a corrupt cop for a starlet with a taste for involvement in vigilante violence. They are not quite vintage Ellroy--a little too close for that to Mickey Spillane on the one hand and the Simpson's 'Itchy and Scratchy' on the other--but they will do until his next dark mad masterpiece comes along.--Roz Kaveney

Review:

""...an autumn must-have" Ladsmag"

"James Ellory is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world" (TLS)

"All Ellroy's preoccupations are present: corruption, sex, violence, unsolved murders and excess by the dozen. As ever the results are fascinating as a car crash" (Guardian)

"One of the finest US writers. Admirers will be pleased to learn that Ellroy's Mad Dog voice barks as loudly as ever, continuing to create its own howling, breathtaking brand of powerful, pumped-up poetry" (City Life)

About this edition

• Publisher: Century
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0712662634
• ISBN 13: 9780712662635
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400