Sunday, December 1, 1996 
   Home Edition 
   Section: Book Review 
   Page: 10 

   The Redhead and the Kid; MY DARK PLACES: An L.A. Crime Memoir. By
   James Ellroy (Alfred A. Knopf: 360 pp., $25); 

   By: MARK ARAX 
   Mark Arax is a Los Angeles Times staff writer and the author of "In My Father's Name,"
   (Simon & Schuster), a twenty-year journey to find the answers of his father's unsolved
   murder 


   James Ellroy's pungent voice and wicked eye have churned out some of the more distinctive
   works in recent American crime fiction, and like Raymond Chandler's take on another Los
   Angeles, their deceptions fool lesser writers into pale mimicry. 
   Ellroy has tapped into vernacular, its rawness and riffs, and his lifelong lust for noir to carve
   out a host of warped characters set against the sensational crimes and mythology of
   post-World War II Los Angeles. When he is on target no one does the forlorn--cops,
   lounge lizards, female murder victims--better than Ellroy. He counts on context and his
   hypertonic style to get away with words and images that would tag other writers as
   homophobes or racists. Sometimes, context notwithstanding, the reader still wonders about
   the badges he may be hiding. 
   Ever since the 1979 publication of "The Black Dahlia," his first of four Los Angeles crime
   novels, Ellroy has not been shy about tying his fiction, at least superficially, to the murder of
   his mother, Jean, in 1958. She was found strangled in a field in El Monte after a Saturday
   night of dance, drink and sex with a man her 10-year-old son did not know. The boy had
   spent the weekend with his father as part of the divorce decree. The murder was never
   solved. 
   Ellroy dedicated "The Black Dahlia," based on the gruesome 1947 killing of Elizabeth
   Short, to the memory of his mother. On his publicity tours, whenever he needed a nice
   transition or a glib touch of the personal, Jean Ellroy's murder was always an available
   topic. He had sublimated his mother's death, turned it into the hushed center of a bizarre
   fictional world, and he managed to accomplish this without any visible lingering demons. So
   what if his mother was the caricature his father, long dead, had drawn for him all those
   years ago: She was a lush and a whore. 

   Then in early 1994, Ellroy got a phone call from a reporter who was doing a newspaper
   story on unsolved murders in the San Gabriel Valley, his mother's among them. The
   reporter had the old file, and it was all the tug the 46-year-old Ellroy needed to begin
   writing his newest book, "My Dark Places," an L.A. crime memoir that moves a brutal light
   over his parents and himself. He addresses his elusive mother in the opening: 

   "A cheap Saturday night took you down. . . . Your death defines my life. I want to find the
   love we never had and explicate it in your name. I want to take your secrets public. I want
   to burn down the distance between us. I want to give you breath." 

   Surely, the reader anticipates, such a worthy charge is going to elicit a different Ellroy, a less
   vulgar, frenzied and mannered one? Surely he's not going to lay on the cop-speak and refer
   to his mother's murder case as the "Jean Ellroy job?" But Ellroy has an unconventional
   memoir in mind and knowing that he has spent most of his life running from his
   mother--both repulsed and aroused by the illicit fantasies her body alive and dead
   triggered--we are inclined to indulge his comfort zones. 

   If he leans too much on his stylized voice and overlays her murder with too many women
   who met similar fates, we understand his concern. Maybe the "Jean Ellroy job" alone isn't
   enough to carry the journey. We are even willing to ratify his far-fetched attempt to solve
   the murder and confront the killer, the so-called Swarthy Man, who is likely dead. 

   This is a tough and admirable memoir, even though the author isn't present in the "I" form
   for half its 360 pages. At the outset, his mother is a body, the Redhead, and he is the Kid
   hanging tough at the word of her death, posing for a newspaper photograph that freezes a
   pudgy face with inert lips. A couple of young ballplayers on their way to batting practice
   had discovered her in a patch of ivy along a narrow lover's lane. She had been killed and
   dumped before sunrise, her unzipped dress wet with summer dew. A nylon stocking and a
   cotton cord were lashed in a three-inch noose around her neck. She was 43 years old. 

   Los Angeles County Sheriff's detectives interviewed neighbors, friends and employees at
   the military parts plant where Jean Ellroy worked as a nurse. They were told she rented a
   house in El Monte so her son could have a better life. She was doting and lonely; on
   weekends, when the kid stayed with his father, she sometimes went out with men. None
   measured up to her. She was pretty and smart; she read Reader's Digest books. 

   The boy told police he knew the names of two of his mother's boyfriends and neither was
   skinny and swarthy. What he didn't confide was that he caught her twice in bed with
   different men and clung to his father's vision of her as unworthy. 

   In a deft unmasking of his own scrambled psychology, a portrait that is at once brave, sad
   and funny, Ellroy returns to the lost years between his mother's murder and his mental
   breakdown at age 27. He had moved in with his father, Armand Ellroy, a broken-down
   accountant, and they lived like pigs, the father feeding the boy's growing fascination with
   noir by buying him crime books and pornography. The kid was soon a full-fledged freak, a
   gangly goon covered in pimples who shouted "Long live the Nazis!" and shoplifted T-bone
   steaks, driving a tricked-out bicycle through the streets of Hancock Park. 

   His father ultimately died of a stroke and the 17-year-old orphan was left to the streets,
   where his confidants were winos. He abused alcohol and Benzedrex inhalers and stuffed his
   ears with cotton, trying to mute the voices in his head. His mother appeared to him in a
   vision and they made love. The kid landed in a hospital and conjured a trade with God: I'll
   give up my ways, he promised, to have my mind back. 

   Ellroy writes of his failed attempts to demystify his mother: "I found you in the shadows and
   reached out to you in terrible ways. You withstood my assaults and let me punish myself. . .
   . You live outside of me...I am determined to find you. I know I can't do it alone." 

   Enter Bill Stoner, a 53-year-old sheriff's homicide detective about to retire. So begins the
   search for the Swarthy Man, and Ellroy does a fine job dissecting place, using only a few
   strokes to capture El Monte in the 1950s--a city of divorced women, a honky-tonk
   dressed in Stetsons and pipestem pants and hoop skirts. His portrait of Stoner, truly one of
   L.A. County's finest, is equally skilled. 

   The investigation to solve Jean Ellroy's murder really never comes alive because the trail is
   so cold. Trying to compensate, the author takes us down the path of too many bum leads
   and too many white female murder victims. But these are minor excesses that never
   overwhelm the literary gift at the center of this journey, which is Ellroy's brutal honesty. 

   "Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts," he writes. "My mother
   gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. . . . I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its
   final form in language." 


   PHOTO: James Ellroy PHOTOGRAPHER: ERIC SLOMANSON / Los Angeles Times 
   Type of Material: Book Review 

   Copyright (c) 1996 Times Mirror Company