Geneva Hilliker Ellroy was a buxom redhead, a divorcee, a lush. She brought home strange men. Her 10-year-old son, James, called them "uncle," but he knew better.

One morning in June 1958 some Little Leaguers discovered her body in shrubs next to the local high school in El Monte, Calif. She'd been strangled, possibly raped. One of her stockings was tied around her neck.

Thirty-seven years later, author James Ellroy is living one of his own noir crime novels. Like his antiheroes -- Fred Underhill, Bucky Bleichert, Ed Exley, Dave Klein -- he's trying to pick up a trail that's long since gone cold. He's searching for his mother's killer, who, if he's alive, could be pushing 80.

He's also searching for the mother who emotionally abused him, and whose violent death at 43 set Ellroy on his own journey into -- and out of -- darkness. He's forcing himself, he says, to have an overdue "confrontation" with a woman he feared for so long that he couldn't bring himself to visit her grave until a few months ago. And it's a way of getting back at her. Geneva Ellroy provided him the emotional fuel for his 11 dank, violent novels. Now she's providing him grist for a memoir, to be titled "My Dark Places." He exploits her in death as she abused him in life.

Ellroy stands a sturdy 6 feet 2, with thinning gray hair cropped short on the sides. If his mustache were styled differently, he'd be a ringer for a certain dead German dictator. Even when he's lunching on a Caesar salad and nursing a Perrier at a Georgetown restaurant, he looms large.

"I want to know who she is," he says, hunched over and speaking directly into an interviewer's tape recorder. "I want to portray her with coldhearted lucidity and compassion. The strangest thing is that I can smell her every so often. L&M cigarettes. Her breath, Early Times bourbon and the perfume she wore."

"My books," Ellroy says dramatically, "are dark, dark, dark, dark, dark."

But Ellroy -- self-confessed obsessive with a fantasy life so fecund, he says, he never has nightmares -- is in the bright light these days. His latest novel, "American Tabloid," has received generally positive reviews, including a rave in the New York Times Book Review, and is now in its fifth printing. He considers it his second breakout novel. With his first hit, "The Black Dahlia," published almost a decade ago, critics called him one of America's leading crime novelists. With "American Tabloid," his admirers say, he's transcended the genre.

"He's bigger than that. He's one of the important writers of the '80s and '90s," says his friend James Grady, author of the thriller "Six Days of the Condor."

Whether it's the '40s and '50s of his hometown Los Angeles or the Kennedy era of "American Tabloid," Ellroy writes about a clandestine world too fantastic to be fact and too real to be entirely fantasy. His cops are interchangeable with his criminals. His gangsters crack jokes as they order hits. His anonymous "bottom-feeders" are the real authors of late 20th-century American history. To him, Camelot was a canard and Jack "the Haircut" Kennedy was cruising to be whacked.

For the past three months, Ellroy, a tireless promoter of himself and his books, has been touting "American Tabloid" in bookstores in the United States, Britain and France. But the investigation of his mother's death and the memoir that will result are foremost on his mind. When he's not holding court in bookstores, reciting a ribald poem he wrote about the "Demon Dog" whose sex organ glows in the dark, Ellroy is working with Bill Stoner, a retired homicide detective, tracking down leads, searching for anyone who might hold a piece in the puzzle of his mother's murder.

The investigation began early last year, when a journalist friend of Ellroy's was reporting a story about five unsolved murders in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Among the cases was Geneva Ellroy's. "As soon as he told me this, I said, 'Holy [expletive], I've got to see my mother's file,' " Ellroy says.

There was more than just personal curiosity: "There's got to be a plum in it too. I got to turn this into something." He turned it into an article for GQ last August, "My Mother's Killer," which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. It will serve as the basis for "My Dark Places."

"I couldn't have gotten a nonfiction contract from Alfred A. Knopf [his publisher] five books ago, so this is the perfect time to be doing this," Ellroy says unabashedly. "Why didn't I get at this earlier? Because I was locked down in my own ambition, my own efforts to create fiction. I couldn't get at it, couldn't access it emotionally. And also I've been running away from that woman for a long time."

As he tells it in GQ, he contacted the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department's Unsolved Unit and was directed to Stoner. Together, they went through Geneva Ellroy's file, crime scene photos and all.

The basic facts of the case are these: On the evening of June 21, 1958, Geneva Ellroy was seen drinking in the Desert Inn bar in El Monte, the low-rent eastern L.A. suburb where she and her son were living. She was joined by a young blond woman with a ponytail and a tall, swarthy man in his forties. Geneva and the man were seen leaving the bar together about 10 p.m. The next morning, some kids discovered her body in shrubs by the Arroyo High School athletic field. The coroner concluded she had been killed elsewhere and dragged to the bushes. Dried blood under her fingernails indicated she had put up a struggle as her killer squeezed the life out of her.

All the leads in the case went nowhere.

Stoner and Ellroy have picked up where the cops of 37 years ago left off. "We have located several witnesses, almost all of whom remember it like it was yesterday," Stoner says in a telephone interview from his Fountain Valley, Calif., home. He says they are working on a few fresh leads, but he is not optimistic the case can be solved.

Stoner says he's impressed by Ellroy's talents as a detective. "He has the ability to interview someone and keep his mouth shut to let the person answer." And Stoner says he's impressed by Ellroy's detachment during the interviews. But, the detective says, "when he's alone at night, the ghosts come back.

"When we drove to Utah to interview his landlord in El Monte, James was very excited about doing the interview," Stoner says. "But on that long drive back, you could tell the ghosts were bouncing all over the place."

Cruel Start

Geneva Ellroy has been the most powerful force in her son's life. After his parents divorced when he was 6, he lived with her; he joined his father on weekends. He didn't like his mother. She was the disciplinarian, but she lived an undisciplined life of cheap bourbon and men. On his 10th birthday, just months before her death, she told James he could decide whether to live with her or his father. When he chose his father, she slapped him.

Then she died. "My wish was granted."

But his life went into a tailspin. He was an undistinguished student, sometimes disruptive. His father, Lee, an unsuccessful freelance accountant with a history of heart disease, didn't do much to keep him under control. And then Lee died when James was 17. The only relative he had was his mother's sister in Wisconsin, who sent him $ 100 a month. Aside from that, he was left virtually penniless and homeless. Already bounced out of high school and washed out of the Army after a brief stint, Ellroy began, by his account, a decade-long bender -- drinking Thunderbird and snorting speed, breaking into homes and pilfering wallets and liquor and women's underwear. He landed in jail, by his estimate, 30 or 40 times, slept in flophouses near downtown L.A. and the Goodwill clothing dumpster. He'd take odd jobs from time to time; at one point he worked as a cashier in a porno shop until he was caught dipping into the till.

Eventually he landed in the hospital with an abscess in a lung; a few weeks later, he says, he was back in the hospital suffering auditory hallucinations, caused by acute alcoholism. He says he knew if he kept drinking he'd die. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. To make a living he took up caddying.

He'd long harbored dreams of being a writer; during his lost years he'd spent many hours holed up in the public library, reading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Now he began making some notes for a mystery novel. On Jan. 26, 1979, he says, he was walking the greens of the Bel-Air Country Club. "I sent up a prayer: 'Please, God, let me start this [expletive] book tonight.' I went home and started the book from these threadbare notes and I've been at it ever since." Standing at the dresser in his room, he wrote his first book, "Brown's Requiem," a conventional private-eye yarn that touched on the kinds of psychosexual obsessions that would figure in his later novels. He sent the manuscript to four agents whose names he found in Writer's Market. One of them sold it to Avon as a paperback original. Ellroy received $ 3,500, less his new agent's commission.

His second novel, "Clandestine," is a thinly disguised account of his mother's murder case. Unlike in real life, the detective solves the case -- the woman's husband did it. Ellroy himself makes an appearance as the 9-year-old son who has a habit of exposing himself to the neighborhood girls.

Novel Success

"The Black Dahlia," his seventh book, was a big, sprawling novel, darker than anything he'd written earlier. He based it on the sensational 1947 unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old party girl and would-be actress who was tortured for two days before she was killed, then cut in half and eviscerated. The local press dubbed her the Black Dahlia, playing off Raymond Chandler's "The Blue Dahlia," a popular movie at the time. In Ellroy's book, two Los Angeles police officers become obsessed with the case, leading one to oblivion, the other to redemption.

With "The Black Dahlia," Ellroy was writing as much about his mother as he was about Betty Short. "I knew intellectually at the time that this was the single event that formed me most, but I'd been running from the woman for a long time and I succeeded in shutting her out."

Ellroy's earlier books had sold well enough but he had no hits. With "The Black Dahlia," he says, "it was now or never. . . . I thought that my mother's death would be a very simple cause-and-effect hook that journalists, movie people could get a handle on: Young boy's mother is murdered. Boy reads about the 'Black Dahlia' murder case. Symbiosis forms in boy's mind. And so I wrote the book and toured with that story, took a huge jump in sales and got a lot of ink."

He drew a following of youngish readers who were drawn to the seedy, corrupt world he depicted. But the books put off many conventional mystery lovers and were too brutal for even some of his admirers. Otto Penzler, the mystery maven who published several of Ellroy's books, says: "I've told him, 'James, you'll never have a big audience without sympathetic characters.' "

One of Ellroy's harshest critics is Mike Davis, whose "City of Quartz" is a bleak sociopolitical study of Los Angeles. "In his pitch blackness," writes Davis, "there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality . . . a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest."

And there's the violence. Mass murders. Gangland hits. Hands pushed into garbage disposals. Throats slashed. A fiend ejaculating into the empty eyeball sockets of his victims. After reading "The Big Nowhere," says Virginia Campbell, Ellroy's researcher for "American Tabloid," "I wondered, who is this person, thinking up this awful stuff that's so disgusting?"

"Ellroy represents something quite diseased in America today," Davis says in an interview from his Los Angeles home. "He's on much the same wavelength as this trendy shop on Melrose Avenue that sells human bones. It's a necrophilic culture all too popular in L.A."

With his frequently coarse dialogue and narration, sprinkled liberally with racial and ethnic epithets, Ellroy has opened himself up to other criticism. "I've been called a fascist, a racist, a homophobe, an antisemite," Ellroy concedes, almost boasting of the attacks and yet seeming hurt by them.

His critics misunderstand him, he says, and confuse his characters' opinions with his own. "My heroes are white Anglo-Saxon male heterosexuals, who express the attitudes of their times, in the language of their times. Go through it and you'll see the language, the racial argot is really tailored entirely to the speaker."

Ellroy's wife, feminist author and critic Helen Knode, says her husband's books really portray "patriarchy on the skids."

Knode, a former film critic for the L.A. Weekly, met Ellroy, then married to his first wife, in 1991 through writer Mikal Gilmore, who was at the time writing a profile of Ellroy for Rolling Stone. "I'd never heard of him," Knode says.

Friends thought they made an odd couple. She was a feminist and "James was perceived as a right-wing uber-male type," she says. But, while he's no feminist, she says, "James is a sucker for women. He's one of the few men who actually respect women. He's not afraid of powerful women. He likes women who have his number."

And what's his "number"? "He's felt a lot of fear. He's lived very close to the abyss. He fears oblivion. And he has a tremendous ambition that he won't be forgotten."

Writing Life

Ellroy's flamboyance is deceiving, friends say. "Fundamentally he's a square," says James Grady. "He leads a life that could put a CPA to sleep. But inside his brain he's leading a life that's more exciting than any we can imagine."

His life is almost entirely wrapped up in his work. He usually writes for three or four hours in the morning, takes a break for lunch and a workout on an exercise machine, and then writes another three hours or so in the evening. He still writes in longhand, big block letters that are illegible to all but his typist.

After so much chaos in his early life, he demands order, peace and quiet. He's left the mean streets of L.A. long behind him and is now about to move from the dull suburbs of Connecticut, his home in recent years, to the dull suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., where his mother-in-law lives. He speaks disdainfully of writers who lack his self-discipline and drive. He is everything his characters are not, says his wife: "While his novels are of men in a downward spiral, his life is just the opposite.