James Ellroy Books in Order

Disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator Fritz Brown takes a job tailing a caddie’s mysterious sister and her wealthy older lover, only to uncover arson, long-buried family secrets, and a trail of corruption that leads back to his own past.

Ambitious young LAPD officer Fred Underhill stumbles onto the mutilated body of a secretary and becomes obsessed with linking her death to other unsolved murders, drawing him into a shadowy world of corrupt cops, political pressure, and a brilliant, damaged prosecutor.

Investigating a senseless triple murder in a liquor store, Hopkins follows the trail to glamorous psychiatrist John Havilland, whose cult-like circle of patients are being manipulated with drugs, sex, and therapy games into ever more violent and depraved crimes.

Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant but unstable LAPD detective, investigates a series of brutal killings that echo his first traumatic shooting during the Watts riots, forcing him to match wits with a cunning serial predator who seems to know him too well.

Told entirely from the killer’s point of view, Killer on the Road follows Martin Plunkett, a disturbed drifter who turns his fantasies into a cross-country murder spree, chronicling his crimes, twisted relationships, and chilling self-justifications in unnervingly intimate detail.

On the verge of forced retirement, Hopkins latches onto an FBI bank-robbery task force and a tangle of L.A. heists, using his intuition and rule-breaking methods while his marriage unravels and enemies inside the department work to push him out for good.

Two Los Angeles cops, boxing partners Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, become obsessed with the real 1947 Black Dahlia murder, and their hunt for Elizabeth Short’s killer pulls them into a maze of Hollywood dreams, corruption, and personal betrayal.

Set amid the early-1950s Red Scare, The Big Nowhere weaves together a deputy sheriff chasing a sadistic sex killer, a disgraced ex-cop working for gangsters and Howard Hughes, and an ambitious LAPD lieutenant caught between political witch hunts and his conscience.

Spanning most of the 1950s, L.A. Confidential tracks three very different LAPD officers—ladder-climbing Ed Exley, brutal enforcer Bud White, and celebrity cop Jack Vincennes—as a diner massacre exposes a far-reaching web of police corruption, tabloid scandals, and organized crime.

Vice lieutenant Dave Klein is both cop and contract killer, juggling law school, mob work, and dirty assignments for his superiors until a burglary case and federal investigation start prying open years of LAPD corruption, leaving him scrambling to save himself and his sister.

This collection gathers noir novellas and stories, including the title tale about real-life accordion star Dick Contino hunting a serial killer to redeem his reputation, along with other dark, jazzy slices of 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles.

Hollywood Nocturnes offers a suite of linked L.A. stories, from the wild novella Dick Contino’s Blues to tales that revisit aging characters from Ellroy’s novels, capturing moments of obsession, regret, and sudden violence in the city’s smoky clubs and low-rent streets.

American Tabloid follows three lawmen and fixers—Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littell—as they move between the FBI, CIA, the Mob, and Howard Hughes from 1958 to 1963, building the hidden alliances and betrayals that lead to the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Part memoir and part true-crime investigation, My Dark Places follows Ellroy as he reopens the unsolved 1958 murder of his mother with a retired homicide detective, confronting buried memories, police files, and the roots of his lifelong obsession with crime.

Edited by Peter Haining, this hardboiled-crime anthology surveys pulp-era and later stories from writers including James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, and Stephen King. Its selections trace the tough, unsentimental traditions of noir and crime fiction.

Crime Wave collects Ellroy’s true-crime reportage, essays, and short fiction about Los Angeles, blending cold-case investigations, celebrity scandals, and two linked novellas to show how tabloid culture, cops, and crooks feed off one another in the city’s dark corners.

Picking up after the Kennedy assassination, The Cold Six Thousand drops mob lawyer Ward Littell, fixer Pete Bondurant, and Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr. into the 1960s, as civil rights battles, Dallas cover-ups, and the Vietnam-era drug trade turn America into a shooting gallery.

Ellroy’s volume of The Best American Mystery Stories presents his selection of standout short crime and suspense tales from contemporary writers, offering a wide mix of voices, settings, and tones along with his punchy introduction to the year’s darker fiction.

Edited by David L. Ulin, this wide-ranging anthology presents fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries about Los Angeles by more than seventy writers. Spanning the city’s cultural and social history, it captures its glamour, contradictions, neighborhoods, landscapes, and fault lines.

Published as Destination: Morgue! L.A. Tales, this collection mixes autobiographical essays, true-crime pieces, and hard-edged novellas set in Los Angeles, tracing Ellroy’s obsessions with unsolved murders, tabloid history, and the ways violence and desire intersect on the city’s streets.

This anthology of long-form true crime, co-edited by Ellroy, gathers magazine pieces on topics like sex trafficking, con artists, barroom violence, and high-end theft, and includes an original essay in which he recalls how reading Joseph Wambaugh helped shape his own fixation on crime.

In this intimate follow-up to My Dark Places, Ellroy revisits his mother’s murder and the curse he feels he placed on her, tracing a lifetime of romantic obsession, failed relationships, and spiritual searching in brutally candid, sometimes tender, prose.

Set from 1968 to 1972, Blood’s A Rover concludes the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy as cop-fixer Dwight Holly, ex-hit man Wayne Tedrow Jr., and young snoop Don Crutchfield navigate FBI dirty tricks, Black Power infiltrations, and a mob-backed Dominican casino scheme that may doom them all.

Edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, this reference collection asks more than 100 mystery writers from twenty countries to write personal essays about favorite mystery novels. The result is a wide-ranging reading guide spanning classic detectives, crime fiction, and modern suspense.

Perfidia launches the Second L.A. Quartet in December 1941, when a Japanese American family is found dead on the eve of Pearl Harbor and chemist Hideo Ashida, scheming sergeant Dudley Smith, and diarist Kay Lake pursue the case amid rising wartime panic and racism.

LAPD ’53 pairs striking archival crime-scene and police photographs from one year in Los Angeles with Ellroy’s commentary, creating a stark, episodic portrait of midcentury policing, everyday violence, and the ordinary people caught in the path of both.

This Storm continues the story into 1942, following characters from Perfidia through an investigation of a gold heist, murderous arson, and fascist plots that link Los Angeles to Mexico, as war, internment, and political paranoia intensify the pressure on every cop and suspect.

Narrated from a netherworld jail cell by real-life fixer Fred Otash, Widespread Panic races through his years as an LAPD cop, Hollywood private eye, and scandal-magazine enforcer, chronicling the blackmail schemes, betrayals, and guilty romances that defined midcentury showbiz sleaze.

In The Enchanters, set in the summer of 1962, Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash is hired to manage the fallout from Marilyn Monroe’s death and a starlet’s kidnapping, dragging him into a feverish investigation that entangles studio bosses, the Kennedys, and his own addictions.

In Los Angeles just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, investigator Freddy Otash leads a politically charged hunt for alleged Communist threats. A Halloween murder and ties to Richard Nixon entangle him in a volatile 1962 web of police power, racial conflict, and paranoia.