Perfidia: A Novel

James Ellroy
In Conversation With author Walter Kirn
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
01:05:32
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Episode Summary

Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia. Together with Kirn, author of a recent riveting take on a Los Angeles cold case, Ellroy uncovers a corrupt city under the shadow of Pearl Harbor, where the investigation of a hellish murder of a Japanese family throws together and rips apart four driven souls.


Participant(s) Bio

James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is the author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.



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