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STEPHEN CAPEN: I picked up a copy of Granta a couple of years back, the one on "Crime," and was absolutely devastated by what followed.

JAMES ELLROY: "Dick Contino's Blues."

CAPEN: That's it.

ELLROY: Well, I am going to put Dick Contino in my next novel.

CAPEN: What a major story. And how is My Dark Places doing at this point?

ELLROY: My Dark Places is doing great. I think it's going to be my best selling book. It went all the way to number one on the LA Times best seller list. It popped up on a lot of regional and bookstore chain best seller lists, it was a New York Times Notable Book of 1996 and it was Time Magazine's #5 non-fiction book of 1996, following up on my novel American Tabloid being named Time's number one novel of the year in 1995. I've gotten a lot of great press on it. The CBS Sunday Morning Show that Charles Osgood hosts did a feature on me and Bill Stoner and the book. The book has done splendidly.

CAPEN: The crux of the book, a couple of your novels, and the Granta story revolve around the murder of your mother.

ELLROY: The Granta story does not. That beginning of the Granta story is not really the story, that was just addendum that they put in there to justify the photograph of me on the cover. The photograph of me on the cover is also included in my book My Dark Places that was taken June 22, 1958, five minutes after the cops had said "son, your mother has been killed."

CAPEN: You've been living with an obsession for quite some time.

ELLROY: Well, running from the obsession, yes. It's not as if the specific obsession of my mother's murder has dogged me, plagued me and cursed me -- obsessed me in the sense that the event itself happened, it mutated in other forms very early on, chiefly an obsession with crime, crime fiction, psychosexual behavior, kids' crime books, adult crime books, the whole criminal universe.

CAPEN: Is this actually a world in which you live?

ELLROY: Yes. And a world I am very comfortable and happy in. The odd thing that a lot of people don't grok is that I have written a wrenching and harrowing work of non-fiction about my mother's murder and its effect on me but I was a happy man when I started out writing the book and I'm a happier man now. I think the absence of self-pity shows in the book.

CAPEN: It does. Do these serve to purge this nightmare from your life?

ELLROY: It hasn't been a nightmare. It's something that I turned into something good and useful very early on. The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're ten years old and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case. You just get on with it to one degree or another. As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years. More than anything else I think what the book charts is my collision course with my mother.

CAPEN: Back to this world of crime. Is this the real world?

ELLROY: It's my world, it's a very stylized world, it's the secret world that coexists within the outwardly more placid outer world that I actually live in, that you live in. I write about the secret world of Los Angeles from the late forties to the late fifties in my ------ quartet books and The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere and My Confidential and White Jazz.

American Tabloid is my first book in what I'm calling the underworld USA trilogy. Tabloid covers 1958 to 1963 America, the total vision of politics as crime within those five years. The next book will cover 1963 to 1968 and the third book will cover 1968 to 1973, thus you have fifteen years of dark American history broken down into three books of five year increments. I live in those worlds right there and I'm very happy bopping around in them. I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

CAPEN: Does it also give you a feeling that most people, the population at large, are really deceiving themselves by not understanding which forces control this country, which forces are at play in the world that actually exist? That maybe they see this world in a movie or read a book about it, see a TV show, whatever, but don't really take it too seriously, chalk it up to fantasy.

ELLROY: Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose. Anybody that doesn't look at Bill Clinton whipping out his dick on women when he's the governor of Arkansas and doesn't see the venality in that man, anybody who can look at Newt Gingrich and tell me this guy is kosher and above board is just playing with loose screws or is dealing with a willful ignorance.

CAPEN: Yeah, typical pro forma mafia activity. This is the way they operate. They get you involved and you can't quit and you can't back out. You're hooked.

I wonder how that applies to your associations with the underworld.

ELLROY: I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

CAPEN: Seriously?

ELLROY: Seriously. I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little. I don't know any criminals.

CAPEN: Have you ever perhaps offended anybody in that world or that element to the point where threats were forthcoming?

ELLROY: No. The real life characters that I use in my books are all dead or I wouldn't be able to use them. I would be liable. Hence, the books that I have written that feature real life characters are all reviewed by the legal departments of my publishers.

CAPEN: You don't actually have anything to do with these people.

ELLROY: No. The Carlos Marcellos and the J. Edgar Hoovers and the Mickey Cohens and the gangsters in my early quartet books and American Tabloid are all dead. These people don't care, their heirs don't care if you write about them. Their heirs do not have a legal recourse to sue you.

If these celebrated gangsters were to take personal offense, the heirs of them, in everything written about them, well --, they would be involved in vendettas against journalists and fiction writers all day, every day. They wouldn't have any time to extort money or deal dope.

CAPEN: You say that you really come down more on the side of authority.

ELLROY: Yes, every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.

CAPEN: One of the facts that arises from My Dark Places is that at one point you were involved with the neo-Nazi party of the US.

ELLROY: I wasn't involved with it.

Essentially I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99% Jewish and I wanted laughs and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored. It was a question of, if you can't love me, notice me, so how are you going to get lots of attention in a high school that's 99% Jewish but go around going "Zeig Heil!," kill the Jews?

That's exactly what I did. I never believed in Nazism seriously for one second and I certainly wasn't involved with the American Nazi Party. I went to a couple of their preposterously ineffectual Bund rallies out in Glendale thirty-odd years ago and sang the Horst Wessel song and had to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing as I was doing it. I was just a fucking clown.

CAPEN: So there's not much to that, that's what it was.

ELLROY: Yeah.

CAPEN: What are you working on at this point? Do you spend your entire life taking notes, observing, writing the next draft?

ELLROY: Right now I am getting ready, putting notes together for the sequel to American Tabloid. Then I will write the outline for the book which will take months and then I will write the novel.

CAPEN: That was called one of the most substantive takes on the Kennedy assassination.

ELLROY: Yeah, but the assassination doesn't even occur in the book. It's really the complete story of 1958 to 1963 America, so you've got J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes and Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli and the crazy Cuban exiles from the Bay of Pigs invasion and Bobby Kennedy's war on organized crime, and Bobby Kennedy deporting Carlos Marcello in the weeks preceding the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the prelude to the Kennedy assassination -- but not the assassination itself.

It isn't really a novel about the assassination, just the five years that preceded it.

CAPEN: James, tell me about your mentors in the writing business. Don DeLillo perhaps?

ELLROY: Don DeLillo, I've never met him. I wrote him a letter thanking him for writing his novel Libra, and I sent him a copy of American Tabloid when it was first published. American Tabloid was spawned by his novel which is a great book specifically about the Kennedy assassination. I read that book and got hooked on the Kennedy assassination. I had never been interested in it before.

I read a lot of Kennedy assassination theory books and so on and saw DeLillo had co-opted it all into the most plausible theories, the most interesting real life characters and perspectves. I saw that this book was so great that I could write a book about the Kennedy assassination. Then I began to see that I could write a book about, as I stated, the five years preceding it. So for attribution I give Don DeLillo every credit every chance I get. Other than that, Dashiel Hammet was a big influence on me as a kid and probably my largest influence was Joseph Wambaugh -- the Los Angeles policeman turned novelist.

CAPEN: Someone offhandedly made the remark that you had once said you were "Raymond Chandler reincarnate."

ELLROY: I never said that. Raymond Chandler is not a guy that I admire anymore. I think his books are softheaded and full of bad writing. I think Hammet is a much more important guy.

CAPEN: Even things like The Big Sleep?

ELLROY: Yeah.

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