In the tradition of Raymond Chandler s crime fiction comes this story of three tortured souls in the 1950s LAPD a clean cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of his dad his colleague who busts movie stars for payoffs from a sleazy magazine and a detective haunted by the sight of his mother s murder Intensity mounts as the novel s various plots intertwine more and more tightly yet the narrative never veers too far from its core theme of cops competing with crooks to see who can be more corrupt and violent James Ellroy s L A Confidential is film noir crime fiction akin to Chinatown Hollywood Babylon Raymond Chandler Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson It s about threetortured souls in the 1950s L A P D Ed Exley the clean cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of hisdad a legendary cop in the same department Jack Vincennes a cop who advises a Police Squad like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush Hush magazine and Bud White a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom Ellroy himself was traumatized as a boy by his party animal mother s murder See his memoir My Dark Places for the whole sordid story So it is clear that Bud is partly autobiographical But Exley whose shiny reputation conceals a dark secret and Vincennes who goes showbiz with a vengeance reflect parts of Ellroy too L A Confidential holds enough plots for two or three books the cops chase stolen gangland herointhrough a landscape littered with not always innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who havebeen surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars a vile developer based unfairly on Walt Disney schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can bemore corrupt and violent Ellroy s hardboiled prose is so compressed that some of his rat a tat paragraphsare hard to follow You have to read with attention as intense as his and that is very intense indeed Buthe richly rewa - from Amzon