The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World

Shortlisted for the H.R.F. Keating Award 2020 James Ellroy’s identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy’s early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy’s life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction. The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World is an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Flügge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels. The ‘Big Somewhere’ is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK) Part I: Genre and Literary Influences 1. “Tragic Power”: The Influence of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett on the Work of James Ellroy Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK) 2. “No Man's Land”: Broken Men and Traumatized Police Officers in The Onion Field and The Black Dahlia Jim Mancall (Wheaton College, USA) Part II: Ellroy and Noir 3. “Capable of Anything”: Dudley Smith’s Role in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartets Anna Flügge (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) 4. “Geography is Destiny”: Cinematising the City in the L.A. Quartet Nathan Ashman (University of Surrey, UK) Part III: "America was Never Innocent": Underworld and Government Power Structures 5. Between Althusser and Foucault: Power Relations in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy Rubén Peinado Abarrio (Independent Scholar) 6. Paradoxes of Race in the L.A. Quartet Joshua Meyer (University of Western Sydney, Australia) 7. The Divine Violence of Underworld USA Rodney Taveira (University of Sydney, Australia) 8. From Paranoia to the Contrary: Plotting the Noir World of James Ellroy Woody Haut (Independent Scholar) Part IV: Ellroy and After: The Ellrovian Influence on Authors and Genre 9. ‘‘A Pointed Demythologization”: The Influence of James Ellroy's Novels on Megan Abbott’s Revisionism of the Femme Fatale Diana Powell (University of Liverpool, UK) 10. Individual and Institutionalised Corruption: The Influence of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet on the Novels of David Peace David Bishop (Independent Scholar) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK) Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Steven Powell is an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the editor of Conversations with James Ellroy (2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (2012). His most recent work is James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (2016).

Review :
[Ellroy’s] unique qualities as a crime writer are well captured, and cogently analysed, in The Big Somewhere … I think that anyone who is a serious Ellroy fan will find The Big Somewhere insightful and interesting. The introduction alone making for fascinating reading … with these essays one gains a greater insight into how influential he has been, and continues to be so. I can do no better than recommend The Big Somewhere … [A] fascinating piece of scholarship. Steven Powell is fast becoming the authority on James Ellroy, and this excellent edited collection consolidates and enhances this reputation. The essays, uniformly high-quality and wide-ranging in scope, bring together key scholars in the field and offer complex, exciting ways of understanding Ellroy's entire body of work and the contexts that have produced it. Taken as a whole, this immaculately put-together book should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in Ellroy, crime fiction and post-WW2 American culture. Pull down the top of your Eldorado and prepare for a ride through the Big Somewhere, aka the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Steven Powell and his colleagues are ready and able to guide you, and they’re not afraid of Ellroy's dark places.