Zócalo Public Square

James Ellroy, the author of the bestselling L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz — has just concluded another high-selling set of novels: the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Like the prior two volumes, American Tabloid and The Cold Six-Thousand, Ellroy's latest, Blood's A Rover, captures the explosive 1960s, placing Ellroy's strange characters — a Klan-raised, Yale-educated FBI agent, an ex-cop and heroin runner, and a wheelman for divorce lawyers — in the middle of that decade's fierce battles over race, sex, and crime. The great Ellroy visited Zócalo to ballyhoo, consecrate, deconstruct and ridicule his bestselling new novel, and to reflect on the nature of his historical fiction and the America it invents. He chats with his girlfriend, writer Erica Schickel.