Fables of the material world in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles

James Ellroy’s detective stories detail an urban landscape in which crime is inseparable from its relationship to a grossly material world. In Ellroy’s Los Angeles, gothic bloody serial murder, rape and incest, violent armed robberies and assassinations, terrorism, institutional corruption, and petty crimes from property theft to mail fraud are everywhere tied to large- scale urban development and land deals— to the physical structures of the city. Thus, Ellroy’s work gives radically substantial form to the generic pattern in which the world of the detective story is saturated with the traces of crime. This study investigates the effects of this imbrication of crime into the fabric of the city in Ellroy’s fiction. It examines the way Ellroy’s LA concretizes the narrative and semiotic tensions that run through his work, as the shifting terms of the exchange between the semiotic possibilities produced by mysterious crimes, and the potential significances of the clues discovered through the course of their investigation, are hypostasized in the city’s relentless material activity.