Audiobooks by James Ellroy

Brought to you by Penguin. Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - and it got to him bad. Now he's a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Welcome to the world of the malevolent monarch of the Hollywood underground - a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows. In Widespread Panic, we traverse the depths of '50s L.A. and dig on the inner workings of Confidential. You'll go to Burt Lancaster's lushly appointed torture den; you'll groove overhyped legend James Dean as Freddy's chief stooge; you'll be there for Freddy's ring-a-ding rendezvous with Liz Taylor; you'll be front and centre as Freddy anoints himself the 'Tattle Tyrant Who Held Hollywood Hostage'. 'Purgatory is rarely this much fun.' - Financial Times © James Ellroy 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

James Ellroy (Author), Craig Wasson (Narrator)

Audiobook

El gran desierto (Cuarteto de Los Ángeles 2)

Retrato único de una ciudad y sus entrañas, El gran desierto es la segunda novela del «Cuarteto de Los Ángeles», tetralogía que se ha convertido en un clásico de la novela negra del siglo XX. Los Ángeles, Nochevieja de 1949. El cadáver mutilado de un hombre joven, los ojos arrancados, mordeduras por todo el cuerpo... es el primer asesinato de la oleada que sembrará el pánico en los entornos comunistas de la ciudad. Danny Upshaw, ayudante del sheriff, se obsesiona con el caso mientras se convierte en anzuelo contra los comunistas en Hollywood. Se sumarán a la caza de brujas Mal Considine, ambicioso teniente de la fiscalía del distrito, y Buzz Meeks, expolicía caído en desgracia. Considine busca un ascenso; Meeks, dinero. Tres hombres sumidos en una espiral de codicia y engaño que les confrontará con sus propios demonios. La crítica ha dicho... «Un gran libro que se extiende sobre una atmósfera ricay densa. [...] Sus personajes están creados con trazos firmes, los diálogos, duros y sarcásticos, son excelentes, y quieres saber desesperadamente cómo acabará todo.» The New York Times «Ellroy crea un caleidoscopio de pasión humana y oscura obsesión.» Library Journal «La Dalia Negra, El gran desierto, LA Confidential y Jazz blanco son de esas novelas que vas a releer siempre con perdurable fascinación.» El País «Es imposible que estos libros te dejen impasible. Puedes odiarlos, sí. Su lectura no nace del placer, es el reflejo de una obsesión. Sexo, mujeres, crimen, política, poder, corrupción. [...] Una vez aprendida y asimilada su sintaxis de anfetamina es imposible dejar el vicio.» Rodrigo Fresán, El Cultural

James Ellroy (Author), Víctor Velasco (Narrator)

Audiobook

L.A. Confidential (Cuarteto de Los Ángeles 3)

Exploración del bajo mundo del crimen y la violencia en la época dorada de Hollywood, L.A. Confidential es la tercera novela del «Cuarteto de Los Ángeles», tetralogía que se ha convertido en un clásico de la novela negra del siglo XX. Los Ángeles, años cincuenta. Camuflada tras sus fabulosas mansiones y el glamour de los clubs nocturnos, la ciudad es un hervidero de corrupción y bajas pasiones. Una noche, una matanza baña en sangre una cafetería de la ciudad. Se trata de una auténtica carnicería, y sus oscuras ramificaciones atraparán a tres policías en sus arenas movedizas. Eclipsado por el éxito de su padre como policía, Ed Exley hará lo que sea para superarle y conseguir la gloria. Bud White, por su parte, vio cómo su progenitor asesinaba a su madre y es una bomba de relojería con placa y pistola. Y por último, Jack Vincennes, que se dedica a airear los escándalos de Hollywood en los medios de comunicación mientras lucha por ocultar sus propios secretos. L.A. Confidential fue llevada al cine con enorme éxito por Curtis Hanson, y galardonada con dos premios Oscar. Críticas: «Es imposible que estos libros te dejen impasible. Puedes odiarlos, sí. Su lectura no nace del placer, es el reflejo de una obsesión. Sexo, mujeres, crimen, política, poder, corrupción. [...] Una vez aprendida y asimilada su sintaxis de anfetamina, esimposible dejar el vicio.» Rodrigo Fresán, El Cultural «James Ellroy es un genio: el mejor escritor de novela negra americana desde Raymond Chandler.» Times Literary Supplement

James Ellroy (Author), Víctor Velasco (Narrator)

Audiobook

La Dalia Negra (Cuarteto de Los Ángeles 1)

La Dalia Negra, obra maestra del perro diabólico de las letras norteamericanas, en edición definitiva, con una traducción actualizada y un epílogo inédito del autor. 15 de enero de 1947. Los Ángeles, un solar desocupado. El cadáver de una mujer de veinticinco años, desnudo y seccionado en dos partes. El médico forense determina que ha sido torturada durante días mientras ella seguía consciente. Un periodista bautiza a la víctima como «la Dalia Negra». Los policías Bucky Bleichert y Lee Blanchard, dos ex boxeadores conocidos como Hielo y Fuego, son puestos al frente del caso. Al sumergirse en los bajos fondos de Los Ángeles para averiguar quién era la Dalia se verán atrapados en un circo mediático y en una investigación policial plagada de pistas falsas, intereses políticos y dificultades; un caso irresoluble que acabará por obsesionarles. Basada en un suceso real e inspirada en el asesinato de su propia madre, La Dalia Negra es la primera novela del «Cuarteto de Los Ángeles», ciclo novelístico que figura entre los grandes clásicos del género negro y policial del siglo veinte. Un viaje por la cara oculta de los oropeles de Hollywood a través de los estercoleros morales de una sociedad obsesionada con el éxito y que solamente brilla en la superficie. Críticas: «Si me preguntan quién es el mejor novelista vivo cuya literatura es feroz, valiente, divertida, escatológica, hermosa, enrevesada y paranoica... la respuesta es fácil: James Ellroy.» Stephen King «Es imposible que estos libros te dejen impasible. Puedes odiarlos, sí. Su lectura no nace del placer, es el reflejo de una obsesión. Sexo, mujeres, crimen, política, poder, corrupción. Las mismas obsesiones que dominarán al lector que se deje morder por sus páginas.» Rodrigo Fresán «Uno de los mejores escritores norteamericanos de nuestro tiempo.» Los Angeles Book Review «En el Los Ángeles de Ellroy es imposible diferenciar a los buenos de los malos, porque simplemente no hay buenos.» Kirkus Reviews

James Ellroy (Author), Víctor Velasco (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Big Nowhere

Los Angeles, 1950 Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name as a cop...and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.'s Bureau brass. He's climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks-bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes-is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare. (100,000 words)

James Ellroy (Author), Jason Culp (Narrator)

Audiobook

American Tabloid

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination-in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C.... Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy.... Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty.... Where three renegade law-enforcement officers-a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents-are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history.... James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open. "Compulsively readable.... Hard to forget." -CHICAGO TRIBUNE "Vastly entertaining." -LOS ANGELES TIMES

James Ellroy (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

Audiobook

L.A. Confidential

Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.

James Ellroy (Author), Craig Wasson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Perfidia: A novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLERAN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIt is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.From the Hardcover edition.

James Ellroy (Author), Craig Wasson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Hollywood Nocturnes

Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest borscht belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he's slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He's too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino's Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957-a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera. Included along with the novella are five short stories, all in the author's inimitable tough-bitten style. Includes-"Dick Contino's Blues"-"High Darktown"-"Dial Axminster 6-400"-"Since I Don't Have You"-"Gravy Train"-"Torch Number"

James Ellroy (Author), Dick Hill (Narrator)

Audiobook

Clandestine

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950's-a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition-and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past. And his good and pure love for a crusading woman lawyer has been corrupted and may not survive. But even without the authority of a badge, Fred Underhill knows that his only hope for redemption lies in following the investigation to its grim conclusion. And the hell to which he has been consigned for his sins is the perfect place to hunt for a killer who hungers but has no soul.

James Ellroy (Author), William Roberts (Narrator)

Audiobook

Brown's Requiem

Fritz Brown's L.A., and his life, are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem, a private eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music, he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown's life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap. Reopening this cas could be Fritz's redemption; his welcome back to a moral world and his path to a pure and perfect love. But to get there, he must make it through a grim, lightless place where evil has no national borders; where lies beget lies and death begets death; where there's little tolerance for Bach or Beethoven and deadly arson is a lesser mortal sin; and where a p.i.'s unhealthy interest in the past can turn beautiful music into funeral dirge.

James Ellroy (Author), R. C. Bray (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blood on the Moon

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer. “A brilliant detective and a mysterious psychopath come together in a final dance of death.”--New York Times

James Ellroy (Author), L.J. Ganser (Narrator)

Audiobook