Details for this torrent 


My Dark Places - by James Ellroy (unabridged)
Type:
Audio > Audio books
Files:
22
Size:
408.82 MB

Spoken language(s):
English
Quality:
+0 / -0 (0)

Uploaded:
Oct 21, 2008
By:
paulyearwig



General Information
===================
 Title:                  My Dark Places
 Author:                 James Ellroy
 Read By:                Michael Prichard
 Copyright:              1996
 Audiobook Copyright:    1997
 Genre:                  Memoir
 Publisher:              Books On Tape
 Abridged:               No

Original Media Information
==========================
 Media:                  Tape
 Number:                 10
 Source:                 Library
 Condition:              Good

File Information
================
 Number of MP3s:         20
 Total Duration:         14:52:32
 Total MP3 Size:         408.80 MB
 Parity Archive:         No
 MPEG CRC file:          NO
 Ripped By:              scsigirl
 Files Created on:       02-May-2006  22:59:16
 Ripped With:            CoolEdit Pro v2.0
 Encoded At:             CBR 64 kbit/s 44 KHz Mono
 Normalize:              None
 Noise Reduction:        None
 ID3 Tags:               Set, v1.1, v2.3
 Cover Image present:    NO
 NFO Created:            04-May-2006  21:45:08
 NFO/SFV/PAR created by: Mp3BookHelper http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/
 
Posting


MP3 File List
=============
     Size MB  Duration  File Name
01     20.40  0:44:32   JEMD01-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 01A.mp3
02     20.13  0:43:57   JEMD02-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 01B.mp3
03     20.85  0:45:31   JEMD03-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 02A.mp3
04     21.04  0:45:56   JEMD04-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 02B.mp3
05     20.55  0:44:52   JEMD05-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 03A.mp3
06     20.40  0:44:33   JEMD06-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 03B.mp3
07     20.48  0:44:43   JEMD07-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 04A.mp3
08     19.94  0:43:31   JEMD08-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 04B.mp3
09     20.35  0:44:26   JEMD09-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 05A.mp3
10     20.24  0:44:12   JEMD10-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 05B.mp3
11     20.49  0:44:44   JEMD11-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 06A.mp3
12     20.61  0:44:59   JEMD12-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 06B.mp3
13     20.45  0:44:39   JEMD13-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 07A.mp3
14     20.41  0:44:34   JEMD14-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 07B.mp3
15     20.51  0:44:47   JEMD15-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 08A.mp3
16     20.58  0:44:56   JEMD16-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 08B.mp3
17     20.44  0:44:37   JEMD17-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 09A.mp3
18     20.12  0:43:56   JEMD18-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 09B.mp3
19     20.41  0:44:34   JEMD19-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 10A.mp3
20     20.41  0:44:33   JEMD20-20 James Ellroy - My Dark Places 10B.mp3
 
Book Description
================
My Dark Places
FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
October 1997

From the author of L.A. Confidential comes My Dark Places, an investigative 
autobiography by James Ellroy. In 1958, 
Ellroy's mother, Jean, was raped, killed, and dumped off a road in El Monte, California, a rundown L.A. suburb. The killer was never found, and the case was closed. It was a sordid, back-page homicide that no one remembered. Except her son.

James Ellroy was ten years old when his mother died. His bereavement was complex and ambiguous: "I cried. I cranked tears out all the way to L.A. I hated her. I hated El Monte. Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life." He grew up obsessed with murdered women and crime. He ran from his mother's 
ghost.

Ellroy became a writer of radically provocative and bestselling crime novels. 
"I wear obsession well," he says. "I've turned it into something." He tried to 
reclaim his mother through fiction. It 
didn't work. He quit running and wrote this memoir.

My Dark Places is Jean and James Ellroy's 
story � from 1958 to all points past and up to this moment. It is the story of 
a brilliant homicide detective named Bill Stoner and of the investigation he and 
Ellroy undertook. It is also an unflinching autobiography with vivid reportage. 
This is James 
Ellroy's journey through his most forbidding memories.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother - and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer - author of American Tabloid and White Jazz - tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten - and to reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is an epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
FROM THE CRITICS
Charles Taylor

There's 
no genre of writing more in love with its own bullshit than hard-boiled 
detective fiction. Possessing a 
rat's eye view of the world is almost always accompanied by the temptation to bully the reader into stomaching the dark, dirty truth of just how lousy and corrupt things are. Hammett and Chandler had enough style to get by with that sensibility; Ross MacDonald, the most gentlemanly and compassionate of American detective authors, saw its limits. James Ellroy revels in it. And he pushes his tough-guy pose into post-modern cynicism. His heroes aren't 
slumming angels, but brutal, racist sons of bitches almost as dirty as the 
slimeballs they're up against.

Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places is, 
ostensibly, an attempt to explain the formation of his preoccupation with the 
seedy side of life. The memoir is about his 
mother's still-unsolved 1958 murder (Ellroy was 10) and his subsequent slide into junior white supremacism, petty crime, dope, booze and dementia. The trouble is that Ellroy has such a pathetically limited sensibility that the book reads like a sub-Jim Thompson take on the hot trend in literary memoirs. Ellroy writes in ridiculously rat-a-tat prose ("The Ellroy case was stalled out. They weren't 
coming up with shit on the blonde and the dark man . . . A Narco deputy liked 
the nurse angle. He forwarded the tip to Homicide. Joe the Barber was 
interviewed and crossed off as a 
suspect.") which is almost a parody, like Jack Webb on a bad drunk. And while I understand he's imitating the voices of his characters with the incessant references to "homos" and "fruits" and "wetbacks" and "niggers," Ellroy is also clearly getting off on it, and the genre lets him get away with it.

Although Ellroy claims his attempts to solve his mother's murder (with the help of a retired LAPD homicide detective) are a way of showing the love and loyalty he withheld while she lived, it doesn't read as anything more than a chance to play private dick. I can't imagine what losing your mother to violent crime does to a 10-year-old, and I don't want to deny Ellroy's torment. But using her corpse as an excuse to live out your hardboiled fantasies is about as sordid as it gets. Ellroy is what the pulps he's so enamored of used to call one nasty piece of work. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
The novelist's gritty memoir features a new epilogue. (Aug.)
Library Journal
In 1958, when crime novelist Ellroy (American Tabloid) was ten years old, his mother was found murdered near Los Angeles. The crime was never solved. In 1994, with the help of a retired detective, Ellroy set out to reinvestigate his mother's death. Despite exhaustive efforts, they were unable to identify the "swarthy" man last seen in a bar with Jean Ellroy. Like Ellroy's fiction, this memoir is terse and hard-boiled, treating his early, homeless life as a petty thief and substance abuser; murderers and victims; and most of all his complex feelings about his mother. Ellroy's search for her killer ultimately became a quest for his mother's true identity. A cathartic journey for Ellroy that will appeal to his readers. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/96.]-Gregor A. Preston, formerly with Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Kirkus Reviews
The man who reenergized the hard-boiled detective genre (American Tabloid, 1995, etc.) delivers a true-crime noir unflinchingly detailing his mother's murder and his own belated but obsessive investigation of it.

Jean Ellroy was strangled in 1958, when James was 10. Initially relieved because her death allowed him to fulfill his wish to live with his father, young James develops an obsession with crime�especially homicide. In his teens he begins a life of petty theft fed by alcohol and drug abuse, social alienation, and his father's laissez-faire approach to child-rearing. This steep personal slide�related frankly and graphically in Ellroy's trademark tough-guy staccato�lasts into his 30s, when he channels his murder fascination into a first novel. His feeling toward his mother during these lost years is an unseemly mix of emotional disconnection and sexual attraction. Active interest in her death is ignited in 1994 when a reporter writing about unsolved murders contacts him. Ellroy writes about her death for GQ, which only whets his appetite. And so he enlists the help of retired L.A. police detective Bill Stoner and launches an exhaustive investigation that revisits old witnesses and reconciles Ellroy with family members long abandoned. Eventually, the quest transmogrifies from identifying the killer�an elusive suspect known only as "The 
Swarthy Man"�to learning the details of his secretive mother's life. Jean's murder remains unsolved and under investigation, but the child is reconciled with his late mother. Ellroy's short, simple sentences set up a punchy but monotonous rhythm that's as unrelenting as a jackhammer�and as wearing, since the book, bogged down in background that indulges Ellroy's fascination with police procedure, is overly long.

Fanatics will undoubtedly savor the facts behind Ellroy's fiction (and his murder riffs), but those expecting autobiographical exposé of the writer's psychological clockwork will feel stonewalled by macho reserve

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hope you enjoy this, please take the time to leave a comment
Thank you for a great book! :)