James Ellroy Book Club

Would you let hardboiled novelist James “Mad Dog” Ellroy join your book club? His violent, sprawling, and obsessive novels would make for some crazy tea-time conversation.

Tune in next week for a GalleyCat interview with the author, but until then, The Daily Beast gave James Ellroy his own digital book club–collecting five customized book recommendations from the author of the upcoming novel, “Blood’s A Rover.” His choices included some hardboiled classics by Don DeLillo and Dashiell Hammett, but also included forgotten novels like Meyer Levin‘s “Compulsion” and John Gregory Dunne‘s “True Confessions.”

Here’s Ellroy dishing about “Compulsion” in the article: “You’ve got psychoanalysis reaching back three decades, to the Roaring ’20s. Two rich kids kill a 14-year-old boy for kicks. Clarence Darrow defends them and saves their lives. Compulsion is a brilliant one-two punch of history meets pathology. Chicago ’24 lives, incendiary.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

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