James Ellroy's pungent voice and wicked eye have churned out some of the more distinctive works in recent American crime fiction, and like Raymond Chandler's take on another Los Angeles, their deceptions fool lesser writers into pale mimicry.

Ellroy has tapped into vernacular, its rawness and riffs, and his lifelong lust for noir to carve out a host of warped characters set against the sensational crimes and mythology of post-World War II Los Angeles. When he is on target no one does the forlorn--cops, lounge lizards, female murder victims--better than Ellroy. He counts on context and his hypertonic style to get away with words and images that would tag other writers as homophobes or racists. Sometimes, context notwithstanding, the reader still wonders about the badges he may be hiding.

Ever since the 1979 publication of "The Black Dahlia," his first of four Los Angeles crime novels, Ellroy has not been shy about tying his fiction, at least superficially, to the murder of his mother, Jean, in 1958. She was found strangled in a field in El Monte after a Saturday night of dance, drink and sex with a man her 10-year-old son did not know. The boy had spent the weekend with his father as part of the divorce decree. The murder was never solved.

Ellroy dedicated "The Black Dahlia," based on the gruesome 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short, to the memory of his mother. On his publicity tours, whenever he needed a nice transition or a glib touch of the personal, Jean Ellroy's murder was always an available topic. He had sublimated his mother's death, turned it into the hushed center of a bizarre fictional world, and he managed to accomplish this without any visible lingering demons. So what if his mother was the caricature his father, long dead, had drawn for him all those years ago: She was a lush and a whore.

Then in early 1994, Ellroy got a phone call from a reporter who was doing a newspaper story on unsolved murders in the San Gabriel Valley, his mother's among them. The reporter had the old file, and it was all the tug the 46-year-old Ellroy needed to begin writing his newest book, "My Dark Places," an L.A. crime memoir that moves a brutal light over his parents and himself. He addresses his elusive mother in the opening:

"A cheap Saturday night took you down. . . . Your death defines my life. I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name. I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn down the distance between us. I want to give you breath."