Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Kat Johnson: Hi, I'm Kat Johnson and I'm an editor here at Audible, where we are delighted to welcome the one and only James Ellroy, one of the greatest living crime writers of all time. He's here to talk about James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip, his first-ever true crime podcast. Welcome, James.

James Ellroy: Hello, Ms. Johnson, how are you?

KJ: I'm doing well. How are you today?

JE: I'm good like a rabid dog [howls].

KJ: Let's just get right into it [laughs]. It’s always a dog thing, isn't it? You have an affinity with dogs?

JE: Yeah, I'm a demon dog.

KJ: You're the demon dog. I was afraid to introduce you because you do your own introductions so well, but yes, this is the Demon Dog James Ellroy.

James, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip is not like any I've heard before. I absolutely love it. How do you describe it to people?

JE: These are personal documents that serve as a valediction in blood. The first true crime piece I ever wrote, for GQ magazine, was called “My Mother's Killer.” It was about the experience of seeing my mother's LA County Sheriff's homicide file, unsolved, 36 years after the fact. Reading the file, commenting on the file, describing the file for the pages of GQ, detailing the nitty-gritty minutia of the file. And here it is, and I'm reading it now for Audio Up and Audible. And now I know why God made me a bass baritone: I've got a good voice for this.

"Now I know why God made me a bass baritone."

KJ: You really do. Your voice is so perfect for this medium that I'm surprised this is our first James Ellroy podcast. What inspired you to take that leap into podcasting?

JE: Jimmy Jellinek [Chief Creative Office of Audio Up] came along and, initially, a friend of theirs had contacted me about reading a true crime piece from The Hollywood Reporter. I said, "Hell no. I only want to read my own full-length magazine pieces." Voila, Jimmy Jellinek contacted my agent, Andrew Wylie, in New York, hence James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip, and that's just the beginning.

KJ: That's right. We're very excited to get some of your fiction into this format, which is wonderful. But to stay on James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip for now, these eight episodes are based on, as you said, true crime stories that you've written about in the past. How did you pick the stories to adapt here, and is there a common thread?

JE: As I say in the prologue to the overall series, “Dead women own me.” It doesn't take a genius or a Freudian head shrinker to figure that my interest in crime predates back to June 1958, when I was 10 years of age and my mother was murdered. That's it. I became a fiendish reader of true crime magazines, watcher of crime television shows, viewer of crime movies. Well, no big surprise, years later, what do I do? What do I want to become? What's my career? All these decades, I write crime novels and, secondarily, true crime stories. So, these pieces that I initially covered in print for Vanity Fair and GQ are now available on Audio Up with yours truly, Ellroy the Demon Dog, reading the text, and fabulous music cues and sound design.

KJ: I love the audio format, and it goes so well with your writing style. Like you said, you're the narrator—you're kind of guiding us through each case. We have actors performing the dialogue, and then there are sound effects, which heighten the adrenaline. What was the vision for this all, and what was your involvement in the creative and production process?

JE: I don't even use a computer. I've never used a computer for anything. I've written all 22 of my books by hand, and I hire people to type them. I have a fax machine and a whole lot of white paper, black ink, and red ink. This level of technology—I didn't know it existed. Then I had a series of discussions with Jimmy Jellinek. He explained it to me, "We recorded these pieces that you're here to publicize and comment upon in a hotel here in downtown Denver about a year ago."

KJ: So you didn't know too much about the audio element, but I'm glad that Audio Up was able to elucidate the vision, because it's such a great audio experience. And I was curious about the performance element. Have you read your work before? Because you sound very natural behind the microphone. Did you have any way of preparing for your parts?

JE: I read crummy abridged versions of my two memoirs, My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse. Of course, I wrote the texts, so I had the books semi-memorized. I'm just a good dramatic reader. And there's no dialogue that I had to interpose in those two books because they were memoirs. In regular audiobooks, one reader reads all the narration and then has to run the gamut of all the voices, portray men, women, old, young, differentiate the voices. Not so in my upcoming big audiobook for Audible and for Audio Up, American Tabloid. Jimmy has hired name actors to read the dialogue; [I'm} just sticking with my narration. So, I had the dialogue information shuttered aside, and I had the narrative narration pretty damn well memorized, and that was my preparation.

KJ: Wow, that's interesting because your style is so intentional. And like you said, with true crime, it translates so well because we're hearing police blotter reports and it's very informative and clipped, but it also has a lot of action. You lead off with “My Mother's Killer” and the death of your mother. As you have revisited these cases throughout the years, I'm just curious: Do you feel like revisiting it again? Do you have the urge to amend what you've written before about it or was everything translated perfectly for this recording?

JE: The translation that I did was literal to the original written text. But reading it aloud after a period of decades, I was able to put emphasis that I didn't have the first time around, even though I was reading the same words.

KJ: The episode about your mother is incredibly moving, and I can only imagine revisiting that for this could be difficult. Did you feel emotional in the recording?

JE: Yes, I did.

KJ: I loved the end of that one, where you said, "Your final terror is the flame I touched my hand to." Such a beautiful line.

JE: Thank you.

KJ: Most of these stories center on misogynistic violence—women who were murdered in the 1950s and '60s in Hollywood. What draws you to this sort of midcentury underbelly of Hollywood over and over again?

JE: Well, if you look at all of my books, on the backflap that has the biography, it says James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. And in that sense, geography is destiny. I got lucky: My mom and dad hatched me in a very cool locale. There's the specter of the film business. In fact, I grew up just a few blocks south of the Paramount Studio. It's all in my blood. It's LA when LA, as I write, was indigenously everywhere. I'd never been anywhere else. Even though I’m older now and I’ve lived all over the world, it’s LA, and LA then. My brain and my soul are back in LA in the '50s and '60s. LA has imbued me and rewired my circuits on a very deep level, and that's what I write.

KJ: You said you don't own a cellphone or a computer or a television, and you don't use the internet. How intentional have you been about this over the years? Is it something that just comes naturally to you? Are you ever tempted to access all this information that's so readily available?

JE: No, I don't care. I ignore the world so that I might live in a fantasy world of my own. It's not 100 percent sealed, this compartment. I know about the last few presidential elections. I don't feel free to comment on them because I got my snout in a manuscript that I write by hand. I'll do anything to be alone in a contained environment, temperature controlled, so I can think.

As far as I'm concerned, the contemporary world does not exist. The contemporary world is LA in the early '60s, LA in the late '40s, LA in the mid '50s. I am augmented in this by my puritan nature and my Spartan work habits. I don't look into a computer screen. There's no ads popping up in the margins. There's no click-and-tease. I got a lot of black ink pens, red ink pens, white notebook paper. I got a desk. It's quiet. Don't mess with the dog—or I'll bite you. Arrrgh.

KJ: Is there something about the past, like the murkiness, that revisiting these old cases, which might be unsolved or incomplete or tangled up in conspiracy, appeals to you creatively? Do you enjoy the sort of blend of fact and fiction in your work?

JE: What I like to do is rewrite the history of America, my country, and LA, my city, to my own specifications. Doing this with real-life characters, Chief William H. Parker and Daryl Gates of Los Angeles Police Department, notable military leaders, film stars, notable jazz musicians, real cops and made-up cops, and creating fictions out of this mélange of humanity. I love writing love stories. Man meets a woman. He's a gas, she's a gas, sparks fly. They're caught in the middle of a big web of intrigue.

KJ: I like that. So, for the cases in James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip, there's the murder of Karyn Kupcinet, who was an actress and got tangled up in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. You also revisit the murder of the actor Sal Mineo. Which of these cases would you say was your favorite to revisit for this podcast?

JE: The Stephanie Gorman murder. Stephanie Gorman was a 16-year-old girl out in West Los Angeles. She went to Hamilton High School; I went to Fairfax High School. So she grew up in a high school [a mile] and a half northwest of me. And I was terribly busted up over that one and reinvestigated it. It was a home invasion, sexual murder in the summer of 1965. And it looked like some friends of mine, Dave Lambkin and Tim Marcia, [along with] Rick Jackson on the LAPD's Unsolved Unit, turned up an old fingerprint. As it happened, it belonged to the wrong guy. It was nothing but a snafu. But two of us got devastated by who Stephanie Gorman was—her kindness, her decency, her lovely nature, her concern for other people. And working our way through this horrible file, we both felt in the end like we loved her.

KJ: And how about the Sal Mineo case? That one's a bit of an outlier, since it's a male victim and it's a little bit later. How does that case tie into the rest of your work?

JE: It ties in because it was a come-and-go murder of a failed movie star, now doing crappy TV and crappy B movies, with a promiscuous lifestyle. He died in February of 1976. This was my chance to do LA in the '70s—and LA in my favorite month of the year, February, when the rains come in and the colors mute and it becomes really a different city. People thought for many, many months that this was a homosexually themed murder case, that one of Sal's ex-lovers or one-night boyfriends did him in. It faded from view quickly, and it turned out to be a street robbery. It was Ellroy does the '70s, and I had never written true crime in the '70s to this level. And boy, did Jimmy Jellinek, Audio Up, and their sound design genius, Jerry Houser, set this to the throbbing "dzt, dzt, dzt" bass beat music of the time. It doesn't sound like any of the other episodes.

KJ: That's a great point. And speaking of adaptation... famously, you haven't been super thrilled with the film adaptations of your work, in all cases. How was the process of adapting for audio? How did that compare to doing it for film?

JE: I think it's the wildest thing that's ever happened to me in my career outside of the books themselves. It's a far bigger thrill than movie-option money, movie-buyout money, or even acclaimed movies made from my books. And one [such} movie is profoundly overrated, L.A. Confidential. I think it's a dog. I think it's a woof-woof. I think it should have been debuted and relegated for its film shelf life to the LA Pound. That's how bad and lame-ass that movie is.

"I think it's the wildest thing that's ever happened to me in my career outside of the books themselves."

Audio is a literal transposition of fiction to sound, true crime to sound. Later this year, we have one of my signature novels, my story of the five years leading up to the Kennedy assassination, American Tabloid, Time Magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, coming out from Audio Up on Audible with me reading the narration again and name actors reading my dialogue. No abridgement. No expurgation of language. The actors don't improvise. It's intact. It is the new way to present the novel in all its glory, uncut, unmessed with. It's this new form of the novel for the new millennium.

KJ: Wow, you heard it here first! Your novels are known for being so densely plotted and big and epic, so I totally agree with you that unabridged is the way to go. I think that the full-cast production of American Tabloid is going to be very, very satisfying and very thrilling for people as a way to consume this amazing novel. So, you're saying the text is directly as is being performed in audio?

JE: Yes.

KJ: It hasn't been abridged at all. Wow. That's interesting. American Tabloid is the first book in your Underworld USA Trilogy. Can listeners possibly hope to get audio adaptations of the second and third parts, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover?

JE: Yes, we're hoping to negotiate those rights with Random House Audio. Because Jimmy and I both believe that the [regular] audiobook, where one man or woman reads the entire text and then has to concoct dialogue in dozens of different voices, is as dead as a duck. Here, you have, for big, long-length fiction, numerous actors acting out the parts, reading my dialogue without adlibs. Just sit by your radio or your computer or your cellphone and strap on. You can supply the visuals yourself. Shut your eyes. Imagine the characters as they speak the words, as you're embedded in your listening pleasure by the sound design, the period music, the sound signatures that announce the chapter breaks. It's tremendously ingenious.

KJ: That's so exciting. This is really the future of audio that we all think about and talk about here at Audible, and so I'm so excited to have someone of your caliber doing such amazing work in this space.

JE: Well, I'm having a blast doing this because Jimmy and I get along great, and I love to read. I like reading aloud.

KJ: Your work definitely translates that way. Have you always read aloud to yourself when you're writing?

JE: I do, and I'm a slow reader when I read for pleasure. And yes, indeed, I do move my lips. A young friend of mine at Alfred A. Knopf had to move to a traffic manager position because he can't read for retention 60 words a minute. I could probably read half of that with spotty retention because I'm always reading the damn words aloud.

KJ: I'm a big fan of true crime, and I'm really excited that you've got this true crime podcast coming out. I'm curious how your work as a crime writer of fiction and nonfiction has shaped your perspective on crime in this country. The ultimate crime that you keep circling closer and closer to is, of course, the death of your mother. Have these attempts to get to the heart of what happened helped bring you closure? What are your thoughts on closure? Is that important for you?

JE: I think that crime is a continuing circumstance that my curiosity continues to mutate, 64 years after my mother's death. I may not be thinking about her literally, but there sure are a lot of tall red-haired women of my mother's generation that I create and plumb the souls of in my books. In that sense, she has served to create a fictional archetype that I call the lonely, haunted women. So, it's no surprise that in these pieces that I read for James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip, all these women are inspired by my mother, who forms a very, very powerful archetype within me.

KJ: Thank you for that. So, can you share with us, James, any upcoming projects or ideas that you're working on? Are you still at work on The Second LA Quartet, or is there anything else you can share with our listeners?

JE: I'm doing an interim novel set in LA in '62, a private eye book, and then I will return to the concluding two volumes of The Second LA Quartet.

KJ: That's wonderful. Well, James, it has been a pure delight. Thank you so much for joining us today. And listeners, James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip is on Audible now.

JE: Thank you, Kat.