In June 1958 Geneva Hilliker was murdered. Just another victim of cheap thrills on a Saturday night. She left behind an ex-husband and a ten-year-old son. Her killer was never found.

At that time, Dragnet was on TV and creator/star Jack Webb wrote a true crime chronicle of Los Angeles called The Badge. Geneva’s ex-husband  gave a copy to their son for his eleventh birthday months later. It is there that young James Ellroy first reads about the unsolved  killing of Elizabeth Short in 1947. Fascinations  become predilections, identities fuse, history warps. Betty Short and Jean Hilliker become one singular obsession.

Crime infects his imagination. 1950s Los Angeles becomes the flashpoint for one of the most fertile and obsessive literary minds dedicated to criminal chronicles of the twentieth century. Ellroy first works out the Short/Hilliker motif tangentially in Clandestine, (1982) then came at it head on in The Black Dahlia, (1987). By the mid nineties, he’s ready to drop the sensationalism of the Dahlia and focus on the facts of his mother’s murder. He hired a private investigator and re-opened his mother’s case more than thirty years after it’d gone cold.

He wrote perhaps the most unflinching  memoir of oedipal regret and sexual obsession ever for the mother he hated and loved in tandem. He opened My Dark Places with this dedication:

A cheap Saturday night took you down. You died stupidly and harshly and without the means to hold your own life dear… 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.

What followed was a harrowing confessional, exploitation by pedestal, exoneration by deconstruction and the re-ignition of that crime juju we so desperately crave. Crude and tender, cruel to be kind, nobody lays it bare like James Ellroy and that is why I am so jazzed to read his new memoir The Hilliker Curse.  

What’s promised? More unsparingly candid introspection, further peeks behind the curtain where the great and powerful Oz of crime fiction is dissected, condemned as a pervert and exalted as an artist pursued by his vindictive muse through gauntlets of lust toward spiritual atonement. And the subtitle? My Pursuit of Women—gives me chills.

Take that, James Frey.

Am I alone?

Jedidiah Ayres  writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.