Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the writer James Elroy, a Colossus of Crime Fiction.

His bestsellers include White Jazz, LA Confidential, the Black Dahlia and American tabloid.

Yet the crime that's obsessed and defined him remains unsolved.

His mother was murdered when he was ten. After her death his life veered onto a new trajectory

He said I lived to read, brood, peep, stalk, skulk and fantasize

There was always a voracious appetite for literature even throughout the years of drug abuse

in prison.

He nursed private thoughts of becoming a great author. He says his mother's murder absolutely defined my life.

I wouldn't be what I am today without that murder. And I hope that in mercilessly exploiting

it with pit bull tenacity I have honoured my mother's memory.

You tell us so much in that quote James Elroy and you spare us nothing.

Do you think people are sometimes taken aback by your honesty.

Pitt Bulls are wonderful animals that by and large like human beings and I have that kind of tenacity but I like people and I have the ability to exploit misfortune.

People are scared by people so maybe even though they shouldn't be. It's absolutely true. Do you

think you're right? Do you think your mother would feel honored by what you've done? Do

you think she would be proud of your writing career? I don't know if she would like specifically what I wrote

about her because I was quite candid, but she might have felt the honor that

people feel quite often when you accurately portray their life.

You say that you're a person built for obsessiveness.

...