You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverbladden. Welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is James Elroy, the author most recently of White Jazz.

He's been writing a series of, what do you call them?

Thrillers, Detective novels?

I call them crime novels.

Crime novels, okay, that have most recently included L.A. Confidential, the Big Nowhere, and the Black

Dahlia. I wanted to start by asking you, you know, I read a bunch of the articles that have

appeared on you recently, and, you know, you're quite a mad dog. Do you think it's a chore for writers to have to be part of their own mythology?

I'm tired of my own story right now.

My agent, Atzlo, back in New York, thinks that I should start a new story of it.

He thinks I should call myself Tom Bradley's illegitimate son.

Because, you know, I got the sense, you know, I was reading some of the biography of Raymond Chandler.

And, you know, the – he made a lot of the play between a kind of effete nature,

kind of anglophiliac, a tendency to like governess like women who were sort of dominant.

And weirdly, you know, in that Raymond Chandler sampler, there's a early first novel that's sort of an

English romance novel. You'd never expect it. It seems as if books like white jazz are written

not just as the perfection of a style, but of a personality as well.

Do you know what I mean?

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