When James Ellroy's latest cod-cosmic rehash of his troubled - and troubling - life arrived on my doorstep I assumed the business of reacquainting myself with the terrain shouldn't be that difficult. The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women is, on the face of it, a substantiation of Ellroy's previous memoir, My Dark Places, in which he employed the true-crime plot device of hiring his own homicide detective, formerly of the LA sheriff's department, in order to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, in 1958. In this new piece of work Ellroy offers his readers - and who knows what they may make of it? - a different kind of case history, one of compacted self-delusion, grandiosity and monstrous self-pity.

LRB 2 December 2010 | PDF Download