James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction

James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Browns Requiem in 1981, Ellroys eccentric Demon Dog persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroys fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroys two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroys fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse peeping tom into a recognizable, contemporary social type, a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory cinematic world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of ocularcentric crisis in Ellroys texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroys worksparticularly his later novelsare themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.