Description
James Ellroy turns his attention to a single year in the history of Los Angeles crime: 1953. Working with Glynn Martin and the archives of the Los Angeles Police Museum, Ellroy selected a remarkable group of police photographs documenting murders, suicides, robberies, investigations, bodies, suspects, cops, streets, houses, bars, and all the other raw material of postwar L.A. noir. Ellroy supplies some 25,000 words of text, while the book reproduces 85 archival photographs in duotone.
What makes LAPD ’53 especially good is that the photographs weren’t made as art. They were evidence—workaday police pictures made by officers documenting what they found. The result is something stranger and considerably more unsettling than a conventional true-crime book: an accidental photographic portrait of Los Angeles at mid-century, seen through crime scenes, cheap rooms, dark yards, dead bodies, automobiles, detectives and patrolmen. Ellroy is exactly the writer you want wandering around in this material. For anyone interested in Ellroy, Los Angeles noir, vernacular photography, police photography, or the darker corners of postwar America, this is a hell of a book.
A terrific collision of James Ellroy and the photographic evidence locker—1953 Los Angeles exactly as the cops found it.
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