Like Hot Knives To The Brain

Often more disturbing than entertaining, James Ellroy is an author who never shies away from the ugly or repellent. Eminent crime fiction scholar Peter Wolfe examines how Ellroy transcends the genres of pulp and neo-noir fiction to write stories that are both psychologically haunting and culturally relevant. Wolfe skillfully combines biography—including the unsolved murder of Ellroy's mother—with literary analysis to provide a fascinating and readable study of this popular author. The first in-depth companion to the work of James Ellroy, Like Hot Knives to the Brain will interest students of popular culture, mystery readers, and crime buffs everywhere.

James Ellroy's prose, in many ways as complex as any in the Western literary canon, strung together sensational stories of crime and catastrophe. The significance of his writing to Western culture has yet to be fully explored. Author Peter Wolfe offers us the first book-length study of Ellroy in English.

Peter Wolfe is the Curators' Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His many book subjects include Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Raymond Chandler, Yukio Mishima, William Gaddis, and the Twilight Zone television series. Wolfe's shorter works have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, the L. A. Times, the Washington Post, the New Zealand Listener, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Calcutta Statesman, and Modern Fiction Studies.