even went so far as to suspect the DC sniper was travelling in a white car, wearing white clothing and firing a white gun (with white bullets).

He was white, had to be. Just had to be since as everyone knows serial killers are white.

Chief Moose was a complete moron, but no one said anything because he was black. He had everybody in the DC area looking for a white guy in a white van.

I only read one book by Ellroy. It was good, but kind of too disgusting for me. I'm pretty genteel and this was too much of a trip through a sewer in a glass bottomed boat. I threw it away after I finished it because I didn't want it in my house. It was aboutLAPD detectives trying to solve the Blue? Black? Dahlia sex murder in the 1940s and so they round up all the usual suspects, each more depraved than the last. Too much depravity for my tastes.

On the other hand, Ellroy's introduction he wrote recently for a reissue of Joe Wambaugh's The Onion Field is touching. He talks about how he was a homeless junkie constantly stealing stuff to sell for drugs, but one item he shoplifted that he wouldn't sell was Wambaugh's magnum opus The Onion Field. He stole it the first day it came out, read it over and over, and resolved to stop being a despicable bum and become a writer like his hero, Wambaugh.

Of course the late Curtis Hanson's movie adaptation of Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential" is