CENTURY TO PUBLISH FINAL NOVEL IN JAMES ELLROY’S AMERICAN UNDERWORLD TRILOGY

Century Editorial Director, Oliver Johnson has announced in London overnight the publication on 5th November 2009 of the long-awaited final novel in the American Underworld trilogy, Blood’s a Rover by the great American crime novelist, James Ellroy. The rights were acquired from Abner Stein at Abner Stein Literary Agents in association with Sobel-Weber Associates Inc.

Blood’s A Rover is described as a mind-blowing fusion of fact and fiction set during the social and political upheaval of 1968-72. The book opens in 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. The Mob, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover are in a struggle for America’s soul. Three men are drawn to women on the opposite side of the political and moral spectrum. Wayne Tedrow Jr.: assassin, dope cooker, loyal to none; Dwight Holly: Hoover’s enforcer and hellish conspirator in terrible crimes; Don Crutchfield: private detective who stumbles upon an ungodly conspiracy from which he and the country may never recover. All are compromised and ripe for destruction and only one of them will survive.

Johnson, Ellroy’s editor since the early 90’s comments:
‘Reviewers, literary critics and fans have long acknowledged James Ellroy as one of the world’s greatest novelists: an unflinching chronicler of recent American history and the deep seam of violent criminality that runs through US public life. Blood’s a Rover brings to a stunning climax a masterpiece begun in 1995 with American Tabloid and continued in The Cold Six Thousand in 2001. Those earlier books were incandescent but Blood’s a Rover eclipses them: it is a stunning culmination of one of the great literary epics of our time.’

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the first two parts of this Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand which were both Sunday Times bestsellers.

Blood’s a Rover will be published in hardback by Century on 5th November 2009 and in Arrow paperback in July 2010 and The Bookman is feeling impatient already!