Book Your James Ellroy LA Bus Tour
Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction Guides You through Los Angeles
Best-selling American crime writer James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, leads a unique bus tour down the mean streets of his own Los Angeles.
Imagine what it would be like if you could drive around Los Angeles with Raymond Chandler. Well, a new tour announced by the innovative and esoteric Los Angeles tour company Esotouric lets you do the modern equivalent. Esotouric has persuaded best-selling American crime writer James Ellroy to lead a special bus tour around his very own Los Angeles, for Christmas 2007.
What a prospect. The author of bestsellers like LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia, My Dark Places, Clandestine and many other truly great crime novels and non-fiction has agreed to be the guide on James Ellroy Digs LA, a bus tour from Esotouric that takes place on the afternoon of Saturday December 22, 2007. Yes, you get to spend a pre-Christmas afternoon with the man they call the Demon Dog of American crime fiction.
The tour departs from Arnie Morton's Steakhouse, 735 S. Figueroa Street, LA 90017 at 1pm on December 22nd. Advance booking is absolutely essential, and places are limited so make it quick. Helping James Ellroy lead the tour will be regular Esotouric tour leader Kim Cooper, who leads such Esotouric true crime tours as The Real Black Dahlia.
Esotouric already do crime tours through the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and James L. Cain, so it's a terrific coup for them to get maybe the city's leading modern crime chronicler James Ellroy to lead a tour through his own personal Los Angeles.
From Arnie Morton's downtown steakhouse and bar, which is being specially opened for the James Ellroy party, the luxury bus will take guests to locations including:
- Hancock Park, where Ellroy stalked his teenage classmates and broke into houses
- The Hollywood Flats, where some grisly 1950s murders fascinated the young James Ellroy
- El Monte, where Ellroy's mother Geneva was murdered, the crime that was never solved and which influenced his work, especially The Black Dahlia and My Dark Places
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, and it was in 1958 in El Monte that his mother Geneva was murdered. The murder was never solved, and it was this traumatic event, and a gift from his father a few months later of a copy of a book about the LAPD, The Badge by Jack Webb, that helped turn Ellroy into one of the world's leading crime writers. He is certainly one of the most respected, especially for his ambitious series like the LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz) and the American Underworld Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover, due to be released in 2008).
To find out more about James Ellroy Digs LA, and to book this and other Esotouric Los Angeles crime tours, visit the Esotouric website.
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Also read about Esotouric's Rock 'n' Roll Hollywood tours in Los Angeles.
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And read about some of Esotouric's crime and other Los Angeles theme tours.
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LATEST NEWS
Another tour with James Ellroy has been added for December 29th, after the first one sold out within a day. There are also December tours on Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain themes. The schedule is:
- Sat Dec 8 - Raymond Chandler's LA
- Sat Dec 15 - James M. Cain's So California Nightmare
- Sat Dec 22 James Ellroy Digs L.A.
- Sat Dec 29 James Ellroy Digs L.A.
- Sun Jan 15 - Vroman's Bookstore presents The Real Black Dahlia
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