James Ellroy is one of the great American authors of the last 50 years, and yet, it is easy to dismiss his literary achievement. If you were to pick up his latest novel, Red Sheet, and turn to a random page, you’re likely to encounter such terse fragments as, “It was a sex-slash job. Cuts, mutilations, slashed throats.” Unfamiliar readers might think they’re dealing with just another hard-boiled crime writer, but Ellroy is decidedly more than that. It is true that Ellroy is a crime writer, and one who follows in the grand tradition of the unholy trinity who more or less invented the genre: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the comparatively underappreciated, but nonetheless very influential, Ross Macdonald. Ellroy exhibits many of the same trappings, deployed with just as much skill as the masters before him. Readers of Ellroy are well-acquainted with tortured (sometimes literally) tough-guy protagonists, snappy dialogue, cool atmosphere, and clockwork plotting, and appreciate the surprising depth of characterization lurking behind the various archetypes and minor characters who populate his novels. And it’s probably not a coincidence that, like Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald, Ellroy’s chosen milieu is also mid-20th-century California – specifically Los Angeles, at a time when the contrast between overt corruption and the very real promise of the American dream could not have been starker. Where Ellroy departs from, and largely transcends, the genre is that he has taken the formula bequeathed to him and blown it up into something truly Dickensian. Ellroy may share the economy of prose of his fellow crime writers, but he does not share their modest formulaic ambitions.