James Ellroy’s Critical Criminology: Crimes of the Powerful in the Underworld USA Trilogy

Abstract

This article argues for the criminological value of James Ellroy’s fiction, using his Underworld USA Trilogy (the “Trilogy”) as a case study. I present the Trilogy as a critical criminological enterprise, understood in the sense of offering a convincing explanation of the cause(s) of social harm—specifically, those committed by various agencies of the American government from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Ellroy’s Trilogy provides this explanation in two distinct ways, using literary devices first to establish a counterfactual vision of America during the 1960s and then to represent the lived experience of perpetrators of state-sponsored social harm. In conveying such criminological knowledge, the Trilogy constitutes an instance of critical criminology and demonstrates the exercise of the criminological imagination.