Guest editors: Nathan Ashman (University of East Anglia) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool)

The 30-year anniversary of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, a historical novel that challenged the established view of the events leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, will occur in 2025. For Ellroy, who had published acclaimed but largely genre-focused noir novels set in his native Los Angeles, it represented a critical break- through in his writing career and proved a major step in establishing him as a literary figure with an idiosyncratic revisionist take on U.S. history. Thus, it seems like an appropriate moment to reappraise Ellroy’s vast literary output, as well as his ever-provocative and controversial “Demon Dog” persona that may feel anachronistic in the era of social media and movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo. Yet these contexts also provide fertile ground for new or revised approaches to Ellroy’s canon and to the mode of the historical crime novel more broadly.

Subjects might include (but are not limited to):

• Ellroy’s characters as agencies of the State (and questions of state power more broadly)

• Ellroy and the historical crime novel (including Ellroy’s influence on other practitioners and on the development of the form more broadly)

• The various meanings of “policing” and its relationship with the State in Ellroy’s fiction

• Gender in Ellroy’s work

• Ellroy and U.S. history

• Sexuality in Ellroy’swork

• Race/racism in Ellroy’s work

• Music in Ellroy’s work

• Underworld, Overworld: Organized crime–LAPD webs of corruption in Ellroy’s novels

• The protagonist as voyeur: Perverted viewpoints in the Quartet and Underworld USA novels

• Public and private space

• Ellroy’s “Demon Dog” persona as well as broader consideration of animality in Ellroy’s work

• Ellroy’s “late” fiction

Submissions should include an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio (max 150 words). Proposals should be sent to Nathan Ashman (n.ashman@uea.ac.uk) and Steven Powell (s.p.powell@liverpool.ac.uk) by March 1, 2025. Full manuscripts of 3,500 to 6,000 words based on an accepted proposal will be due October 31, 2025.