 High Bridge Audio presents Hollywood Nocturnes by James Elroy, read by Dick Hill, original material copyright 1994 James Elroy, recording copyright 2013 High Bridge Company, and recorded by arrangement with mysteriouspress.com LLC. To Alan Marks, out of the past, a man gyrating with an accordion, pumping his stomach's steinway for all it's worth, my father pointing to the TV, that guy's no good, he's a draft dodger. The accordion man in a grade Z movie, clenching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloom tirades. Death-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed. LA, my hometown, in the 50s. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction. I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels. Memory to moonshine, in a hot second. Memory. That place where personal recollections collide with history. Memory. A symbiotic melding of then and now. For me, the spark point of harrowing curiosities. The accordion man is named Dick Contino. Draft Dodger is a bum rap. He served honorably during the Korean War. The grade Z flick is Daddio. A music, hot rod, romance, stinker room. Memory is contextual. The juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutiae. In June of 1958, my mother was murdered. The killing went unsolved. I went to live with my father. I saw Dick Contino belt Bumble Boogie on TV, noted my father's opinion of him, and caught Daddio at the Admiral Theatre a year or so later. Synapses snapped, crackled, popped. A memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark. Women were strangled and spent eternity unevented. I was ten and eleven years old then. Literary instincts simmered incoately in me. My curiosities centered on crime. I wanted to know the why behind hellish events. As time passed, contemporaneous malfeasance left me bored. The sanguinary sixties and seventies passed in a blur. My imagination zoomed back to the decade preceding them, accompanied by a period soundtrack. Golden oldies, Dick Contino slamming the accordion on the Ed Sullivan show. In 1965, I got kicked out of high school and joined the army. Everything about the army scared me shitless. I faked the nervous breakdown and glommed an unsuitability discharge. In 1980, I wrote Clan Destin, a thinly disguised, chronologically altered account of my mother's murder. The novel is set in 1951. The hero is a young cop and draft dodger whose life is derailed by the red scare. In 1987, I wrote The Big Nowhere. Set in 1950, the book details an anti-communist pogrom leveled at the entertainment biz. In 1990, I wrote White Jazz. A major subplot features a Grade Z movie being filmed on the same Griffith Park locals as Dadio. Jung wrote, What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate. I should have seen Dick Contino coming a long time ago. I didn't. Fate intervened by a photograph and videocassette. A friend shot me the photo. Dig. It's me, age 10, on June 22, 1958. An L.A. Times photographer snapped the pic five minutes after a police detective told me that my mother had been murdered. I'm in minor league shock. My eyes are wide, but my gaze is blank. My fly is at half-mast. My hands look shaky. The day was hot. The melting brule cream in my hair picks up flash bulb light. The photo helped me trans- Sample complete. Ready to continue?