This gave him the power to blackmail many powerful individuals. He was supposedly in the midst of convincing one high-class escort to wear a wire to an illicit meeting with Kennedy so incriminating statements could be used against the US senator, who was running for president.

“One of the advantages of writing historical fiction is to take these very well-known figures from history and show them in casual context,” Ellroy says from his home in Denver, Colorado. “You don’t need to see Kennedy in the White House. Better to show Kennedy as he appears in Widespread Panic.”

But, the 73-year-old adds, “I never tell people what’s real or not, like all of my books”.

“Fred Otash is taking drugs and banging women and losing women, and enacting justice in his own inimitable fashion,” he says. “Otash is hot-wiring the dwellings of shithead movie stars and he’s f***ing around with the commies.”

Hollywood’s red scare is another strand in the novel, Ellroy’s 16th.

“The communists were horrible,” he says. “[The directors] Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets testified about this before the House Un-American Activities Committee back [in 1952]. Those motherf***ers knew damn well there was a conspiracy to influence the motion picture industry in the United States.”

In Ellroy’s fiction, primitive violence is a badge of honour. So too is his characters’ foul-mouthed street lingo. Most are hardened criminals or crooked cops. They take pride in offending every class, colour and creed. But with this latest offering, the raging racism and aggressive misogyny seems to have been taken down a notch or two, certainly in comparison with his earlier novels.

Mother’s death

Is the author adapting a less provocative style to please a publishing industry becoming increasingly obsessed by its own squeaky-clean political correctness? Any hope of a conversation about the rise of identity politics and cancel culture gets shut down before it even begins.

“No, I don’t want to talk about race, I think it’s bullshit,” he says. “It’s too contemporary for me. I’m only interested in talking about this book. Because I have a rule, Mr O’Malley: I don’t talk about contemporary issues. I’m stuck in 1955 to 1960 America.”

So we return to June 1958: when the body of Jean Ellroy was found on a football pitch in Los Angeles. Her murder followed a brutal sexual assault and strangulation. Her son was psychologically scarred for life.

“My mother’s death was the spark point that got me interested in crime — and a way to touch the horror, while remaining immune from it,” Ellroy says.

“But it’s not like I go around [pining] for my mother all the time. She was killed 63 years ago, and I pray for her, but I don’t think about her very much.”

Ellroy reinvestigated his mother’s death with a retired LAPD detective in the mid-1990s. He documented the forensic details in a his memoir My Dark Places. They never found the man who killed Jean.

In The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, Ellroy recalled a frantic moment of childhood anger where he wished death upon Jean Ellroy. She was murdered not long afterwards.

The trauma and guilt that followed led to Ellroy’s down-and-out years. There was a brief stint in the army. After pleading insanity, he managed to get a discharge. “I can howl when I want to,” he says.

Petty criminal

Ellroy’s biography is as colourful as it is controversial. He was a petty criminal, shoplifting and breaking into houses around LA to feed his drink and drug habit in his early 20s.

Brief periods of homelessness and a stint in prison ensured he had to look for a more stable source of income.

“I was a very stupid kid, and a criminal,” he says. “But I was really only a danger to myself. I quit drinking and using drugs: That’s when I started writing.”

His debut novel, Brown’s Requiem, appeared in 1981, but building a literary profile took time.

He continued to work as a golf caddy until his fifth book was published. The discipline kept him sane and sober, as did his deep commitment to Christianity.

“Sin and repentance is the daily war of all human beings,” he says without irony. “We ate the apple and we fell; I believe this.”

By the mid 1990s, Ellroy was being hailed as America’s greatest crime writer since Raymond Chandler. Mainstream success came from a series known as the LA Quartet: the bestsellers The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz. Two of those became major Hollywood movies. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of LA Confidential won two Oscars in 1998.

Ellroy’s USA Trilogy followed. After that he started what will be the second LA Quartet. Perfidia was published in 2014. It’s set in LA in 1941, just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. This Storm was published in 2019. Also set in LA in the 1940s, it tells the story of dodgy law enforcement officers with Nazi sympathies.

He lives a quiet life with his second ex-wife, the critic Helen Knode. He moved to Denver from LA in recent years after they rekindled their relationship. “We have two apartments on the same floor, so we can be together or alone, as it suits us,” he says.

Ellroy is a proud Luddite. “I don’t have a computer, or a cellphone, and I don’t have Instagram or Twitter,” he says. “But I do have my own website.” It describes Ellroy as the foul owl with the death growl [and] the white knight of the far right”. “It’s a shtick, brother,” he says playfully.

Ellroy has a reputation for being an oddball reclusive eccentric, a persona he has largely created. It seems less and less convincing the more we keep chatting. Maybe age has softened his character somewhat. He continues to play up to the role of the aggressive bad-boy of mainstream American crime writing nevertheless. “I like to perform,” he says, “and I’m like a hound dog on the moors when I get off my leash.”

‘Widespread Panic’ by James Ellroy is out now, via William Heinemann