The outspoken crime novelist talks his provocative new book, his hatred of technology and why the film adaptation of LA Confidential is a ‘turkey’James Ellroy does not own a computer, his publicist explains, so will a phone interview be OK? When the self-proclaimed “mad dog of American crime fiction” picks up his landline at the appointed hour, it transpires that he has never owned a mobile phone either. Nor sent an email. Nor figured out how to turn on his ex-wife Helen Knode’s TV set.“Everything is very complex and it’s satanic to me, the dependency that people have on computers,” Ellroy, 78, says cheerfully in a bass baritone drawl from his pad in Denver, Colorado. “I don’t engage in internet chat and I understand there’s all this crazy shit on the internet and people with the most outlandish beliefs on God’s green Earth.” Continue reading...