INTRODUCTION

I sat down to plot Blood on the Moon late in 1980. I’d written two previous novels, Brown’s Requiem and Clandestine—a private eye story and a period cop book. I wanted to write a contemporarily set, contrapunctually structured novel about a sex obsessed cop tracking down a sexually motivated killer. I was not familiar with the term “serial killer.” Thomas Harris’s brilliant and ground-breaking novel Red Dragon was yet to be published. I didn’t know that the mano-a-mano duels of cops and serial killers would soon become a big fat fucking cliché. Red Dragon—to my mind the greatest suspense novel ever written—spawned an entire sub-genre. It was explicit in a way that Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin wasn’t. The killers’ psychopathology scared the shit out of me—more than the killers’ psychopathology in Blood on the Moon. I wrote Blood on the Moon. I read Red Dragon and realized it was a far superior book. I carried the hero of Blood on the Moon on to a second and third novel— Because the Night and Suicide Hill. I hadn’t planned to write a trilogy at first. I did not possess the long-range planning skills I possess today. I finished Blood on the Moon, read Red Dragon and wanted another shot at making Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins as great a character as Thomas Harris’s Will Graham.

Hopkins was my antidote to the sensitive candy-assed philosophizing private eye. I wanted to create a recognizably racist and reactionary cop and make his racism and reactionary tendencies casual attributes rather than defining characteristics—wanted to build a complex monument to a basically shitty guy—and I didn’t care whether my readers liked Lloyd Hopkins—as long as they liked the books he was in.

You can take Hopkins or leave him. You can dismiss him as a fascist fuckhead or dig him as a vessel of urban torment. I don’t care what you think of Hopkins. I hope you dig the books.

James Ellroy

18 February 1997