James Ellroy's Critical Criminology: Crimes of the Powerful in the Underworld USA Trilogy

This article argues for the criminological value of James Ellroy’s fiction, using his
Underworld USA Trilogy (the “Trilogy”) as a case study. I present the Trilogy as a critical criminological enterprise, understood in the sense of providing a convincing explanation of the cause(s) of social harm—specifically, those committed by various agencies of the American government from the late-1950s to the early-1970s. Ellroy’s Trilogy provides this explanation in two distinct ways, using literary devices first to establish a counterfactual vision of America during the 1960s and then to represent the lived experience of perpetrators of state-sponsored social harm. In conveying such criminological knowledge, the Trilogy constitutes an instance of critical criminology and demonstrates the exercise of the criminological imagination.