James Ellroy as Historical Novelist

Thanks to Agatha Christie . . ., murder tends to be reduced to a kind of middle-class parlour game. I think that's bollocks. A murder is a little human apocalypse. It has threads that run up to it and run away from it, that tie it up to the culture that it happens in, to the art of the time, to the politics of the time ... It struck me that if I could find an interesting enough murder, I could follow threads out from it and solve the entire culture. Alan Moore, 2000.1