Crime novelist James Ellroy's mother left home on the night of 21 June 1958 and never returned. He was staying with his father, something he did every weekend after his parents' acrimonious divorce. Returning the following day he was told that the redheaded mother he loathed had been found that morning at the local Arroyo High School, a silk stocking wrapped tightly around her throat, skirts above her head.

Carrion-like, James Ellroy has fed off that corpse for years. He would admit as much. It's a riff, an act for the cameras and the fans. The fact that he was obsessed by the infamous Black Dahlia case as a child (he was a voracious pulp crime reader) only fuelled the legend. It was just something else that made James Ellroy grating to some, undeniably sexy to others. Much of his early life was, by his own admission, out of control. 'Dead women owned me,' he writes.

My Dark Places is not fiction. His mother was thirty-eight years dead when Ellroy finally resolved to square up to his past. The homicide had been investigated and shelved when The Swarthy Man seen with Geneva (Jean) Hilliker the night she died failed to show. Ellroy resolved to return to it in the 1990s and, with retired policeman Bill Stoner, try once and for all to answer Case Z-483-362. They knew they were 'bucking stratospheric odds'. They bombed-out.

But to say that they failed is hardly to give away the end, for My Dark Places is rather more than just true crime melodrama. Although ostensibly a study into his mother's murder, what emerges is a detailed and, it has to said, extraordinarily painful journey into the heart of the man Iain Sinclair calls the pulp Dostoevsky. In cold forensic detail her tells us of the death and its aftermath. Of how the press had the victim's ten-year-old son pose for photographers minutes after receiving the news. Of the years with his father, slowly descending into petty crime, evenings spent masturbating over pictures of dead women. Of the attention-seeking goose-stepping at his Jewish school (something for which, we sense, he is rightly ashamed). And of how all of it went to feed his eventual homelessness and a near-fatal addiction to booze and inhalers. It is all dispassionately recorded: Ellroy isn't making himself the hero.

His conclusion is that he discovers how his mother dies rather than who did for her. It is, in the end, the more valuable lesson. As he and Stoner chase witnesses to nursing homes and graveyards it dawns on his reader that the truth of identity is just so much detail. That is what makes this book: had he been successful in apportioning blame – administering justice – My Dark Places would be so much less. He came to bury his mother but found only love to fill the vacuum.

This book behaves like an act of contrition on Ellroy's part, with none of the heroic sense of closure he expected. For anyone who finds his loudmouthed reactionary wild man act irksome, My Dark Places, with its ugly images of low rent sex and death in fifties Los Angeles, is eye-opening. And played out against the background of the OJ trial in the city, teaches us lasting lessons about crime, punishment and, above all, guilt. In offering explanations over excuses, James Ellroy might finally have grown up. •

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