James Ellroy is a crime fiction writer, best known for books such as The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid, which are often set in mid-20th-century Los Angeles. His preoccupation with crime began as a child when his mother was killed in LA in what remains an unsolved murder. His new novel, This Storm, is set in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and is a frenetic mix of intrigue, corruption and racism, featuring a cast of Nazis, communists, rogue cops and, of course, murder.

This Storm is the second part of your second LA Quartet. Why do you write in trilogies and quartets?

I love everything big. I love a big movie. I love big pieces of symphonic music. And I like large novels. Since my early childhood, I have always lived in the past. Most often the recent past of America, this historical past, it’s what I love, it’s what I am, it’s what I do. My intent with readers is to uproot them from their daily lives and force-feed large swathes of American history and more specifically Los Angeles history. It’s a love of size and scope and density and big emotion, big police investigations, big conspiracies. Everything big.

I write enormous outlines. The outline for This Storm is 450 pages. So everything is there on the page

How do you think your writing style has changed since your breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia, in 1987?

It became much more terse. Two books after The Black Dahlia, with LA Confidential, I developed a truncated, clipped style with exposition cut down to the minimum. Then when I embarked on the Underworld USA trilogy, I expanded the text in the third person because I wanted to enhance the emotional content of the book. I went back to the truncated style in The Cold Six Thousand, and took it to such screaming extremes that many reviewers found the book incomprehensible. And then in my ensuing three novels, I have been more interested in enhancing the style of the book to fit a more wholesome view of humanity. I am always tailoring the language of a book to the immediate story I am telling.

The characters in This Storm are lurid, brash, vulgar. There is now an occupant of the White House who could fit that description. What’s your opinion of him?

I don’t talk about politics in any circumstances. The current day in America has nothing to do with my books.

You’re highly successful, but do you feel that you’ve received the critical acclaim that you deserve?

It’s funny because I’ve been more critically acclaimed in Britain than I have here in my own country. What’s important to me with the new book is that it also complements the publication of the three volumes of Everyman Library in America and the UK. So you have the LA Quartet in one volume, and then the Underworld USA in two volumes. In effect I’ve been canonised. And that’s a gas.

There are a mixture of real and invented characters in This Storm. Do you approach writing them in a different way?

There’s a key to writing historical characters. What I learned early on is that it’s best not to show them in previously established historical contexts. Better to show them in intimate contexts, out of the spotlight, mingling with my invented characters, who are always the dominant men and women in my books. Thus I think I have created a highly charged and entertaining J Edgar Hoover and John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King and others in the Underworld USA trilogy. And in the second LA Quartet, Perfidia and This Storm, the much misunderstood William H Parker, who would go on to become in the 1950s the chief of LA police department.

Do you ever have problems remembering all the different characters you’ve created while writing a novel?

No, because I write enormous outlines. The outline for This Storm is 450 pages. So everything is there on the page. It’s a diagram for me to write these extremely complex densely structured books. And the viability of the outline is such that given that the overall dramatic arcs are already established before I write the first word of the texts, this allows me to know that the story is there, down to the most minute detail, so that I can live improvisationally within the individual scenes, as long as they don’t diverge from the outline.

You’re not a fan of Raymond Chandler, one of the founding fathers of hard-boiled crime fiction. Why is that?

I don’t like the books and I don’t think he knew people well. I don’t like the style, and the plots are slapdash. The writing enchanted me as a 17-year-old, when I read all seven of Chandler’s novels. I tried to read them two years ago and ended up tossing them across the room.

You often introduce yourself as the “white knight of the far right”. Is there any significance to that, other than rhyme?

It’s schtick, brother. It’s schtick. It rhymes. It’s part of my alliterative peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants schtick.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading the Israeli hitman novels of Daniel Silva. He has a character who is both an art restorer and a hitman for Israeli intelligence, a man named Gabriel Allon, and I’ve read all 18 of the books. And if I’m lucky a new one will be published in the next few weeks and I can read it on the airplane to Britain.

What was the last truly great book that you read?

I reread Compulsion by Meyer Levin, his novel of the Leopold and Loeb killings in Chicago in 1924. It was published in 1956. I read it in the early 70s the first time. I’ve read it six or seven times. It’s a very fine novel of 1924 Chicago, a very astute novel of affluent Jewish American life, and it’s a very deft portrayal of two psychopaths.

What kind of reader were you as a child, and which books have stayed with you?

I was an early reader. My father taught me to read before I went to school. I’ve always been a slow reader, a deliberate reader. It takes me longer than most people to read books. My early reading experience was going through stacks of Life magazine that my parents had in a closet. After my mother’s death in the summer of ’58, I started reading crime books. I remember reading John Creasey’s Gideon of Scotland Yard books when I was 12 or 13. What I loved was the police novel, the detective novel, the spy novel, the novel of realistic intrigue. And that’s what I still love.

What book might people be surprised to see on your shelves?

The baseball novels of Mark Harris. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The early Philip Roth books, may he rest in peace. I have the autobiography of Elia Kazan, which I’ve read a couple of times.

Who is your favourite literary anti-hero?

You know who I love, and I can’t point to any one, are the psycho policemen in Joseph Wambaugh’s early novels. They’re funny as shit. The books went through me like a jolt. This was the Los Angeles police department that I knew, that kicked my ass and deservedly so on three notable occasions.

Is there a particular novel that you repeatedly return to?

I can reread the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels every several years. I’ve read all 55 of them. I have them on a shelf in chronological order. The early ones are the best, the ones that Ed McBain, and that’s a pseudonym for Evan Hunter, wrote between 1956 and 1972. He wrote very fast and very well.

Is there a book that you feel you should have read but haven’t?

Every once in a while I think I should read Crime and Punishment, especially since Joyce Carol Oates called me the American Dostoevsky. It’s Russia, it’s the 19th century. It’s not the stuff that I dig. I have a volume at home and every time I pick it up I go, Oh shit, I can’t read this.

You’ve got to read it…

I know, I know. You’re chiding me, and others have, so one of these days I’m going to pick the damn thing up.

James Ellroy is at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, on 27 May. Complete UK tour dates available at jamesellroy.net.

• This Storm by James Ellroy is published by William Heinemann (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99