“I’ve had precious few moments,” admitted the novelist James Ellroy, “where I’ve said to myself: ‘Ellroy, you are the king. You’re the greatest crime writer that ever lived.’” A comment like that might be insufferable if it weren’t delivered, as it was by Ellroy, with a grin and if it didn’t also have a plausible claim on the truth. Ellroy’s morally complex, baroquely plotted, sprawling and highly stylized novels — “The Black Dahlia” and “L.A. Confidential” chief among them — constitute a singularly intense body of work. In the 71-year-old’s opinion, he has reached a new peak with his latest, “This Storm.” But he’s not taking that as an invitation to coast. “The reflex kicks in,” Ellroy said, and it tells him: “You’ve got more work to do.”

Almost all your books are set in the past,1 and I know that you’re intentionally disconnected from modern culture. Are you missing out on something important by not living more deeply in the times in which you live? I have a quotation here. [Ellroy removes a note from his shirt pocket.] This is the great pianist Glenn Gould on the great composer Richard Strauss. “The great thing about the music of Richard Strauss is that ... it presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time for not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality, an argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.” That says it all.

O.K., I know you like to do shtick in public. Is that shtick2 about concealing anything? A lot of it is being the pit bull staked by chain to a spike in the front yard. I’ve been writing a book for a couple of years, and then they slip the chain off and I can run wild. But I realize part of it is a cover-up. My early life was horrible privation living with the unhousebroken dog and my dad3 telling me, “I [expletive] Rita Hayworth.” I passed that off as [expletive], and then 10 years after my dad died I saw a Hayworth biography in a bookstore and looked his name up in the index. It didn’t say he’d eh eh eh but it did say that he was her business manager between about 1948 and ’52.

Could any of your self-mythologizing stand to be deflated? The more I look at my own life, the more I realize that traumatic influences have played a part in it. I’m talking about my mother’s murder.4

Hasn’t your mother’s murder always been central? Yeah, it formed my mental curriculum. But there’s a particular aspect of my youth that has become distorted by repetition: like going to jail.5 It was not the big house. It was the jail of six-man cells and two stupid white guys, two stupid black guys and two stupid Mexican guys lying about their daring criminal exploits and their movie-star girlfriends. “Oh yeah? With Marilyn Monroe?” “Yeah, sure.” And also my breaking into houses6 and sniffing girls’ undergarments and stealing five-dollar bills: Technically it’s burglary, but it was craven. It was circumspect. It was very easy to do back then. People didn’t have answering machines. You rung up the phone, and if they didn’t answer they weren’t home. I did that 15, 16, 17 times over the course of two and a half years and got away with it.

You stopped around the time of the Manson family murders, right? Yes. That’s when people started having the security signs: “Patrolled by Bel Air Patrol.” So I quit doing it. I never stayed in the houses very long. Fifteen, 20 minutes. Maybe a half an hour. All together that was probably 10 hours of my life. But on a great many occasions I spent 12, 13 hours a day reading in public libraries. I wasn’t presenting information disingenuously, but looking back as an older, wiser person, I go: “I mostly just read a bunch of books.”

Are there any parallels between your state of mind when you were sneaking into people’s homes and your state of mind when inhabiting the life of a fictional character? Trespassing was about curiosity and yearning. It was for the girls at Hancock Park.7 Those girls live in me: Kathy, Julie, Peggy. I grew up a poor kid within a few blocks of this ritzy, WASP-y enclave. What I did required a certain concentration and was thrilling even though it was immoral. I was trying to sate my emotional hunger. For decades now, the only thing that has done that for me has been creating large-scale fictions set in the past.

Ellroy as a child with his mother, Jean Hilliker. James Ellroy Archive, University of South Carolina Libraries

Why do you pine for the past? There’s this old Stephen King quote. Someone asks Mr. King, “Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?” He said: “Why do you assume that I have a choice?” Fate tapped me on the shoulder and said: “Hey, Ellroy. I got a job for you.”

My armchair-psychologist reading would be that you want to be back in the era in which your mother was still alive. And I have a hunch that your feelings about social probity and your conservatism are a reaction to the chaos of your adolescence. There’s a big element of truth to the latter. My feelings about probity are also about shame for my old disordered state and the crimes, albeit small, that I committed. As for my mother, Jean Hilliker, I’ve always marked historical events by whether she was alive for them. I’m always thinking about stuff like that.

In old interviews, you’ve described yourself as the kind of guy who spends his evenings brooding about the women in his life. Is that still the case? I brood like a dog. As far as my second ex-wife and once-again girlfriend, Helen Knode,8 and I go, monogamy was never the problem. It was cohabitation. So this is Helen’s idea: We have two pads. We’re in downtown Denver. I got a two-bedroom loft, and Helen has an identical one down the hall from me. I’ve got everything turned out exactly the way that I want it. Lots of pictures of bull terriers, pictures of my own book covers, the bust of Beethoven. I’ll sit at my desk and I’ll put my feet up and I’ll brood.

About what? About the new book, about this particular book tour. Mine is a big career, and people sometimes deny the solvency of the new books because they had a signature reading experience with a book way back. “The Black Dahlia,”9 that’ll be the only book for them. Or they conflate the movie “L.A. Confidential” with the novel “L.A. Confidential.”10

Are you only brooding on work? I’m very happy with Helen. I’m not brooding on Shirley Knight in “The Rain People,” which was a movie from 1969. Or Lois Nettleton on a couple episodes of “The Fugitive.”11

“The Fugitive” was such a weird show. There was always this implied sexual tension between Richard Kimble and whoever the lead actress was in a given episode, but nothing would ever happen. This is very, very interesting. “The Fugitive” exerted a deep pull on me. A romantic and sexual pull. Wherever Richard Kimble would go, the grooviest woman in the town — which somehow always looked like the San Fernando Valley — would gas onto him and they’d have their moment of truth and they may kiss a couple of times. But it was all unconsummated because he had to run from Lieutenant Gerard. The actresses on that show did a number on me. June Harding, Shirley Knight, Brenda Vaccaro, Diana van der Vlis, Suzanne Pleshette, Sandy Dennis. That’s the only time I’ve ever been obsessed with a TV show.

Aside from TV shows, what other products of the past do you miss? There was a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. that had stores that sold wide arrays of perfectly fitting Shetland wool crew-neck sweaters, perfect saddle shoes, perfect tweed jackets and shawl-collar cashmere sweaters. You can’t find that stuff anymore. Nobody wants to dress that corny. You know, I also used to go [expletive] crazy buying women clothes. In ’07, I was on the loose in L.A. during the time of my divorce and I had a wingding with a woman. In the couple of months this wingding went on, I bought her $20,000 worth of clothes.

Ellroy’s mother’s death, reported in The Los Angeles Times on June 23, 1958. Los Angeles Times

And then it ended? Yeah. She kept the clothes, which is O.K. Hey, I try.

I feel like maybe you romanticize women in a weird way. Where does that tendency come from? One day she was there, Jean Hilliker, and then one day she wasn’t. She died horribly. She’s been through a thousand metamorphoses with me. I finally realized that in the two memoirs I wrote that are very much about her that I didn’t get to the heart of her. It was because my gift is fiction. I’m not a journalist or a memoirist. Hence, Joan Conville12.

Trying to get to the heart of a person who died when you were 10 is like trying to catch smoke. Yeah, you can’t. I’ve overdramatized my mother. I’ve underdramatized her. Helen has told me a trillion times, “Leave your mother alone. Let her rest in peace.” I’ve honored her in fiction. I tried to get to the core of her in a dramatized fashion. I co-opted the exterior facts of her life. I don’t know if there’ll be a moment of peace with that.

When you say that your mother has been through a thousand metamorphoses, does that extend to your feelings about real-life as well as fictional women? I’m a sucker for a tall redhead. That’s for damn sure. I think that I’ve never gotten over sex.

What’s that mean? Just the whole thing. O.K., here’s a joke I first heard in the early ’60s. It’s a howler: “I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now.” Sex is a head scratcher. It remains prevalent. I was sitting with Andrew Wylie, my agent, in Columbus Circle a couple of days ago so he could smoke a cigar on his way back to the office. We were sitting there, talking a little, looking around a little, and I said, “There sure are a lot of healthy-looking young women in New York City today.” He said, “I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

In the past when journalists have asked you about your conservative politics, you sometimes give confrontational answers. Were those authentic reflections of your thinking or an expression of your urge to needle? I’m thinking about stuff you said about Obama. I don’t even remember what I said about Obama.

The word “hate” came up. I voted for him! But what did I say? That I hate him or something like that?13 I think it was a British journalist who I said that to. We were sitting in a hamburger joint in L.A., and he was pissing me off. He was hassling me about Obama, and I was like, what do you want me to say?

It does seem as if you’re often asked to justify your politics in ways that wouldn’t be expected of liberals. Why is your conservatism treated as something requiring explanation? Being conservative is considered by many people as a codified expression of: You’re not nice, you’re unenlightened, you’re not one of the gang, you’re not one of the humanists. It should be evident in “Perfidia”14 and “This Storm” that I despise totalitarianism. I write characters who are the good guys and who also occasionally drop the racial slur, the anti-homosexual remark, but with these characters racial animus is never a defining characteristic. It’s a casual attribute. I like the idea of race as anecdote. I live by anecdote. I live to the exclusion of epigram. Those who think that all people who would express racial animus do that because of a deep-seated hatred boiling within them don’t understand that at a certain time and place it was the common linguistic coin of the realm.

Ellroy at his desk in 1992. Micheline Pelletier Decaux/Sygma, via Getty Images

I understand that people have a tendency to define conservatism in narrow political ways, but what does it mean to you? I have always described myself as a Tory. Underneath my profane exterior, I’m very concerned with decorum, with probity, with morality, and I have a painfully developed conscience. I despise unconscionable acts, whoever is perpetrating them. Helen says that what I am more than anything else is a Protestant. That’s what it is.

Can you tell me what you meant when you said you live by anecdote and to the exclusion of epigram? Am I wrong in thinking that anecdotes and epigrams aren’t terribly dissimilar? We were talking about race. In my books, I deploy racial anecdote, unmediated by any kind of preaching, any kind of philosophy. For example, two months before the first Watts riot, I had adventures in South Central Los Angeles, repossessing cars, going around with an unscrupulous fellow, looking for street hookers. I had heard a rumor that if you want to get a girl, you go to Cooper Do-nuts on Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard. You talk to one of the counter guys there and he’ll always know somebody who will drive you around. Well, I did this. I was 17. 1965. The girls had themselves a couple of white tricks, that’s for damn sure. We had all kinds of adventures, driving around to one pad after another and shooting the [expletive] with all these black folk. It was a rollicking good time. So, I live in anecdotes like that. I see something, it makes human sense to me, and I’m on it like a pit bull.

Do you feel any internal friction between your conservatism and, for example, your obvious relish in the content of the anecdote you just described? There’s the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line.

About how the test of first-rate intelligence is someone who can hold two opposing ideas in his mind? Absolutely. It’s an old saw, and that’s me. Mine is a Christian ideal that expresses of the presence of God and the presence of sin. It’s that kind of duality. It’s banal in my case, and in my expression, in my every way of life. But you can only do the do-right so much before you’re going to have some reaction against it.

Critics have called your books nihilistic. But to my mind it’d be more accurate to argue that the characters in your books care too much. Does that make sense? You’re absolutely right, and nihilism is a maddening criticism to hear. Optimism is best expressed in “This Storm” by the two words “people change.” They do. Elmer Jackson enters “This Storm” as a good-natured, horny rube who has the common good sense to hate the Klan, because of their high jinks in his North Carolina hometown. He’s chastened by the events of the book, and he changes. The character of Hideo Ashida changes. Dudley Smith changes. William H. Parker changes. If people as hard-core and as driven by the animus of the times as these folks can change, that’s optimistic.

Reading “This Storm,” which is so much about American Naziism and racial paranoia, it’s hard not to think of the resonances between the time in which the book is set, 1942, and today. Were you thinking about those resonances as you were writing? People have asked, “Isn’t this novel with all the whacked-out right-wingers and left-wingers and anti-Semites and nativists and race hucksters really about America today?” I said, “Nah. It’s about America in 1942.” Nothing stands in for anything else. If I wanted to write a novel about America today I would damn well do it. I don’t think much about what’s happening today.

Do you read anything contemporary? Or is it mostly old crime stories? I’ve read Daniel Silva15 because a colleague at Knopf said, “You might like this guy.” And that’s that. I’ve read through a lot of anthologies of Library of America: American noir of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s and American noir written by women, the two volumes edited by Sarah Weinman. I’ve been going at that like a pit bull.

Speaking of dogs, tell me about your current bull terrier.16Helen and I have an imaginary bull terrier named Ingrid. We have a great deal of fun anthropomorphizing bull terriers. Ingrid is a reddish-brown and white bull terrier and also a psychopathic cop who’s immortal. Her first enforcement gig was with the pharoahs when they were whipping the Israelis into slavery. Ingrid’s also very badly alcoholic.

That’s too bad. Yeah, but she’s immortal. Wherever Helen and I live, Ingrid joins the Police Department and goes on the robbery squad. Ingrid does what a great many people would like to do. She phone-books suspects and shoots ’em in the back. The anthropomorphizing is all in good humor. There’s no explicitness. Ingrid’s idea of a man is the sodden, overweight, alcoholic police officers she’s seen in cop movies. Her favorite film noir actor is pudgy and corrupt Edmond O’Brien.17 We never get into the mechanics of a human man and a dog doing it or anything like that because Helen and I are very wholesome at our cores. I love dogs insanely. Though I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bitten.