Los Angeles - Fritz Brown, ex-alcoholic private eye with a stained past, makes do with car repossessions and classical music. Then he is offered a case by Freddy "Fat Dog" Baker, an eccentric golf caddy whose sister has made off with a much older man.

This is the beginning of the nightmare: the underworld of golf caddies, arson and incest played against the backdrop of an LA surreal by night and bad by day; of long hidden secrets that will drive Brown back to the bottle and to the gun: all conspire to make this one of the most hypnotic crime novels ever written.

'Brown's Requiem' was James Ellroy's first novel and was the first in which his obsession with Los Angeles and its criminal underworld was realised.