Beneath the slick, glittering surface of L.A., an underworld of depravity and wickedness reins. Fritz Brown is a part-time private eye and full-time repo-man who gets his kicks listening to classical music. But the waters get too deep for Brown when he takes a case from a cash-flashing golf caddy named Freddy “Fat Dog” Baker that puts him on the trail of his client’s sister and the older gentleman she’s run off with. But more suspicious than his sister, a classy cellist, is Fat Dog himself, who has a past more sordid than he lets on. Diving into a cesspool of payoffs, incest, and arson, Brown’s California dreaming transforms into a technicolor nightmare. In his hypnotic debut, master crime writer James Ellroy takes us to the edge of an abyss, where nothing, not even Beethoven, can let in the light.

In this enthralling debut, James Ellroy, one of crime fiction's greatest writers, introduces the hyperreal L.A. we've come to know from his later work--a land of vice, corruption, and, in this case, golf.

Fritz Brown is an ex-alcoholic PI with a taste for classical music who gets by as a repo man. But he finds himself in the rough when he takes the case of a trigger-happy golf caddie who wants to destroy the older man who stole his sister's affection. As he tries to unravel this complex case with echoes from the distant past, Fritz Brown plunges into the seedy underbelly of L.A., where the hazards include arson, incest, and murder. Brown's Requiem is, in the author's own words, "a righteous private-eye novel: fast, profane, densely plotted." It is the first work of a master in the making.