the un secretary general says he's concerned that an escalation of political tensions in venezuela will make it difficult to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. antonio guterres‘s comments come after the imprisonment of two opposition leaders. the us secretary of state, rex tillerson, has stressed that his country is not seeking to topple the north korean government and it wants dialogue with pyongyang. he said, "we are not your enemy," but warned pyongyang its ballistic missile tests presented an unacceptable threat. the uk's national crime agency says that sixty people have died in the uk in the past eight months after taking the painkilling drug fentanyl. it's 50 times more potent than heroin and is the drug that was linked to the death of the rock star, prince. now on bbc, hardtalk. my

my guest today has been called america's greatest living crime writer. in his la quartet and many other novels, james ellroy has painted a uniquely dark portrait of this city of angels, a nightmare world of psychotic killers, corrupt cops and depraved appetites. the rights of what he knows, his own mother was murdered when he was a child. and it is that simple terrible fact the key to understanding all the words he's ever written? james ellroy, welcome to heart block

-- hardtalk. hey, boss, what's shaking? i have but i came back. i made a conscious decision with my new novel to craft a second la quartet, taking characters from the initial la quartet, said in a lay between 1946 and 1958, and initial la quartet, said in a lay between 1916 and 1958, and the aforementioned underworld usa trilogy, three novels set in america at large between 58 and 72. characters from those two bodies of work and place them in los angeles during world war two as significantly younger people so i made quite the conscious decision to go back to la. going back is something i want to do with you as we talk about the evolution of your fiction because it seems to me, and

you've talked about it a great deal, that you can't discuss james ellroy‘s body of work without spending a little bit of time talking about the long—running impact of that terrible period in your life which began with your pa re nts' your life which began with your pa rents' breakup, your life which began with your parents' breakup, marriage failure, and ended when you were ten years old with the murder of your mother, her body found on an la street. the actual impact of my mother's death reached cessation years ago. it is a fact, it will always be brought up by the media, and it is the key to understanding the work that i do. but it is not the key to me as an individual. it hasn't been for decades. there is an interesting distinction. if you don't mind, tell me why it is the key to understanding so much of your work. onjune 27, 1958, when i was 12 and my parents were divorced, my mother was murdered. it was a sex murder in a crummy dog town east of los angeles. a man raped and strangled her, unsolved to this day. parenthetically i wrote a memoir about it, my dark places. i tried to solve the crime posthumously. my mother's death brought a tremendous curiosity

for all things criminal and historical. i got hooked on american social history, and la's social history, and their criminal history. its history from the point of that transcendence to now drives me. that makes it sound almost detached, like a series of conscious decisions you took to pursue a writing interest after this terrible event as you grew up. you also suggested that there was something much more visible in your reaction. you talked about the degree to which at the time you hated your mother, and this may sound perverse, lusted. there was a sexual element there as well. a red—haired 43—year—old woman. here's a newsflash to our british viewers. young males are introduced to the idea of sex in the home, and their mother is the first archetype. this is basic freud. with me it went a little beyond the basics. up until a certain point,

you have a red—haired woman, tall and statuesque in front of me, i'm way off the deep end. but we grow up over time. i grew up over time in relationship to my mother's murder. i made an internal decision to be happy, to be fulfilled. it is instinctively who i am. but you weren't for an awful long time. i was always happy. when you were into booze, into all sorts of different crime, you spent time injail, you lived rough are quite a while. you were happy? i was happy. i am easily distracted. i'm easily obsessed. give me a window to look into. give me a movie to watch. give me access

to a public library and a book to read. and way back when some mind—altering chemical, icanfindjoy and fixation within myself. it wasn't until i got sober at the age of 29 and started reading books that i went beyond this idiot happiness into a productive, sober life. can i talk about one of the books, and people across the world will know this, black dahlia. that was about a horrible murder of a young woman in la. your book was fascinating, but to me what is interesting is that it seems the detective in that novel seems to resemble you, but at the same time i am wondering whether as you were growing up and making sense of what happened to you as a child, whether you would have identified more with detectives or criminals. i have always identified with police officers. i am a natural born authoritarian. i would rather live in a society tha on the side of authoritarianism than in a society that errs on the side of permissiveness. i take myself and i superimpose my l losses, sorrows, and my own yearning, which is the chief thing. i write in my memoir that yearning is the chief fount

of my inspiration. i yearn for women, i yearn for history itself, i yearn for big lives juxtaposed against large geopolitical events, and to return to your question, yes, i take these authoritarian characters, rogue in nature, and i give them a great case. a woman to fall in love with. it is the laura syndrome. from the 19114 movie, dana andrews, a lonely, haunted detective falls in love with the portrait of the dead woman, and she turns up alive. not surprisingly, i havejust been commissioned by 20th century fox to write to remake of laura. it is all connected. when you say to me you are a natural born authoritarian, that raises questions. if you are an authoritarian you surely have to believe that

authority works for the public good. that in essence, the police, authority, security services, represent good, and the villains represent evil. i do believe that. but your books are so much more ambiguous and ambivalent than that. they have a message that says, the law enforcers can be and are corrupt, they can be deeply flawed, they can be almost as problematic morally as the wrongdoers. i take those characters who are problematic. i juxtapose them against evil that is pervasive, it is in the outer world, we must interdict and suppress it. i am on their side, and they are not meant to represent american law enforcement at large. they are always rogue elements. you can't be on their side!

some of the most famous betrayals of corrupt cops in literature come from you, from la confidential, for example. i love them anyway, they are my guys. how can you love them? they are abusive... i give you their souls. i give you their heartbreak, i give you the society at large. i give you malefactors who are a0 times as flawed and out on missions of systematic evil, and my guys quash them. but if you are prepared to tolerate the corruption inside the public bodies that govern our lives, it is a recipe for societies going wrong, going very bad. if it takes hitting a child molester with a phonebook in order to secure his conviction and ultimate imprisonment,

or one—way ticket to the gas chamber, then i'm on the side of the guys who wield the phonebook. are you? yes. i am rewriting my assumptions about you as i speak. i was going to quote to you the words of pdjames, and was expecting you to contradict them. she said, the classic detective story confirms our belief that we live in a rational and generally benevolent universe. i thought you would say, that is nonsense! no. i agree. i think human beings are evolving. god is not through with us yet. so much of modern crime writing, and a lot of it owes a lot to you, so much of it is about ambiguity, and as ian rankin says, writing fiction where good does not always triumph, where evil can't always be rationalised, and the reader is sometimes seduced to take side with the evil side.

you always know who my good guys are. so you believe in good guys? i believe in good guys, and i think the heroes of my books are the good guys. they have first person and third person subjective viewpoints, and you understand each and every one of their rationales. even the evil irish cop, dudley smith... he's the one who says, "i control people, and if i can't control them i destroy them". he is on a slow path to redemption. a slow, tortuous path to self—sacrifice, salvation and redemption. even as we speak. maybe the conversation

we are having and the explanation you give for ultimately the sympathy you have, and who are very bent and corrupt, maybe that is one reason why some people in the us have come to see you as a defender of, for example, the lapd, even during the rodney king fallout, the videotaped beating of a black citizen, and you said, give the lapd a break. if you see the entire three—minute sequence of events, pertaining to rodney king, you will notjudge the lapd anywhere near as harshly. the extracted 56 blows

to the head are shocking in that abbreviated context. but that abbreviated context is nothing but a lie. you have to see all of the events that preceded it. you say you think like a detective... i am by the way the yearly mc of the lapd's jack webb awards. oh, i know that. you're close to the lapd. you've only said, "a lot of my good friends are inside the lapd". but i wonder with all the allegations of racism and institutionalised abuse within the lapd, whether you are blind to it because you're too close to it? no, what i'm not blind to is the idiocy these human rights groups and their impacted,

stiffnecked sense of victimisation. this is james ellroy, who earlier in his career, i think gloried in the idea that you were a demon dog, who would say it like it really is in american culture, even despite the forces of liberalism and pc... demon dog, i love dogs. i love bulldogs. i love banned dogs. but dogs can be dangerous. i'm shocked that pit bulls are banned in a climate of hysteria in great britain. i stand up for staffordshire bulls — a british dog that i have had three off. the bullterrier. well, let's not get too hung up on dogs, but let's apply this to american culture today, and the political atmosphere. no, we're not going to talk about politics in america today, no. i don't mean party politics, whether you are a republican or democrat.

i just mean the flavour of the times. for example, in your latest book, perfidia... finally, we get to it! it's an important book. it's a very interesting book because you place it around the time of the pearl harbor attack and soon after. mm—hm. and what you portray is a southern california which is in the grip of a fear, a fifth column of an enemy within. and because of that fear, corners are cut. the constitution is sort of... mm—hm. ..adapted, shall we say, to ensure that for example 100,000 japanese americans can be locked up, can be interned in camps. i just wonder whether you see a parallel today? no, i see no parallel today. let's cut right through that right now. i write my books in a state of immersion. as far as i'm concerned, franklin d roosevelt is the president of the united states. oh, but come on... no, brother, you hold on. i know he's not, but that's the world i live in.

it's 1941 - there are no corollaries to any event preceding or following december 19111. that book is written in blood, and in real time. the bombs fall on pearl harbor 80 pages in. then we're through, around the clock, up until the 29th. abrogation of civil liberties — we know it happened. it was the japanese internment, and it was wrong. and i say that it was wrong. and we are inside the perspective of a closet homosexual japanese—american police chemist. he knows it is wrong. the other cops, even dudley smith, the corrupt cop, will come to view it as wrong. because people, in my books, are always on a tortured road to self—knowledge. but even if you say you wrote this book in the mindset of 1942, and you refuse to move that mindset to today, you, as, you know, an important literary voice

in america today, surely have a view as to whether there is a justification post 9—11 for things like the patriot act, that we saw in the bush administration, or indeed the mass surveillance that... no, i don't. no? no, i do not. it does not interest me. why not? and i do not acknowledge anything outside the history that i write about. and it is that very quality, the fact that i deny the world today, do not use a cellphone, have never logged onto a computer in my life. that gives these books their power. and it gives these books their immediacy, and the feeling that they were written in that time period. that's it. i'm here. i'm 66 years old. i will die in sa years, slightly after my 100th birthday. but i will have a lot of books that will stand. and they will stand

because they were written in history's fire. will you, in the course of the next 3a years, that we both hope you have, will you turn your mind to events that go beyond the period of the united states in the ‘30s and ‘40s, which has been the focus of your attention so much of the time? no. will you address what has happened in the last ten years, or the next ten years? no. my historical curiosity runs out in may of 1972, when my novel blood's a rover, my most recent novel, before perfidia, concludes with the death ofj edgar hoover. i am going to write the second the la quartet. i am going to write a post—war trilogy that will run concurrent in its timeframe with the first la quartet. and, brother, at that time i will be

old and i will be tired, and hopefully i will have enough money in the bank to live the rest of my life. let me ask you about the genre, if that is the word you use. crime fiction, detective fiction. you have been a pioneer, and i have mentioned people like ian rankin who say they owe a huge debt to you in the uk. there has always been this discussion, maybe based purely on snobbery, in the world of literature, whether crime fiction should be allowed in to the sort of literary circle. does that matter to you? no. i'm not crime writer, nor am i noir writer. i have written a bunch of books set in la in the height of the noir era. and so noir has been applied to me. i am a historical novelist. that's the novel that is resting

under your left hand right now. and i am happy to have influenced a generation of crime writers. and i think the designation of crime writers, historical writers, all of this, it's interesting in the moment, and really, in the end, it only pertains towards where your books are shelved. i suppose, i have been reading some criticism of you and one thing that struck me is that a lot of writers have compared you, perhaps surprisingly, with james joyce, for your inventive use of language — stream of consciousness at times. others have compared you to conrad. 0ne critic said the conrad comparison works because you explore the savagery at the heart of man. is that right? do you think we are — have a savage heart as a species? ithink we... i think we have a savage heart, mitigated by conscience. and i think the very best of us come to spiritual flashpoints, points of explication

in our personal lives where we see ourselves in the context of the world. other human beings, i believe that we are all as one, human beings. we are one soul, united under god. i believe in the spiritus mundi, the collective unconscious. and in that respect i am perhaps as one with james joyce orjoseph conrad, who i have never read, or dostoevsky, who i have never read. but put all of that aside, i don't think of this stuff. what do i think of? i wasn't fighting you or baiting you just to fight you or bait you when i was talking about history versus the contemporary. that is where i live. i live in history. i live in yearning. i've always been that way.

if i'm not yearning for some woman, i'm yearning for history itself. i'm yearning for conjunction of men and women within history. are you yearning as much now as you ever did? we talked at the beginning about the murder of your mother, about what a difficult childhood you had. and i can understand the yearning that came from that. but still today in your 60s, you are yearning? because i'm deeply in love with a british woman. but that sense of yearning that has driven you on... yeah, it still drives me. it still drives me. that's why the demon dog analogy is so good. it's why i love pit bulls. it's why i am chagrined that they're banned here in britain. and why you are still barking. i bark on, yeah. i bay. my girlfriend and i are going to dartmoor and we are going to find

the hound of the baskervilles, and he is going to say, what has taken you so long? james ellroy, thank you for being on hardtalk. thank you. hello, there. most of our rain over the last couple of days has come in the form of showers, drenching downpours, that bring a lot of rain in a short space of time and then clear away. but the day ahead is looking a little bit different, because we have a more organised area of cloud that has been working its way in from the atlantic, associated with an area of low pressure, frontal systems moving in, which will bring rain. and notice the tightly squeezed isobars, as well. some pretty windy weather,

especially around the coasts of the south—west, as we go on through the morning. so through south—west england and other southern counties, through wales, parts of the midlands, northern ireland, northern england and southern scotland, there will be some outbreaks of rain. the further north you are, that rain quite patchy, with brighter spells in between. across the far south of england, though, that rain will be on the heavy side. close to english channel coasts, we could see a lot of rain through the day. could give some fairly poor travelling conditions, and a lot of cloud and mist and murk across the south—west, with some quite humid air in place, despite temperatures only getting up to 17 degrees for plymouth. across wales, we'll see some patchy rain into the afternoon, but northern ireland brightening up through the afternoon. sunshine, yes, the return of some showers, but not the persistent rain. that'll be moving across southern parts of scotland. northern scotland has some of the best weather through the day. some spells of sunshine, 15—16 degrees. we're back into patchy rain across northern england, albeit with something a little brighter showing its hand in the north—west later on. east anglia seeing a fair amount of dry weather. into the south—east the rain sets

in through wednesday evening. in fact, further pulses of wet weather pushing across the south—east and east anglia as we go on through the night. and our weather front still hanging back across northern scotland. so here we will see some persistent rain through the first part of thursday morning. but across much of the country, by the start of thursday, we're back to square one, we're back to that mixture of sunny spells and showers. the closer you are to this area of low pressure, so across northern areas, that's where we'll see the heaviest showers, the most frequent showers. quite slow—moving across scotland and northern ireland, so they could give a lot of rain in a short space of time, with some thunder and lightning possible. some showers in northern england, parts of wales and the midlands, towards the south—west. the further south—east you are fewer showers and more sunshine. in fact, many parts of south—east england will get away with a completely dry day on thursday, and perhaps again on friday. again, most of the showers up towards the north—west, where some could be heavy and thundery. quite a cool and a blustery day for many. and more of the same as we head

on through the weekend. plenty of showers, particularly towards the north. a little bit drier towards the south—east. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is mike embley. our top stories: international condemnation of venezuela after the arrest of two opposition leaders. the un says the escalating crisis makes a peaceful solution more difficult. 50 times stronger than heroin: growing fears about the painkiller fenta nyl after dozens of deaths in the uk. a message to north korea from the us secretary of state, america is not seeking regime change, but dialogue with pyongyang. we are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond. turkey puts almost 500 people on trial, they're accused of taking part in last year's failed coup.