Brown’s Requiem is heavily beholden to Raymond Chandler — an icon I’ve come to dislike quite a bit. Big Ray was a true original who created a truly original style that lazy-assed writers have been imitating with some success for many years. I owe Ray a two-fold debt: he got me going, and he showed me that imitating him was a dead-end street on GenreHack Boulevard.
–James Ellroy, from the New Author Introduction to the 1995 Arrow edition of Brown’s Requiem.
