The first thing James Ellroy asks me is, "Have you read my book? Do you hate me yet?"

It’s hard to say.

Known for his bestsellers L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia, Ellroy has been called "the demon dog of America crime fiction". His latest autobiographical work, The Hilliker Curse, takes as its starting point the events leading up to his mother’s murder in 1958. Ellroy issued the curse of the title when he wished his mother dead during an argument three months before she was killed. Her murderer was never found and he has been haunted by guilt ever since.

As a young man Ellroy turned to drugs, drink and petty crime, breaking into women’s houses in his native Los Angeles and stealing their underwear. It was not until he was in his thirties, sober and working as a golf-caddy that he wrote his first novel Brown’s Requiem. His work often returns to 1950s and 60s Los Angeles at the height of noir. He tells me his male protagonists are "men who want things and who become so utterly exhausted with their own essential maleness that they are only teachable by women. And I’ve been that way my entire life."

The Hilliker Curse is a departure from fiction and a companion piece to Ellroy’s 1995 memoir My Dark Places, which details his inconclusive attempt, with the help of a detective, to solve his mother’s murder. Curse was written following the dissolution of his marriage and a nervous breakdown.

Realising that he and his mother "comprised a love story rather than a crime story," he saw at last that the "‘primary journey’ of his life had been women."

Ellroy has been a life-long, self-proclaimed obsessive pursuer of women. He claims that the new book attempts to grant each of the major women in his life a "separate and distinct selfhood, whilst acknowledging that this drive has rendered all of them a blur," adding, "There are faces that I can recall of women glimpsed in train stations fifty years ago who I think of on a daily basis."

Is Curse really about women at all? It reads more like an exploration of Ellroy’s own psyche. He admits that this might be the case, telling me, "It’s about the notion in the abstract of formative trauma as progenitor of sexuality and romantic ardour. I am formed in trauma."

Don’t read The Hilliker Curse looking for a love story: more than a romance, it is a dark and disturbing chronicle of one man’s fixation.