Writer James Ellroy suffered the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, at the age of 10 – just three months after he angrily told her he wished she would die in response to being struck by her – and has been haunted by her tragic and still-unsolved loss ever since. In fact, he transposed his obsession with her death into a fascination with the unsolved murder of another Los Angeles woman, Elizabeth Short, to fuel his masterpiece, “The Black Dahlia.”

He’s also famously the author of “L.A. Confidential,” which went on to become a classic film noir film that had a slew of Oscar nominations in 1997. Ellroy is a one of a kind man, a hat-wearing, illustriously tough-talking throwback to the types of men he writes about in his historic novels about Los Angeles. And while his personal life has often been beset by turmoil, he also became famous for being an outspoken, tough-talking conservative who often drew heat for his highly opinionated musings.

Yet, now that he finally decided to tackle his struggles with women – aka “the Hilliker curse” – head-on in his new memoir “The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women,” Ellroy has found that he has also opened himself to a happy relationship at last, finding true love after the age of 60. Speaking from the Beverly Hills Hotel recently in a brief phone interview, he assured his devoted fans that true love doesn’t mean his books will suddenly turn saccharine.

Q: How did you decide to tackle the subject of your relationships at this point in your life, at age 62?

ELLROY: I had come to realize that the characters in my novels were intersecting with the real people in my life, and I discovered that the central journey of my life was not crime or the murder of my mother, but my search for atonement in women. The astonishing personal happiness I’ve found in my union now is the prime source of my work now, but don’t worry – I’m not going to lose my edge, because I give good edge.

Q: How did you manage to find real-life happiness after so long?

ELLROY: The short form answer to this was that the big-time devout ass-kickings I took from the women in the book who preceded this relationship set me up to be with a woman and to recognize in unique fashion the woman as who she was, because I had horrible results from myself at the blank wall that is men looking at women, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.

Q: What’s the difference in the creative process between writing your hard-boiled fiction and a deeply personal memoir like this?

ELLROY: With fiction you can make anything up and write what you want. With a memoir, you have to adhere to fact. You are allowed wiggle room to extrapolate, summarize and analyze in retrospection. So the memoir is also the autobiographical essay and I’ve yet to go back and explore the phenomenon of women in my life and write about it. Then pure serendipity near the end of writing the book, I meet the woman who has become the love of my life.

Q: Now that you’ve found happiness, what are you going to write about next?

ELLROY: I’m writing a big historic novel next. It’s a big novel set earlier than any of my previous historical novels. Mum’s the word on the rest.