THE HILLIKER CURSE My Pursuit of Women By James Ellroy 203 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95 To enter the world of the crime writer James Ellroy, one must accept a certain degree of time warp. His prose clings to the underbelly of mid-20th-century modern, a place that the era's celebrated advertising doesn't even reach -- where men are men and women are...

James Ellroy, the self-described ''demon dog'' of American crime fiction, writes in a baroque, pulp prose style that hurtles along the page like a speed freak in a rocket, an image that I probably lifted from one of his books. In his fiction and nonfiction he rushes forward fast, fast, fast, pausing regularly to do a little scat singing (''a...
James Ellroy, it seems, loves to shock people by playing the role of tough cookie. Or maybe he really is as brutally cold as he appears. Either way, he cuts an impressive figure as a hard-nosed straight shooter in the first episode of ''Murder by the Book,'' a Court TV series that has its premiere tonight. The premise of this new show is a famous...