HOLLYWOOD NOCTURNES

Ellroy marks time between installments of his outsized LA saga with a slender collection of crime fiction — a novella and five stories (1986-94) — all reeking of his trademark corruption and stylistic flamboyance. Readers impatient with Ellroy's indulgently telegraphic prose in L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992) may be surprised to find that the most recent (and excessive) of these stories, the substantial "Dick Contino's Blues," is the strongest. Its honky-tonk accordionist hero, introduced in a could-be-factual prologue, "Out of the Past," tries to boost his stalled movie career by arranging to have himself and starlet Chrissy Staples kidnapped — then watches the hoax spin dangerously out of control when waves of hoods, capped by the fearsome Whipcord Strangler, muscle in on the action, making for a scary, funny, bluesy climax. The other stories, as you'd expect, are all content with a narrower range of effects. In the routine crime story "High Darktown," Sgt. Lee Blanchard goes after a pair of liquor store thieves just out of prison and hot for his scalp. Blanchard's back in the offbeat "Dial Axminster 6-400," paired with Davis Evans, a hard-nosed cop who goes after a trio of violent kidnappers in the hope of repossessing their two-tone 1936 Auburn speedster. "Since I Don't Have You" asks why Gretchen Shoftel, a cozy friend of both mobster Mickey Cohen and billionaire Howard Hughes, was still working as a carhop just before she took off for parts unknown. In the foolishly likeable "Gravy Train," Stan Klein works his way up from hard time to acting as minder for Basko, a dog who's just inherited $25 million. And "Torch Number," the weakest and most sentimental of the batch, shows shamus Spade Hearns pursuing a torch singer who's gotten hold of a song his old love wrote and performed just for him. Nothing here like the power of Elroy's LA quartet; but all the stories are effective as genre pieces, and most of them equally interesting for their manic ambivalence toward postwar California.