This article from Collider ranks the eight best novels by American crime writer James Ellroy, known for his intense, violent and unpredictable noir and historical fiction. Ellroy began publishing in the early 1980s, with his strongest work emerging from the late 1980s onwards, and the piece assesses standout titles from his two major series, the Underworld USA trilogy and the L.A. Quartet, alongside other notable novels.

Among those discussed are "Blood's a Rover", the challenging final instalment of the Underworld USA trilogy covering 1968 to roughly 1972; "White Jazz", the dense fourth book of the L.A. Quartet, praised for tying up earlier plot threads despite its demanding, compressed prose style; and "The Cold Six Thousand", the trilogy's second book, which follows events after President Kennedy's assassination through to the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The full ranking, which the excerpt does not complete, continues to rate Ellroy's output across these series and beyond.