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This article argues for the criminological value of James Ellroy’s fiction, using his
Underworld USA Trilogy
(the “
Trilogy
”) as a case study. I present the
Trilogy
as a critical criminological enterprise, understood in the sense of offering a convincing explanation of the cause(s) of social harm—specifically, those committed by various agencies of the American government from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Ellroy’s
Trilogy
provides this explanation in two distinct ways, using literary devices first to establish a counterfactual vision of America during the 1960s and then to represent the lived experience of perpetrators of state-sponsored social harm. In conveying such criminological knowledge, the
Trilogy
constitutes an instance of critical criminology and demonstrates the exercise of the criminological imagination.