Ellroy Reads – Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow
November 2, 2025
For the latest episode of Ellroy Reads I look at E.L. Doctorow’s classic gangster coming of age novel Billy Bathgate. James Ellroy greatly admires this novel about a Bronx lad who falls under the spell of legendary gangster Dutch Schultz. I have the inside scoop of how the story relates to the one and only unpublished novel of Ellroy’s career, ‘The Confessions of Bugsy Siegel’.
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The Venetian Vase 
Great episode. Quality aside, do you think there is any chance of unpublished/unfinished Ellroy stories ever getting published in some form? Not just the Bugsy Siegel work, but I’m also thinking of the outline for the fourth Lloyd Hopkins’ and the various tv and movie scripts from over the years.
Thanks Dan. Anything’s possible, but the problem is quality as you say, and Ellroy always struck me as very embarrassed when we discussed these early projects. The fourth Hopkins novel was titled ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ so, in a way, Ellroy has already recycled the ideas.