`MURDER' MOST FOUL -- YET FASCINATING.

Byline: David Kronke Television Critic

Novelists are routinely asked from where they get their ideas, and as Court TV's new series, ``Murder by the Book'' suggests, crime novelists can hardly cook up plots more grisly and lurid than those provided by real tragedies.

In the series, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Faye Kellerman, Jonathan Kellerman and Lisa Scottoline recall real-life murder cases that they personally found compelling. Not unlike the victims in crime fiction, most of the stories involve brutalized women.

Ellroy's story, not surprisingly, deals with the murder-rape of his mother when he was 10, an unsolved crime he explicated in great detail in his best seller ``My Dark Places.'' Though tonight Ellroy declares, almost with a perverse pride, ``I have exploited my mother's death to boost book sales and raise my media profile,'' he vows that tonight's episode will put an end to that. Well, we'll see.

Ellroy's mother was a divorced tippler who moved her son from Santa Monica to El Monte in 1958; four months later, she was found strangled and raped. The murderer was never caught.

As riveting a writer as Ellroy can be, you get the sense you wouldn't want to find yourself in the same room with the guy.

Repeatedly in tonight's episode, he employs the phrase ``My hated and lusted-for mother.'' He floridly plays to the cameras as his own investigation into the crime is re-enacted. It's absorbing if grim stuff.

Connelly, by contrast, is a mild-mannered fellow not prone to preening. For his installment next week, he merely adds interstitial commentary for a case he covered as a Florida crime reporter involving Christopher Wilder, a crazed serial killer crisscrossing the country in an 8,000-

mile trek that left at least nine women dead and several others horrifically injured. Interviews with those who investigated the murders make up the bulk of Connelly's episode.

``Murder by the Book'' revels in some pretty unpleasant stuff and, like Ellroy, its producers seem a bit too uncomfortably jazzed with their re-enactments of some of the grisly particulars. Nonetheless, these are compelling cases, treks into dark and demented souls of the sort that these novelists are unnervingly adept at replicating in their own works.

David Kronke, [phone]

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MURDER BY THE BOOK - Three stars

What: Famous crime novelists revisit real-life murders in this five-part series.

Where: Court TV.

When: 10 tonight.

In a nutshell: Luridly compelling.

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Photo:

In ``Murder by the Book,'' authors Jonathan Kellerman, left, Faye Kellerman, James Ellroy, Lisa Scottoline and Michael Connelly recall real-life murder cases they found compelling.