[2] He cites Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Moorcock, J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King as people who influenced his writing.

Ellory's mother died as a result of a pneumonic haemorrhage in late 1971, the victim of a pneumonia epidemic that killed a number of people in the West Midlands.

The Crime Writers' Association, for which Ellory formerly served as a board member, expressed concern about this "unfair" practice, and confirmed it had launched a review.

[3][4] His first novel to be accepted for publication, Candlemoth, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award that year.

[12] Between March and April 2012, Ellory released a trilogy of novellas making up the ebook-exclusive Three Days in Chicagoland, focusing on the brutal murder of a young girl in Chicago in 1956, as told from three different viewpoints: The Sister, The Cop and The Killer.

[6] Papillon de Nuit, the French translation of Candlemoth, won both the Balai d'Or Award 2017 and the Grand Prix des Lecteurs 2017.

[14] Additionally, it won the Villeneuve les Avignon Literary Festival Readers' Prize in 2010 and the St. Maur Prix Polar in 2011.