James Ellroy

James Ellroy’s second volume exploring the illicit and illegal activities shaping U.S. political history, The Cold Six Thousand, is as sweeping in scope and nefarious in character as the first, American Tabloid. Many of the major characters return, and it’s amazing (and darkly humourous) to see how much of what “we know” can be attributed to the hidden machinations of Ellroy’s imagined cabal. It’s conspiracy theory, to be sure, believable not as literal truth but as type: this is show more how things work, with individual and idiosyncratic agendas metastasizing into social trends and iconic events. Cold Six Thousand is book-ended with political assassinations, and fraught with all manner of thievery and murder in between, a comment on the American Sixties and what follows.

It seems to me that Ellroy trades in ideal types rather than historical truths. His imagined transcripts of confidential phone conversations between J. Edgar Hoover and undercover operatives; his briefs and document inserts from confidential CIA files; his headlines and ledes from media stories – all of these are utterly convincing. I don’t know how the transcript of a CIA bugging operation reads, but Ellroy has convinced me he knows. I don’t know how mafiosi run their businesses, but it sure seems like their plans would unfold the way Ellroy depicts them here. Whether racist slang among 1960s U.S. adults sounded like his dialogue reads, is again unclear to me. But it never reads like he's making it up. The chapter summarizing the history and significance of Viet Nam to U.S. political-military security from 1954 to 1964 (in the form of a CIA brief from one agent to another as preamble to an unsanctioned covert ops) is deft without being reductive. And it still reads like a government brief.

So if nothing happened quite the way he writes it, I’d bet it happened something like his version. (And the real point, perhaps, is that not only won’t we ever know, we can’t know. Nothing records this level of history. Ellroy is the closest we’d ever have. Put another way: it isn’t falsifiable, the very essence of fiction.) Ellroy’s history is at the level of the floorboards, what’s fascinating is how his version dovetails with the head-height version(s) bandied about in school textbooks and popular culture.

And his prose is something else, much more stylised than the first volume. I agree with those thinking a reader will either love or hate it, his staccato word flow and almost adjective-less prose weaves a peculiar aura around the events he describes. Hardboiled is perhaps true but beside the point, really, with descriptive passages as clipped and repetitive as dialogue. Ellroy has provided the written equivalent of a mantra or recitation, with the sound of his words as important as their meaning. A singular achievement, in conception as well as in sustained performance. show less

Another brutal story, well told by Ellroy. Like LA Confidential, this may not be to everyone's taste, even to those who enjoy crime and noir, but it's certainly very good at what it is.

Also like LA Confidential, the story is set within the LA Police Department, following two main characters, Bucky Bleichart and Lee Blanchard, through their investigations of a tortured and murdered young woman. There are no angels in the story -- Bleichart and Blanchard lead twisted lives on the point of show more breaking, and the victim, Elizabeth Short, was broken well before her murder.

The story follows obsessions. Neither Bleichart nor Blanchard is a homicide detective, but, in their own ways, neither can look away from the Short murder. Blanchard's girlfriend, Kay, is drawn into the story as well, with her own twisted and nearly broken background. As the story escalates, so do the obsessions, with a kind of apocalyptic feel for the lives of everyone involved. We follow Bleichart though one more dark layer after another, tied together by Blanchard's advice, "Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that."

In a very revealing Afterword to the book, Ellroy himself describes the story as set among "psychically maimed misfits running from World War II." He also gives us insight into his own obsession with the story, based on a true event -- a story he felt compelled to tell because of his own dark experiences. It's really pretty dark all the way down, from the true event, to the author, to the novel itself.

The characters in the story are constantly tested, and many if not most fail. That's what makes the book both hard to take but also hard to look away from. It tests our baser instincts. show less

I've never been a fan of James Ellroy's noir-tinged novels set in post-war Los Angeles. He's got the hard-boiled patter down, but the stories never felt real. Twenty years ago, however, he wrote a book about his mother and, despite the unrelenting patois, the book sizzles with dysfunction and a reconciliation forever lost. In My Dark Places, Ellroy revisits his mother's murder from the direction of a cold case. He'd been ten years old at the time, his parents were divorced and his show more relationship with his mother was not great. He had wished her dead just three months earlier. My Dark Places is an amazing book. It's not particularly well-written, Ellroy can't leave the detective magazine lingo behind and refers to his mother, somewhat disconcertingly, as the Redhead throughout the book, but it resonates with emotion and regret.

The Hilliker Curse is his follow-up memoir and in it he attributes his string of failed relationships to his abruptly truncated relationship with his mother. He's not without self-awareness, something that is usually missing in books about infidelity: I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most. It cuts me loose to yearn and profitably repeat the pattern. He's selfish to an astonishing degree, driven, self-obsessed and deeply religious (the justifications for breaking up marriages, his own and those of the women he meets are a little shaky).

Ellroy begins with his own parents' marriage. They divorced when he was young, or as Ellroy put it: My parents split the sheets later that year. Jean Hilliker got primary custody. She put my dad on skates and rolled him to a cheap pad a few blocks away. Ellroy's father gets him back after his mother's murder, but isn't what could be even loosely termed a good father. Ellroy ends up in a wretched basement apartment, hooked on Benzedrex inhalers and any pills he finds in the Hancock Park homes he breaks into. He has, not surprisingly, trouble finding a girl willing to go out with him.

Surprisingly, Ellroy's odd pulp-fiction language serves this book well. It would just be too intense without the distance of obsolete idioms. He gets clean, using AA as a support and a place to meet women: Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only they grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in sync with yours truly.

As Ellroy's fortunes improve, it becomes more apparent what an ass he is. All the heavy lifting in relationships is done by his partners. When married, he does not do any domestic chores, but needs to eat well and live in nice surroundings. He prefers solitude with his partner of the moment and so discourages any sort of social life in his wives. He hates other places. Amsterdam is described as Truly Shitsville and he leaves sightseeing in Paris for the geeks, freaks and fruitcake artistes.

What saves this book in the end is Ellroy's honesty and a sense of fair play toward the women in his life. The relationships may have all soured, but he's willing to put the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and even figures out toward the end that his mother was not the bad guy in his story. show less

I can't help seeing his Los Angeles-based characters as an annoying pack of overly dramatic, self-involved, utterly tiring people who don't know when to STFU. Ellroy's LA denizens are social-climbing monkeys picking nits from the hair of those they consider their betters. They cling to their facades even in the face of personal devastation. They love to name-drop and then insult anyone who doesn't worship them.

I love the way Ellroy writes. It's timeless.

Perfidia lays bare the way that show more Americans with Japanese heritage were treated at the onset of World War II. He also gave it nuance, which I appreciated. War is a horrible thing that turns normal people into monsters and gives monsters a platform. The corruption and graft lay waste to the lie of that 'more innocent' time. America was never innocent. It was always a country with sins, and Perfidia shows the arrogance in its bones.

Edit 6/16/2017: I just reread The Black Dahlia because I had so many questions after reading Perfidia. I'm upping the stars to five because I can now see what he was doing with this book. It's his apology tour. It is Ellroy trying to make amends with himself and for the treacherous way he treated the women who populated The Black Dahlia. He gives them agency in Perfidia. He gives them back their voice, and he gives them strength in both their innocence and sin. show less