James Ellroy

[Toadal]

Frankly, James Ellroy is God. He is without doubt the world's best living crime author, and I'd wager that he'd the best crime writer ever. Fascinating, if horrifying, life, too: his mother was murdered when James was ten, a crime that has gone unsolved. He then lived with his father, a man who did the odd bit of accounting for Hollywood stars, was obsessed with sex and was hung like a donkey. Apparently. Anyway, James pretended to be a Nazi at his largely Jewish school, got kicked out, joined the army, got a dishonourable discharge (what an ungainly phrase), his dad died, James lived on the streets, sleeping in squats and parks, getting high by swallowing the swabs in nasal inhalers, drinking far too much, breaking into houses and stealing women's underwear. All through his life as a creep (as he describes it) he was reading crime fiction, watching crime shows. He always knew he would be a writer, but just couldn't be bothered trying. In the end, health problems made him kick the drink and the swabs, get a job and a flat and start writing.

Here's a quick rundown of his work.

Brown's Requiem (1981) - His first novel, written and published while he was still working as a golf caddy. I haven't read this. I feel like I ought to, if I want to be a true Ellroy-phile.

Clandestine (1982) - I believe this was Ellroy's first attempt to write about his mother's murder. I haven't read it. See above.

Lloyd Hopkins series: Blood on the Moon (1983), Because the Night (1984), Suicide Hill (1986) - these are the earliest of his books that I have read. Available in a handy omnibus format, they are Ellroy-like in their pretty graphic violence, and the high regard he holds women in is evident too, which comes out more forcefully in later books. However. Ellroy acknowledges the influence of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, and much of the serial-killer type content in a couple of these doesn't really ring true: because, of course, it never does. Ellroy is much, much better when fictionalising real life events and characters.

Silent Terror, known as Killer on the Road in the States (1986) - I have this in my to be read pile. I don't think it is amoung his strongest work, being his first real attempt at autobiography in his fiction. It's a first person serial-killer thing. I'll let you know when I have read it.

The Black Dahlia (1987) - Ellroy's first classic, and the first book in the LA Quartet. He had for many years closely aligned the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short with that of his mother, and this book is his attempt at cahtharsis. It makes excellent use of some of the modernist elements of Ellroy's style, notably the insertion of (fictional) newspaper clippings and police reports, often following one by one describing the same events, so with each one you build up a bigger picture of what is going on. It's gruesome, gripping and the book where he really came into his own.

The Big Nowhere (1988) - The first book to feature Dudley Smith (edit: just realised this is a lie, he appears in Clandestine, apparently), though here only in very much a background role. The storyline is pretty bizaare, and unpleasant, involving communists, gay cops, an actor with a severely nacissistic streak, police corruption, drug deals and all sorts else besides. It's the real start of Ellroy's fiendishly complicated plotlines. Trouble is, much of the story is taken up with the hunt for a serial killer, and so I found it therefore pretty unsatisfactory in itself. It is essential reading, however, if only because it sets up the work of genius that is

LA Confidential (1990) - The book that really set Ellroy apart from anyone else writing crime fiction, anywhere, anytime, as far as I am concerned. The brutality, darkness and seediness that infests the novel grips the reader in. In this book Ellroy also starts really developing his style, the scattergun use of clipped sentences, one word sentences, one word paragraphs. Alliteration, too - sometimes you feel you are reading a scandal rag like those lampooned by 'Hush-Hush'. Ellroy claims he writes about men better than anyone else on the planet, and he has a point. Probably his most famous book, what with Curtis Hanson's film being released to tumultous praise in 1997. The film is brilliant, the book shits on the film from a great height. It has some good jokes, too.

White Jazz (1992) - Have only read this once, a couple of years ago. It's widely considered Ellroy's best, even better than LA.... I think it requires a re-read from me. Dave Klein, an LAPD detective, gets embroiled in the Dudley Smith / Ed Exley feud. The twists and movements and jumps in perspective come one after the other, and it is often hard to know who is on who's side at any one time. I think that's the intention, though. The Ellroy site says this: "When his editor asked Ellroy to shorten his 900 page work to 350, Ellroy did so by eliminating the verbs. Stylistically, it's the strangest prose Ellroy's written." Too right. The last of the LA Quartet.

American Tabloid (1994) - The start of Ellroy's move away from 'straight' crime fiction and into a genre busting historical/noir/crime/politics thing he calls the 'Underworld USA' trilogy. This is brilliant, my second fave Ellroy and features his greatest character, Pete Bondurant. Telling the story of JFK's assasination, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco from the viewpoint of the Mob, the FBI and the political establishment. I guess it might put people off - 'duh, another JFK conspiracy book' but it's well worth reading for the other bits, which make up 90% of the narrative. Indispensible reading.

Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories (1994) - This is a collection of short stories centered on the characters in the LA Quartet. I haven't read this yet, but own it and am looking forward to it. I believe it is known as Hollywood Nocturne in the US.

My Dark Places (1996) - Shocking. Part true crime, part memoir, this book details the murder of Ellroy's mother, the failed police investigation, his life subsequent to that, and his own attempt to solve the crime. He fails in that, but the book is a triumph. I've read some reviews which claim the descriptions of police procedure drag, but they must be wimps: Ellroy's momentum carries you through. What shocks is Ellroy's candour, especially about his own feelings and failings. Excellent.

Crime Wave (1999) - A collection of Ellroy's true crime (mostly) pieces from GQ. I don't have this, so can't comment, though I think someone might have mentioned it disparagingly to me in the past. Ellroy does have something of a fetish for documenting routine police procedures, which could get irritating, I guess. I'll have to wait and see.

The Cold Six Thousand (2001) - This was Ellroy's first full length fiction for five years, and the follow-up to American Tabloid, and is a beast. Long, inpenetrable, complicated and violent, it is brilliant. Some reviewers attacked it's style, which I'll admit is an acquired taste, but their inability to stick with it shows what a lily livered bunch of geeks they must be. The story mesmerises you - you haven't a clue what is going on half the time, but who cares?! It's a wild ride, and Ellroy treats his most endearing character (the afore-mentioned Bondurant) well and generally it ends pretty satisfactorilly for the reader, if not the protagonists, which makes forn a nice change.

Destination: MORGUE! (2004) - Another collection of different bits of prose, I'm not sure if some of the essays have been published elsewhere or not - there aren't any acknowledgements. Covering true crime, boxing and autobiographical pieces, as well as a three part novella, Ellroy is again at his most confessional, and it is electric stuff. Ellroy's style is of course heavily stylised - he writes like no one else - and this applies itself to his non-fiction as it does his fiction.

The most startling thing, though, is when the two collide. Early in the book, Ellroy discusses the LAPD Cold Case team, two members of which are Rick Jackon and Dave Lambkin. In the novella that closes the book, the 'hero' is called, er, Rick Jensen. His mate is Dave Slatkin - and they work on the Cold Case team. They also end up doing some pretty unpleasant stuff, and Jensen certainly harbours some pretty unpleasant prejudices. Even though all Ellroy's recent books are shot through with real-life characters, they usually are so distant that it makes no difference. But having a read a sympathetic portrayal of these men earlier in the same book, it makes for pretty weird reading.

Enjoyable, though. The tale of Jensen and his on-off affair with actress Donna Donahue is at the same time unreal and super-realistic. They only seem to get together when one of them is in danger and it usually ends with Donahue killing someone. Ahum. But it is a really entertaining romp, and well worth reading for both Ellroy completists and the casual reader.

Of the non-fiction, the pick is certainly the two autobiogrpahical essays, "Where I get my Weird Shit" and "My Life as a Creep". They are as horrifying and amusing as their titles suggest. Ellroy's life, as I mentioned above is a fascinating one and I still can't believe how he got from there to here. But thank God he did.



The follow up to The Cold Six Thousand and the last of 'Underworld USA' is putatively titled Police Gazette and should be published towards the end of 2005. I can't wait. After that, Ellroy is moving onto the 1920s. The man just doesn't stop.

 

[lenny nero]

I've read all of his work and the only one that disappointed me was Killer On the Road. Probably because it wasn't written in his usual prose. He's been on an incredible run since The Black Dahlia, every book just keeps getting better, it's just incredible, I hope he keeps it up forever.

 

[lenny nero]

Finally! Due in Sept:



I can't believe it's been 8 years since The Cold Six Thousand. This is my most anticipated book of the year. I can't wait.

 

[Peder]

Well, add another whole bunch to the buy list! Although I have read The Black Dahlia. So that's a start.
It happened during my time and I remember the tabloid coverage, so I've been keeping a casual eye on the multiple books about it by now, each with their own theory.

And many, many thanks for the Ellroy rundown.
Sincerely.
:flowers:

 

[lenny nero]

Interview from the new Rolling Stone

James Ellroy's American Apocalypse

The master of modern noir has completed an epic secret history of America - a trilogy so dark that he lost his mind writing it

SEAN WOODS

Posted Oct 06, 2009 4:51 PM

On a recent New York morning, James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed "Demon Dog" of American fiction, is in a good mood. "I feel like the weight of a lifetime has been lifted off me," he says, sitting in a hotel room. "I'm 61, and I feel like a kid. All I've wanted, ever, was to write great fucking novels, have a couple of dogs and **** women. What else is there? I mean, a good hamburger's OK, but. . . ."

Ellroy is a master of shtick. Over the course of a few minutes he can veer from over-the-top braggadocio ("I'm the Beethoven of crime fiction") to hipster jive ("can't make the scene without caffeine") to unapologetic perversion ("I'm a sex fiend!") to biblical righteousness ("I'm a Scottish minister's son, and I believe in privation and a personal responsibility to God"). Best known for his modern noir classic L.A. Confidential, Ellroy has just released Blood's a Rover, the last novel in his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. The book completes his bleak and disturbing vision of the metastasized cancers at the heart of the midcentury American empire — from the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam to J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes — as seen through the interconnected schemes and criminal enterprises of rogue FBI agents, homicidal cops, mobsters and contract killers.

Ellroy's obsession with the dark side of America can be traced to the well-documented traumas of his early years: his mother's unsolved murder, his ne'er-do-well father who died not long after. A teenage voyeur who broke into women's homes to steal their lingerie, Ellroy washed out of the Army and spent the next decade addicted to speed and booze, jailed for petty thefts and often homeless, living on the streets of L.A. After sobering up in 1977, he began earning a living as a golf caddie, got some books published, then emerged out of nowhere as the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, with a distinctive and brutal style that one critic described as "so hard-boiled it burns the pot."

But as his fame grew, Ellroy's personal life grew darker. Two marriages crumbled, and he threw himself deeper into his work — and wound up suffering a mental breakdown in 2001, during the book tour for The Cold Six Thousand. "Flew too high, worked too hard," he says. "Crazy suppressed shit came out and just blew up in my face." Now, eight years later, he's finishing up a memoir called The Hilliker Curse and enjoying the release of Blood's a Rover, a giant historical noir that provides a romantic coda to his Underworld U.S.A. series. The protagonists, whom Ellroy calls "right-wing leg-breakers," pursue redemption in the form of a left-wing agitator named Joan, making it like so many of his novels: three men obsessed with a single woman over the course of a great big bloody book.


Your Underworld U.S.A. trilogy covers 1958 to 1972, the years when you were most marginalized — homeless, addicted. Is that one of the reasons you wanted to write about that period?

The trilogy derives entirely from my reading of Don DeLillo's novel Libra in 1988. It's told largely from the viewpoint of Lee Harvey Oswald, and DeLillo makes him the single greatest, most fully realized loner in American history. It was also the first time I had seen, in literature, an unintelligent and malleable dipshit portrayed with such empathy and complexity. I realized, "Holy shit — this fucking book is so fucking good that now I can't write about the Kennedy assassination." But then I began to see that I could write a trilogy that would chart all the harbingers of JFK's assassination and create a complete human infrastructure of big public events. After the L.A. Quartet, I didn't want to write anything that could be categorized as a crime novel. I wanted to explore a theme that I call the "private nightmare of public policy."

What's the private nightmare?

The outline of American history from 1958 to '63 is iconic and well-known: the emergence of the civil rights movement, the ascent of JFK, J. Edgar Hoover's repressive shit, the Mob, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then the decade of revolution in the youth culture, the continuing nightmare in Vietnam, more bombs, more crazy CIA shit, political assassinations. We know that. That's the public policy. But who's out there taking names, doing the wiretapping, breaking legs, shaking people down, making a buck out of it — and suffering the convoluted morality of it? Who's coming to the point where they can't do it anymore, and what makes them change? That's the private nightmare. That's Blood's a Rover.

This is a very dark trilogy. Did it **** you up writing the books?

It fucked me up completely. I inhabited the souls of these leg-breakers. I stayed with them morally and spiritually. But Blood's a Rover is about the necessity of revolution and change. This book goes somewhere entirely different from the first two.

Deeper into the moral consequences of violence and corruption?

Right. Blood's a Rover is where the people who have been through the shit of 1958 to 1968 start talking about what it all means. I lived through that shit. I sensed it going on around me but (a) I was bombed until '77, and (b) I was an outlier in just a lot of ways. I was never a rock & roll guy; I was always a classical-music guy. I was never a peacemaker; I was a ****-you right-winger. I've got a weird view of American history that I think is viable and allows me to spread empathy around fairly evenly.

Do you think it's naive to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

It would be a triumph of spatial logic and empirical thinking over imagination to believe that something else wasn't going on. I look at the lone-gunman theory and think, "It doesn't make moral, historical or metaphysical sense to me, so I'm just going to reject it." And it's a better fucking story my way. So I won't argue about the lone gunman — I don't give a shit. So what? **** you. Who's your daddy? Who's got the better story to tell? Guess what, it's me.

One of your characters, a young right-winger named Don Crutchfield, is so willfully out of step with the times that he seems like a fictionalized version of you.

That's me — a big guy with a crew cut and straight-leg pants in the Summer of Love wondering why he can't get laid. "Well, maybe if you quit jacking off and listen to rock & roll instead of Beethoven, you might be a little more likely." In the book, Crutchfield doesn't know what to do for Christmas. He's never been laid, and he's 23, and he's lonely. He's a peeper, and he's got two options: go to midnight service in the Lutheran church, or go peep black women in South Central L.A. That's me in a nutshell.

Do you still have those right-wing tendencies?

Right-wing tendencies? I do that to **** with people. I thought Bush was a slimebag and the most disastrous American president in recent times. I voted for Obama. He's a lot like Jack Kennedy — they both have big ears and infectious smiles. But Obama is a deeper guy. Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze. Jack did a lot of dope.

So why do you still seem to identify with the right-wing goons you create?

I'm a Christian, and my books are stories of redemption. I show you the karmic consequences of horrific deeds. More often than not, I want you to love my characters in the end because they have transcended. They have found something bigger, deeper, morally surer than themselves.

You once wrote that Dashiell Hammett perfectly captured the American notion that a job can destroy a person. Is that what happens to your characters?

The core of Hammett's art is the masculine figure in American society — he is a job holder. He goes at his job with a ruthless determination and has an unwillingness to look beyond it. That's who these guys of mine are. They are so fucking proficient, even as their lives are in precipitous decline. They're eaten up, but they're driven by their inbred American sense of responsibility. There's an undercurrent of tenderness that's driving them as they go about doing their jobs so very ruthlessly.

The way you portray J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping is very present-day, especially given what happened under Bush.

I don't know what I pick out of the zeitgeist. I'm not being disingenuous — I honestly don't know. Let me tell you about my life. I'm 61. I exercise a lot, I don't drink, I don't use drugs, I don't sleep very well. I'm very limited in my interests. I've got a big apartment, I've got a big sports car. I quit running around trying to get married. "Get married and impregnate women" hasn't played out for me. My life has become a matriarchy. I talk to Helen Knode, my ex-wife, my girlfriends and colleagues on the phone. I've never used a computer. I'm not shitting you — I'm cut off from the world.

Your life was such a disaster for so long. Did you ever think you wouldn't make it?

I was always looking to get off, and I had a very pronounced cold streak. But as fucked up as I was, I always had faith. And I loved to laugh. I could always go in a corner, scratch my balls, jack off, pull some dipshit stunt, like dining and dashing. I needed to make my way out in the world because my dad was completely fucked up. I never felt pissed off about it. I never felt like, "Ooh, I don't have a family." I always wanted a family.

That's surprising. Given your books, it's easy to believe that you see the world as an unrelentingly dark place.

No, no, I'm not a misanthrope. I'm optimistic. Heck, I think human beings can evolve over time. I like people — in a distanced way [laughs]. Individuals have prominence over their psyches and can liberate themselves from horrible states of being as the world goes to shit around them. And I've chosen to do that.

In your upcoming memoir, "The Hilliker Curse," you express regret for the way you sold books by using your mother's murder.

I was young and callous. But now I realize my mother and I are not a murder story. We are a love story. And the central story I have to tell is women. I knew that if I consciously applied my talent and my brain power to the persona of my mother, it would lead me to be more receptive to women in general.

In the memoir you also write about your overpowering lust for women. But on another level, you're very puritanical.

I want women. But it's discerning, it's tender. I don't see sex as being inherently squalid — I see the marketing of sexuality and the vulgarization of sex as being depraved. They've denuded and made common something holy and sacred. We need to reinvest in sex, have less sex, wait till the eighth date before you **** and suck.

In "Blood's a Rover," you seem obsessed with Joan, the left-wing Jewish activist.

I wrote this book for a woman I was in love with named Joan. It was the first time I ever did that. I've started following women involuntarily who look like Joan. You just walk 10 yards, and it's not her.

But you keep following?

I eventually come to my senses. Definitely a fucking brain click.

Do you still peep women?

Yeah. Yeah, I do. I stay in on holidays. I live in a deco building on the edge of Hollywood. One holiday, I was peeping this big-ass redhead. She was flipping burgers, and her blouse would come up, and she would pull it down. She bent down way low, and I could see her bra strap. Then my buddy called and said, "What are you doing, Ellroy? Come on out here, we're cooking." I said, "I don't want any food; I'm peeping. Leave me the **** alone."

Do you feel guilty about that?

No.

Why not? Do see voyeurism as a form of appreciation?

Yeah, you want to be saved. You're genetically wired to salvation, and women are our beacons in the night.

And that doesn't strike you as weird?

I am utterly cut out to be in dark rooms talking to women on the telephone and working. My buddy called recently and said, "Hey, we got an extra ticket for Fleetwood Mac." What the ****? I'd rather watch flies **** in Alabama. I live in a vacuum so that I might go back and live more assiduously in pockets of American history.

Is that the secret to your success?

There are greater writers out there, and more gifted writers. What I am is a thinking machine. I see myself as emblematic of extreme drive and ambition and focus. It's given me hyperacuity. I can write like a motherfucker, and man, do I rigorously think about shit and what it all means.

What led to your mental breakdown?

I went through a period of months and months where I was in love with a married woman who was never gonna leave her husband. I'd just be surrounded by that big fuckin' cosmic nothingness. You could say it's the issue of not being able to be with the woman you love. But more than anything else, it was just being alone in the cosmos and knowing that you're gonna die.

Did you see it coming?

It was the shit of a lifetime just oozing out of my palms. Physical stress, overwork, fissuring unconsciousness, boorishness, recklessness. Much too much mental energy expended for too many years. Raging panic attacks and horrible insomnia fits. I was just gone. I was way out of my emotions — shit roared through me at 1,000 rpms. I couldn't hold anything back. And I couldn't control anything through narrative. It was the worst time in my life.

You ended up in an institution, right?

Yeah, a bunch of them. Overnight at the nut ward in Monterey, overnight in the nut ward in Tucson. There was no rubber hose, but I was bombed, what can I tell ya? Before I knew it, I was back at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel jackin' off to pictures of Anne Sexton — in clothes! A dead poet! That's how fucked up I am! [Laughs]

Did you learn anything from losing your mind?

I learned a lot from the crackup. I want to write great books and be good to people, and to shamelessly promote myself. But nothing's worse than an ambitious person with no control. Someone who'll hustle anybody, shabbily. No one wants to have anything to do with people like that.

So it made you a better writer?

I wanna continue to write big-ass, shit-kicking, profound books. I'm arrogant, and I'm fearful. But I'm not as fearful as I used to be. The crackup took a lot of my fear away.

 

[lenny nero]

Bonus Interview

Inside the Dark Mind of James Ellroy

The master of modern noir on L.A., racism and ambivalence.

Your new book Blood's a Rover marks a return to writing about Los Angeles for you. Was it strange to move back to L.A.?

I love this place or I wouldn't be here. L.A. I'm from here. I've assimilated this place very, very deeply. My books have been "L.A." on a very big historical scale. Since World War II L.A. has been the place you go to be someone else. It's a big, booming place and it's become more untenable, but it's more diplomatic and it's more egalitarian because the racial lines and gender lines and sexual preference lines have all blurred because we've all been pushed together.

You've been pretty hard on the most famous L.A. noir writer of all, Raymond Chandler — why?

The plots are patchworks — they don't hold together well at all. And I don't think he knew very much about people. Dashiell Hammett knew a great deal about people. And James M. Cain knew a great deal about people. The Chandler wisecracks, and this Phillip Marlowe knight character, bored me for a long time. I read them when I was 17, 18, 19, and dug the shit out of them, and wanted to go back and be Phillip Marlowe — I still want to go back and live in L.A. in the '40s. And so would you, if you saw the way it looked.

Race and racism are such a huge part of this book.

Oh yeah. You're supposed to be seduced and shocked by the casual racism in Blood's a Rover. This book is so full of race shit, it's fucking hilarious shit. There's a lot of scene of black people and white people cracking jokes. And as much as the people grandstand about race in this book, they're driven by racial animus and the idea of racial reconciliation. Because of political correctness we are losing the outrageousness of humor. I always think of Frank O'Connor's line from a million years ago: "a literature that cannot be vulgarized, is not literature at all and will not last."

But do you worry some readers will miss the message of the book by getting offended by it?

If you are a voice in the culture, people want you identified — there's a very, very strong sense of political identification out in the world. From the scattered way that I observe right now, people want to define cultural personages by political stance on the shallowest level and they want to either embrace or reject you on that level and my job is not to make it easy for these people.

You seem very comfortable with yourself despite all your conflicts and ambiguity ...

It's true. But I distrust people who do not err on the side of action. And there's a distinction between being conflicted and being ambivalent. Ambivalence connotes wishy-washiness, being conflicted connotes a clash of dramatic choices. And so I despise the idea of shades of grey or ambiguity standing as ultimate moral value or literary value.

 

[velocipede2288]

Thanks Toadal for the list. I shall have to look out for him. He is one I have never read.

 

[753C]

Just starting

I just started The Black Dahlia based partly on this thread and partly on my enjoyment of the movie "LA Confidential".
So far... Wow. The pacing and language are superb. I have already become engrossed. This will be a quick read for me.
Thanks for the reviews.

 

[K M Britt]

Thank you for the list.

 

[753C]

Dahlia

Just finished the Black Dahlia. I am a new James Ellroy fan.
The pacing is relentless and the story itself is unapologetically brutal. Ellroy's post war LA is no candy land - full of wretched drug addicts, slimy politics and sociopathic police officers. The story and subplots are unveiled at a blinding pace with plenty of twists and turns along the way. Officer Bleichert's descent into obsession is frighteningly believable. Not for the fainthearted.

Note to LannyNero: You are two for two with me. I read Dan Simmon's "The Terror" earlier this year based on one of your postings. I enjoyed that a great deal as well. Keep em coming!

 

[lenny nero]

Glad you enjoyed it! The L.A. Quartet gets better with each book, so you've got a lot to look forward to. You should also try to find the film James Ellroy's Feast of Death, where you see him and his LAPD detective friends sit down for dinner and work thru the Dahlia case. Fascinating stuff.

Let me know what you think of The Big Nowhere when you get done. You're gonna love his portrayal of Howard Hughes.

 

[753C]

White Jazz

Just finished White Jazz. I got absorbed despite the fact that I hated the prose style for the first half of the book. It was written in a sort of clipped, intense, no frills, quasi stream of consciousness style that I did not think I was going to be able to take. I stuck with it and am very pleased that I did. I even became acclimated to the writing style somewhere near the middle.
Besides all that, the plot was outstanding. The characters were richly drawn despite the minimal use of description. Really great overall. I preferred the Black Dahlia, but this one is also a winner in my book. I hope the library gets the rest of the quartet in soon or I may have to break down and buy them.

 

[eldog]

I am a massive Ellroy fan although I think that he is a bit of a nutter! My only complaint is that his later novels are especially thick. Sadly with my reading speed it can take quite some time to get through one of those babies!

 

[lenny nero]

Just finished White Jazz. I got absorbed despite the fact that I hated the prose style for the first half of the book. It was written in a sort of clipped, intense, no frills, quasi stream of consciousness style that I did not think I was going to be able to take. I stuck with it and am very pleased that I did. I even became acclimated to the writing style somewhere near the middle.
Besides all that, the plot was outstanding. The characters were richly drawn despite the minimal use of description. Really great overall. I preferred the Black Dahlia, but this one is also a winner in my book. I hope the library gets the rest of the quartet in soon or I may have to break down and buy them.

That clipped style of prose is how he's written every novel since then. I don't believe his non fiction is written that way.

 

[velocipede2288]

Received in the post today. Looking forward to reading them.The Black Dahlia and, L.A. Confidential.

 

[753C]

Let me know what you think of The Big Nowhere when you get done. You're gonna love his portrayal of Howard Hughes.

My library didn't have this one, but Hughes was sort of a fringe character in White Jazz. He didn't seem too endearing............
Come to think of it no one is very likeable in either of these stories. Even the "good guys". Ellroy seems to hold a dim view of humanity in general, at least in his stories. It makes for excellent reading though.

 

[lenny nero]

Hughes has a substantial role in The Big Nowhere. He's also in Blood's a Rover in more of a fringe role.

 

[mmyap]

I just started Black Dahlia last night and I'm loving it. I've never read an Ellroy novel before and I'm not quite sure why. It certainly isn't because I hadn't heard of him. Oh well. Time to get caught up.

 

[velocipede2288]

Started reading L.A. Confidential. And found it hard going. Difficult to follow the disjointed sentences and American and cop slang.If I hadn't seen the film, I wouldn't know what was happening.So gave up at around 30 pages.
Back to Ian Rankin and Collin Dextor for me.

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

I used to love his novels, but haven't read any in quite a while. I also read his life story so understand sort of why he has such a negative viewpoint. I think he is an excellent writer, but do not agree he is the best crime writer around. My main complaint is that, having worked in American law enforcement for 25 years, the cops are not generally as bad as Ellroy makes them out to be. The bad cops are the exception and not the rule.