Of all living authors, my favorite is without doubt James Ellroy. Sprawling epic novels based on terse, tense text. He has a profound message; I often wonder if it can be seen behind his macho posing. Ellroy has made himself the subject of any conversation about his writings to the degree that Tom Wolfe or Kurt Vonnegut did; he dominates American literature today. But there seems to be a hidden agenda in Ellroy's writings that he does his damnest to keep from the public.
It was a seminal moment in his life; it took over twenty years for him to move past that trouble. Moving in with his father, becoming a lost child, morphing into a rather nasty young peeping tom, a disastrous attempt at joining the military; all bad turns. He tells the story repeatedly, even turning it, as well as the search for his mother's killer - it is still an unsolved homicide - into a couple of non-fiction books, one of which was the New York Times' Book of the Year.
Ellroy became a crime obsessed creep, eventually turning to drugs and alcohol. His life washed up, both parents dead, it wasn't until he was nearly 30 that he sobered up, turning his life around. He began writing crime fiction to feed the paperback boom. Interestingly, by his second novel, he was starting to create some of the characters that wound up in his L.A. Quartet, although those were still five years away.
It took six novels for James Ellroy to be able to stop working as a caddy in a country club, becoming a full time author. He was stumbling toward a style, but it wasn't there yet, except that he almost only wrote about the City of Lost Angels, Los Angeles. He didn't really get into his signature neo-noir mode until his seventh novel, 'The Black Dahlia'. It was here that Ellroy's obsessions came together and produced his first masterpiece.
His mother and the unsolved mutilation of a Hollywood party girl meld into a story told as a modern hard boiled detective novel. The protagonists are obsessed, the killers are obsessed. It is told in an obsessive style. It catapulted Ellroy onto the top of the crime fiction field. The following is the oldest video of James that I could find; he has the 'Demon Dog of American Fiction' and the dog howl down, but he is still soft spoken.
With 'The Big Nowhere', the canvas starts to expand. There had been a revival of film noir in the mid 1970s, with 'Chinatown' and a couple of Phillip Marlowe movies starring Robert Mitchum, among others. No one had touched the Red Scare, especially from the point of view of law enforcement working for political advancement. All the pieces were suddenly in place for Ellroy to become a major literary figure.
With 'L.A. Confidential' he did not miss his chance at the big time. Added elements, such as using the lowest forms of writing, such as scandal rag verbiage, turning it into pure poetry, made this a breakout best seller that was soon turned into a successful motion picture. Themes were starting to come into focus, particularly how all our ancestors were really vile and evil under that home spun exterior. Every motivation is doubtful, every outcome bad. The building block of the Ellroy universe was corruption; it was everywhere, and it was growing all the time.
'White Jazz' finished up the L.A. Quartet, establishing Ellroy as a literary force to be reckoned with. His public persona was in place; loud, brash, full of himself to a comical degree. Matched with his literary style, it was easy to consider him a right wing throwback from an earlier age. He wasn't the slightest bit hesitant to push this impression on the viewer, as seen below.
It is hard to tell when he's trying to be funny or trying to be shocking. The language in his novels is accurate for the times, as are the attitudes. I should know; I was alive for part of the time, I heard much worse as a child. Even my own father, who was tolerant of African Americans and Puerto Ricans at a time when most of his contemporaries weren't, would go off on Jews in a nanosecond. We all have prejudices, but they may be invisible in the moment. Time will show us all to be bigots of one stripe or another.
His career took off like a rocket in the mid 1990s, between a series of interconnected epics novels and a hit movie, fed by a public persona that was extremely confrontational. Ellroy went out of his way to look like Nazi bureaucrat, having nothing to do with the modern world - no computer, no cell phone, no social media - becoming a hit on the public appearance circuit. He wrote his funniest story, the novella 'Dick Contino's Blues', a wild mix of real people and 1950s exploitation movie plot, told entirely in 'Hush Hush' language, in 1994. Then he put that style aside and got serious.
The 'Underworld USA' trilogy is by far the best series of books that I have read in my life, bar none. They are brilliant, covering the hidden history of the United States from 1958 to 1972, terrible men doing horrible things while feeling entirely justified. It was a huge change for Ellroy, who had made his reputation from the two things that he left behind in these novels; Los Angeles in the film noir era. What he found was the highest form of literature formed from the lowest elements of culture.
'American Tabloid', a kick to the nuts for over 600 pages, was the New York Time Book of the Year. The very next year, he duplicated the feat with a non-fiction book, the very confessional 'My Dark Places'. He treats his own life as harshly, perhaps even more so, than he treats anyone in his novels. The book is a long rumination over the death of his mother as he tries to solve her murder, in the process reconnecting with a mother that he had felt abandoned by. It is a heartbreaking confession of guilt, and it begins to show the true Ellroy beneath the bluster.
All the above is a long introduction to the specific book that I want to discuss, the second of the 'Underworld USA' novels, 'The Cold Six Thousand.' It suffered what all middle books in trilogies suffer, the mid-point letdown. Remember 'The Two Towers'? Ellroy's novel garnered praise and sold as well, but it wasn't as thrilling. 'American Tabloid' was a daring book; by the second or third chapter, you knew that the conclusion would be the assassination of JFK. You wanted to see how it unfolded, you couldn't believe the audacity of the author, bringing in so many historical figures into his narrative.
'The Cold Six Thousand' has to do that same trick twice, with both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Ellroy doesn't even focus on the murders that much; they feel inevitable as mobsters and government figures simply dispose of inconvenient public figures, knowing that they will get away with murder again. The canvas goes Panavision, large parts of the action taking place in Vietnam, Klan klonklaves in the Deep South, and most especially in Las Vegas. It is bad people getting involved in bad things on a Biblical scale.
There is also something else going on, hidden behind the casual racism and violence. Ellroy is coming out as a closet liberal, even a feminist. As is typical of his bigger novels, there are three strong but misguided men at the heart of the plot. They are pawns in the game of bigger men, instruments used to make things happen, lied to, clueless to the consequences of their actions. It is the three women in the book who are smarter, eventually gaining control of their destiny, something entirely beyond the intelligence of the males.
When you finally get to the last novel - it took fourteen years for Ellroy to finish these three, they are the thickest, most dense prose that I have ever encountered - it may occur to the reader that the real protagonist of the 21,500 page story is J. Edgar Hoover, the only character deeply involved in all the books. I'm old enough to remember Hoover; there was a weekly television series about the FBI playing for my entire childhood, exactly the kind of propaganda bullshit that his evil genius specialized in. He doesn't move the plot. Instead, he is the ultimate voyeur, and the trilogy is really a descent into his senility. It's not pretty, but it is Shakespearian.
In fact, the last great plot twist in this epic concerns a well-known rumor at the time, the secret files that Hoover used to keep himself in power well after mandatory retirement age. The entire world that Ellroy creates is place of comprehensive spying and record keeping, down to the barrage of reports and telephone transcripts that dot the three books. After Hoover's death, the great mystery was; where were the secret files J. Edgar kept on virtually everybody? While it provides a pat ending for the Clint Eastwood documentary, it was used in American Exploitation cinema decades earlier.
That's the key to James Ellroy's art; using exploitation elements and managing to turn them into something greater, a tapestry of our past that is not nice, but accurate. After all, we are a nation built on slavery and exploitation, the twin original sins that have corrupted out body politics to this day. Watching the news every day over this long summer has been like reliving my youth, with Watergate, the fall of Saigon, a nation on the brink of cultural collapse. My memory of the so-called Summer of Love was of people screaming hate in each other's face, not a momentary utopia to be viewed with nostalgia.
The paradox of human existence is that great art comes from troubled times. The period of 'Underworld USA' became, to use a phrase of Ellroy's, a 'shit storm.' We are living in similarly cloudy times. I wonder what new art will reflect it. Meanwhile, here is a long but excellent documentary, 'James Ellroy's Feast of Death', that deals with some of the themes explored here. I urge you to watch. History always repeats.
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