COUGAR BLOOD BOIL! - James Ellroy's First L.A. Quartet

Ellroy's mugshot

My one encounter with James Ellroy came in the mid-nineties (probably 1994) at New York Is Book Country. He was hawking his books and asked me to buy the latest, Hollywood Nocturnes. I told him I already had it and everything else as well. He seemed pleased. Then he offered to sign the balloon my friend was carrying. She, of course, let him. With a flourish, he wrote: Cougar Blood Boil! No one could have asked for anything better.

I found James Ellroy during grad school (1989-1991) when I was in the middle of an obsession with true crime. Right after I had seen something about the murder of Liz Short, aka the Black Dahlia, I remembered seeing a book in the mystery section of the mall bookstore called The Black Dahlia (1987). With no idea of the author's name, I had to go through the shelves, book by book. And then I found it, the author someone I'd never heard of before: James Ellroy.

The first sentence just hinted at the dark obsession that the novel would quickly emerge as the core of one of the most intensely haunting and brutal books I had ever read.

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them. Working backward, seeking only facts, I reconstructed her as a sad little girl and a whore, at best a could-have-been - a tag that might equally apply to me.

Narrated by LAPD detective Bucky Bleichert, The Black Dahlia is the story of his friendship with another cop, Lee Blanchard, and his girlfriend, Kay Lake, and the real-life murder in 1947 of Elizabeth Short. Solving Short's murder displaces everything in Bleichert's life, dragging him deeper and deeper into circles of corruption and depravity that would make Caligula blush.

Ellroy took the 1940s Los Angeles of the great film noirs and Raymond Chandler and turned it into a psychotic fantasy hopped up on violence, booze, sex, and racism. Chandler famously wrote : 

down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

This is not the case for Beichert or any of the protagonists in Ellroy's books. They are brutal, liars, drunks, and abusers. Still, some of them still have something buried away that still lets them grasp for justice or deliver vengeance in its absence.

The Black Dahlia changed my attitude toward crime fiction. While I had grown up watching every mystery show imaginable (from the brilliant Rockford Files down to the ridiculous Quincy and anything in between), but I had never developed a taste for crime and mystery novels. This book changed all that. 

Once I had plowed through all of Ellroy's available catalogue I turned to the two best-known hardboiled writers, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I still have to read some of their novels, but I quickly burned through all their short stories. Hammett's Continental Op stories and Chandler's Marlowe stories are brilliant. The Black Lizard editions of their books led me to the Black Lizard editions of Chester Himes' series of novels about two black NYPD detectives; Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Those books, all read over 1990 and 1991, set me on the path of reading crime fiction for which I'll be forever grateful.

The Black Dahlia was followed by three more books; The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). Together, they were called the L.A. Quartet. Each weaves together fictional and historical figures and sets them against the great economic engines of L.A., first home building, then Hollywood, and finally Disney. Ellroy's L.A. is a bottomless-gulletted monster that devours innocence and pukes up sin and corruption. The latter is mere political shenanigans, but the Biblical, soul-destroying stuff. It's not for the timid - it's epically harrowing - but the reward is one of the greatest undertakings in crime writing. (If you like the movie L.A. Confidential - which I do - just know that it eliminated an entire subplot involving a child killer who happens to be the son of a Walt Disney stand-in)

Ellroy's writing is akin to Chandler's but hopped up on speed and booze. As the quartet proceeded, the writing became increasingly elaborate and the storytelling complex and complicated. With White Jazz, he flipped the table. Supposedly in response to his editor's request to trim the book's length, instead of excising sub-plots, he eliminated any words he could. White Jazz is the memoir of a corrupt cop on speed and it reads that way:

Robbery, sweet duty: jack up heist guys and boost their shit.

Work the Commie: phone calls.

Fred Turentine, bug man-yes for five hundred. Pete Bondurant-yes for a grand-and he'd pay the photo guy. Pete, Hush-Hush cozy-more heat on the smear.

 The Women's Jail watch boss ower me; a La Verne Benson update cashed her out. La Verne-prostituion beef number three-no bail, no trial date. La Verne to the phone-suppose we lose your rap sheet-yes! yes! Yes!

Antsy-my standard postmurder shakes. Antsy to itchy-drive.

After not having read anything by Ellroy all the way through in a long time, I'm thinking it might be time for a revisit. At some point, I overdosed. I was exhausted after I finished American Tabloid (1995), the first of the Underworld USA trilogy. I bought the second book, The Cold Six Thousand (2001) and never read it. I never bothered buying the final one, Blood's a Rover (2009), and eventually sold the first two. He'd abandoned the crazed experiment of White Jazz and crafted something too-similar to the Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential but amped up a million white-hot degrees. It just wasn't worth it. 

That was over twenty years ago, so it might be time to revisit Ellroy. I never reneged on my love for the L.A. Quartet. When they came out, I bought copies of Perfidia and This Storm, but I before I go at them, I really think I need to go back to where it all started in The Black Dahlia. 

James Ellroy: grimmer than grim, darker than dark

Spurred on by nothing in particular, I watched the movies made from two of James Ellroy's gonzo LA Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).

The former is an expensive and elaborate failure, starring the usually solid Aaron Eckhart and the often too-stolid Josh Hartnett. The rest of the roles are taken up by good people suffering under a bad script: Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Fiona Shaw, and a host of talented character actors. 

Its failure, I believe arises from two main points. The first is Brian De Palma, a director given to highly stylized shots and who approached the material in ways I find sterile. Nothing feels alive; things are too shiny, too clean, too new. The music is more emphatic and on the nose than is good for the film. There are several of De Palma's patented slow-mo shots. That's something that almost never works in a movie, and it doesn't work here. It only drags out a scene of a killing robbing it of the vicious intensity it deserves.

The second is its attempted fidelity to Ellroy's original material. Yes, De Palma seriously edited the film and that might have made it a little less coherent that it could have been, but I think there's something else going on. Ellroy's books are weird and effed up. To call them over the top is way beyond understatement. De Palma attempted to channel Ellroy's madness into the movie. I think he actually achieves a certain degree of success with that, but the material overwhelms. It's like Stephen King dialogue. It reads great on the page but sounds terrible when spoken out loud. Ellroy's books achieve levels of outrageousness that are so extreme and unbelievable that seeing them acted out by real people only points out how ludicrous they are. Even if Hilary Swank was the best actress ever, I don't think she could pull off some of the lines or scenes she was given. 

As I rewatched the movie, I found didn't hate it as much as I did the first time. Sure, De Palma made lots of mistakes, from the look, to the casting, to the script, but in the end, the biggest flaw seems to be the near impossibility of bringing Ellroy to the screen without setting aside so much of what makes his books such a roar of feral insanity.

L.A. Confidential strips Ellroy's story down to the barest of basics. Gone are the crazy serial killer, the unsavory Walt Disney stand-in, and a host of other things. Ellroy said the movie eliminated 5 out of the book's 8 plots and focused on the three protagonists' attempt to redeem themselves. Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe are powerful as the two main leads, Ed Exley and Bud White, and the lamentable Kevin Spacey is perfect as the sharp-dressed, publicity hungry Jack Vincennes. James Cromwell is terrifying as Dudley Smith, one of the greatest literary villains of all time (side note - a friend of mine thought the perfect casting for Dudley Smith would have been John Wayne, and I hesitate to disagree). All those directorial mistakes I said De Palma made, Confidential's director, Curtis Hanson made none of them. Even though both were shot largely in Los Angeles, only Hanson makes it look like a real place, not some highly polished, model-precise recreation. If you've somehow escaped seeing it and have a taste for tough-minded noir give it a try. I'd be curious to hear what any first time viewers think about it.

So far, I've been writing assuming a knowledge of Ellroy and a familiarity with his writing. In case I am wrong (what's the chance of that?), James Ellroy is author incredibly dark and violent crime fiction. From a life of petty crime, extreme poverty, and drug abuse, Ellroy dragged himself up and turned himself into a writer. A major element driving his fiction, appearing in one slightly altered version or another in many of his earlier works, was the 1958 murder of his mother (about which he wrote the book My Dark Places and writes about here as well).

Ellroy's prose can verge into deeply purple territory, but it is often magnificent, capable of exposing the still-beating hearts of his characters and exposing the gory infections that lace our world. His stories are built of violence, often against women, often against the innocent. His characters speak in profanity, hurl racist epithets, steal, murder, undermine the law, and still, some of them are redeemed. Never, though, does the brutality of Ellroy feel glib or cheap.

They can be hard books to read and I know several people who were repelled by them. I was moved by these stories of broken men trying to find a way out of the Abyss as well as caught up by velocity and excitement of the of the insane  plots. I'm about to begin a reread of the L.A. Quartet, and as I do, I'll let you know my thoughts on them now nearly thirty years after I first encountered them.

The way I discovered Ellroy was completely by accident. I read something about the actual Black Dahlia case and suddenly remembered seeing a book with that title in Barnes and Noble. Not the other, but the cover. I had to scan a bunch of the shelves before I eventually found it. I took it home and finished it within a day or two. Two tough cops, both with dark secrets, become obsessed with the horrific murder of Betty "the Black Dahlia" Short in 1947. Around them swirls a maelstrom of corruption - moral, political, and physical.

It's a work built on a vision of the world as black and rotten as seen by an arch-moralist. There is good and evil, and sometimes, even bad men can lift themselves up to fight it. No matter the cost to their careers, even their lives, the need to avenge certain wrongs becomes the driving force in their lives. It's melodramatic noir with a bleak view of mankind but with an allowance for glimmers of hope, even if they are fleeting.

The next day I started tracking down everyone of his books. Within a few weeks I read the sequel to Dahlia, The Big Nowhere (1988) and the sort of prequel, Clandestine (1982). The Big Nowhere is claimed by some to be Ellroy's masterwork. I haven't read it in ages so I don't feel up to addressing that, but it does have one of his few truly good characters and a serial killer disemboweling his victims with dentures made from wolverine teeth. Clandestine is even vaguer in my memory, but what lingers is a less controlled and less satisfying tryout of the themes and styles that would materialize in The Black Dahlia.

A short time later, I was reading Ellroy's first novel, Brown's Requiem (1981) and the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. Requiem involves golf caddies, something Ellroy did for a time, and the Hopkins books are about a brilliant but ultra-intense LAPD detective. The first book in the trilogy, Blood on the Moon (1984), was filmed as Cop, and starred James Woods and Lesley Anne Warren. It's ok, no great shakes, but it's ok. The next two books, Because the Night (1984) and Suicide Hill (1986) are dark thrilling tales, but contain only the barest hints of what was to come a few years later in The Black Dahlia.

At some point, I read Killer on the Road (1986), a thoroughly disgusting and disturbing story told from a serial killer's perspective. It takes its lead from his creepy childhood to his plans for self-willed death in prison. I read it during my lengthy obsession with serial killers, but I've never felt the slightest desire to go back to it. Even when the worst of the worst stuff happens in other Ellroy books, there's bound to be some big lug looking for a way to achieve redemption. That is not the case, in any way whatsoever, in Killer on the Road.

Right after I finished my mad dash through Ellroy's catalogue, the third LA Quartet book, L.A. Confidential, was released. I bought on my last day in Albany for my first year of grad school and read half of it on the train ride home. It's a brutal and brilliant book, and waiting the two years for the sequel, White Jazz, was painful. It was worth it though. Instead of the sprawling three-protagonist template he'd employed in Nowhere and Confidential, Ellroy presented White Jazz as the diaries of a corrupt speed-freak cop. It's like burning phosphorus on the page, burning with an intensity and a passion that isn't easily shaken or forgotten. 

I even got to meet Ellroy briefly right around the time White Jazz came out. He was hocking his books personally at a stand at New York is Book Country. He was exactly how you might imagine: wild eyed and talking non-stop. I had stopped to look at his table and realized I had everything already. When I told him I wasn't going to buy anything because I owned them all, he offered to sign my friend's balloon. In wiry letters, he wrote:

COUGAR BLOOD BOIL - JAMES ELLROY

She kept that balloon for years.

With L.A. Confidential and White Jazz, Ellroy broke into the big times. He was writing magazine pieces, there were interviews with him all over the place, and there was even a documentary made about him. It's also the time I started to fall out of love with him.

First there was the short story collection, Hollywood Nocturnes (1994). All that outrageousness that made his previous novels so great had become clichéd and too outrageous. Singer and actor Dick Contino hunts for a serial killer and tries to restore his reputation. I don't doubt Ellroy found some serious inspiration in the real Contino, but the results feel forced and predictable in their deliberate extravagance. 

His next novel, American Tabloid (1995) was the start of a new series, something that came to be called the Underworld USA Trilogy. It's a massive tome that purports to tell the real story of the corruption that undergirds America, rotting away political institutions, bending the public sector to the will of organized crime and business - though there's no real delineation between the two. I liked it at the time, digging it as a wild ride, but it struck me as a little hollow. In piling so many things on - Jimmy Hoffa, the hunt for commies, the Bay of Pigs - it was hard to really care about the characters as people. So many things happen, it's way too easy to get lost in the endless welter of Ellroy's hyper-detailed storytelling and inability to walk away from a subplot or digression. Even though I sort of like the book at the time, somehow I knew I was done with Ellroy. By the time the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), came out, I knew I was never going to read it.

Eventually, I gave my cousin my copy of Hollywood Nocturnes, American Tabloid, and a book of non-fiction pieces called Crime Wave (1999). I kept the rest, though. First, I had acquired hardcover first editions of the LA Quartet and liked the way they looked on the shelf. The paperbacks of his earlier books looked nice too, and I think I had somewhere a notion I'd read, at least, the Lloyd Hopkins books again.

I was first tempted to go back to the L.A. Quartet a few years ago when he published Perfidia (2014). It unfolds over 23 days, starting on Dec. 6, 1941. Dudley Smith and several other characters from the L.A. Quartet are among the protagonists in another complicated tale of crime and corruption in the City of Angels. For whatever reason, I didn't, neither rereading The Black Dahlia and the others, nor buying Perfidia. Now, I'm ready. I've got a copy of Perfidia winging its way towards me in the mail and have started The Black Dahlia. So far, it's still able to grab me in its dark embrace.

Crime Fiction

   So I lied. Instead of Megan Lindholm's Harpy's Flight, I read and reviewed Steven Brust's Jhereg, first in his long and ongoing Vlad Taltos series (it came in the mail and Lindholm's book didn't). If you haven't read it you should - it's a blast. On the surface it's a nice bit of hardboiled fantasy, complete with snazzy banter and witty rejoinders and set in the criminal demimonde. In reality it's more a Golden Age mystery, more concerned with the puzzle than any sort of existential dread or moody, tough-guy antics.

  The only genre fiction I read with any sort of regularity besides fantasy is crime. I grew up in a house surrounded by mystery books but I didn't start reading anything in the field until I picked up James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia because I was a little too interested in the actual murder. I liked it and figured since I'd always watched mystery tv-shows and movies I'd probably like other crime writing as well. I did and began a quick review most of the classic authors in the field - Christie, Sayers, Hammet, Chandler, etc. - before moving on to newer authors. This happened at a time when I was becoming bored with sci-fi and not encountering much fantasy that caught my eye so I was ready for something new.

   All of that's a long winded way of saying I really like mysteries and crime fiction and Steven Brust did  a great job creating a fantasy version of that. It's not as hardboiled as Glen Cook's Garrett series. In fact I was a little surprised when I started writing my review (way too late in the day and way too quickly - the crap my wife/editor is subjected to by my writing when I work like that is ridiculous) that I was thinking of the book as light and breezy. Maybe it's because when I think of heavy duty hardboiled crime stories it's from the likes of James Ellroy (and by the by, if that sort of stuff interests you AND you have a strong stomach, check out his Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy or the psychotically brilliant L.A. Quartet - Extra warning - Just because you liked the movie L.A. Confidential does not mean you'll like the book - all the really disturbing stuff was left out) or Ross MacDonald. There's something magnitudes beyond bleak in their books that Jhereg doesn't have. It's not a bad or good thing, just a thing, but Brust's book is definitely written with a lighter touch.

   By those standards, Jhereg's much more like the American Golden Age style crime fiction of Rex Stout and a thousand movies and tv shows. Like the UK's Agatha Christie or Margery Allingham, it's really about the sharp, tightly plotted events but everybody gets to make wisecracks, not just the working-class characters. 

   The problem with Golden Age mysteries is that their star characters usually exist in a state of stasis, never really changing and always exhibiting the same set of traits and tics. From what I've read about the later books they do become tougher and more character driven so I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. In an interview with Brust, I read he realized that if Vlad didn't grow and change there was really no point to continue the books. So between the Vlad Taltos and a half dozen or so related books, that's a nice stack of new things to read in the future.

   Prog and heavy music seemed inappropriate to the mostly urban swashbuckling of Jhereg. I decided on a mix of power pop (early Cheap Trick and the first Knack album - the latter's practically perfect despite its lurid smuttiness), and oddball post-punk rock (Camper van Beethoven and Cracker). It was a nice mix of stuff I haven't tuned into for awhile.