Back To Darkest Los Angeles

Discovering James Ellroy some thirty-seven years ago was a big deal for me. Starting with The Black Dahlia , in quick succession, I read his seven extant books in a couple of weeks. I picked up, by chance, LA Confidential on my last day in Albany during my first year in grad school and finished half of it on the train ride home. I quickly became an Ellroy proselytizer, pushing his books on anyone I could. I remember my friend, George, got his wife to read them. She was furious with him, and by extension me, for convincing her to read The Big Nowhere and witness the fate of one of its main characters. I got her outrage. To this day, that character's fate remains one of the most emotionally brutal fictional ends as I've ever read.

White Jazz, the final book in the original LA Quartet blew me away, but American Tabloid, the first part of the Underworld USA trilogy, broke me from reading him for years. I ended up giving my hardcover original of the book and the short story collection, Hollywood Nocturnes, to my cousing.

I've dipped my toes back in here or there over the decades, but I just started Perfidia, the first book in a new LA Quartet, set five years before The Black Dahlia. So far, I'm digging it, but even by Ellroy standards, it's bonkers. It's not as sharp as the original books were, but it's fascinating, giving the reader insight into the rise of the main characters in Dahlia, as well as glimpses of numerous others who show up in the later volumes.

Ellroy is a fascinating character. His public persona is intense, over-the-top, and wildly self-promoting. It's a shtick, but a brilliant one. I don't know if still shows up on tv anymore, but he seemed everywhere back in the nineties. He's definitely still doing plenty of print interviews, and he remains the crazed, wild-eyed guy who wrote things like "Cougar Blood Boil!" on a friend's balloon at New York Is Book Country. He's an arch reactionary, but one who claims he doesn't pay attention to politics. He doesn't own a computer or smart phone and exists deeply ensconced in his fictional pre-Watergate America.

Ellroy's biography is a tough one, from the murder of his mother to his own criminal and misspent youth. Along the way, not surprisingly, he became an intense moralist. None of his main characters are free of sin and corruption, but many of them are still able to stand against the darker, true evil that permeates his vision of America. Going back to the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, a series he's essentially disowned, you have a racist, reactionary character, but is driven to enforce some sort of justice.

If he's able to finish the books he has planned, Ellroy will have created a massive  thirteen-volume secret history of Los Angeles and postwar America, from Dec 6, 1941 through 1973. Along the way, he'll have exposed the 'truth' behind such terrible real life events as the Sleepy Lagoon murder, the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka, the Black Dahlia), the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the assassination of JFK. For a man who loves this country, Ellroy has a despairing view of what it's become and who its citizens are.

When I first read Ellroy, his way-beyond-cynical attitude appealed to me. As a know-it-all grad student, it seemed to match my view of the world. Later, as I aged and began to dismiss cynicism as lazy, I soured on him. It's definitely part of my antipathy to the majority of grimdark fantasy. Now, I find myself coming back to Ellroy, because I've changed again, as much as some nostalgic memories of how much I liked his books. I'm still no longer sold on easy cynicism, but as the corruption in this nation, the loss of standards, the loss of redemption, the loss of civic virtue, have all increased in the past thirty years, I find his mix of reaction and outrage appealing. 

I also love his psychotic style, his lunatic plots, his monstrous villains and sin-tarnished heroes. As long as it's been since I've reread the entire LA Quartet, there are scenes and characters that have been scorched into my brain, never to fade. These are crime books like no other crime books. Andrew Vachss' vision of the world might have been as dark, but his books are essentially Doc Savage as hardboiled fiction. Chandler is far more poetic. Hammett is probably the closest, but never crosses into savagery like Ellroy. Forgetting any questions of literary merit, his best books are wild, mind blowing reads.

If someone actually tried to do a straight translation of his work to film, it would be closer to to David Lynch than John Huston or Roman Polanski. Brian DePalma tried, but his effort to convert The Black Dahlia to film was ruined by his own stylistic weaknesses and some bad casting. In the end, it probably can't be done. The film LA Confidential succeeded by dropping most of the book's narrative in exchange for a story about three hard men finding some sort of redemption. It's a great movie, as a recent rewatch reiterated, but it's only a portion of the novel. 

Ellroy's books are overwhelming, ridiculous, monstrous, sentimental, terrifying, hopeful, and often moving. In a interview in The Guardian when Perfidia was released, he said he wanted to write for America like Tolstoy and Balzac had written for their homelands. I've only read a little Tolstoy and no Balzac, but I suspect he's nothing like them stylistically or even thematically. Nonetheless, I suspect a century from now he might be seen as getting as close to the dark side of our shadowed soul as anybody ever will.

The LA Quartet

The Black Dahlia

The Big Nowhere

L.A. Confidential

White Jazz

Underworld USA Trilogy

American Tabloid

The Cold Six Thousand

Bloods A Rover

LA Quintet

Perfidia

This Storm

The Enchanters (see below)

Red Sheet (see below)

Fred Otash

Widespread Panic

The Enchanters (see above)

Red Sheet (see above)

Previous Ellroy Posts

James Ellroy: Grimmer Than Grim, Darker Than Dark

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