James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars are in alignment for the publication of Blood’s a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history – from 1958 to 1972 – with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred.
Bloodu2019s A Rover
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When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It’s also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit".
Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy.
The Cold Six Thousand
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American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots’ strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy’s beloved "bad white men" – the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players – and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time".
As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy’s world – acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze – there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy’s writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults.
American Tabloid
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Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy’s White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words – one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters’ activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation.
Blood’s a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he’s in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.)
Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes’s right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups.
December 8, 2009
