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Genius of perversion

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2009-11-24

I've always been afraid of reviewing any of James Ellroy's novels on the off chance that he might read it, hate it, and then hunt me down and kill me. Violence and brutal reprisals pour out of Ellroy's work, and the writer himself is a menacing-looking guy — the back cover photo for his latest novel, Blood's A Rover, is a harrowing close-up of Ellroy's lined, troubled, 61-year old face. His eyes are glaring out at the reader, the look an unsettling mixture of implicit threat and naked beseeching, and he's resting his chin on two vein-gnarled fists. His face is lean and he's bald, strikingly bald, unnervingly bald. It's as if his inner monsters and years of harsh living have frightened his own hair into oblivion.

Of course, publicity shots are manufactured for a reason, and it's obvious that Ellroy enjoys playing up his outsized image as a deranged literary boogeyman. In his book talks Ellroy delivers a very funny, jazz-influenced rap that is equal parts bravado, insult and shock effect, and it culminates in a classic exit line that describes his work: "These are books are for the whole f-----' family, if the name of your family is the Manson family." Ellroy clearly relishes his profane and distinctive literary voice, and he's never afraid of being perceived as an unbalanced lunatic. To be honest, I think he truly is an unbalanced lunatic, but he's also a helluva writer, the best crime writer going, the best L.A. writer since Raymond Chandler (whom Ellroy hates.)

Like Andrew Vachss, Ellroy writes bloody psychodramas that emanate from deep-set scars of personal history. Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was ten, the killer never found, and for decades Ellroy has been trying to write himself out of the horror of that experience. His first great novel, The Black Dahlia, the opening book in the "L.A. Quartet" series, references Ellroy's mother's death overtly by examining the greatest unsolved murder in L.A. history, the horrific killing of Elizabeth Short in 1947. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to recognize Ellroy's desire to solve that crime, even if he can only do it fictionally. In Ellroy's most disturbing book, the memoir "My Dark Places," he talks about his mother's death relentlessly, unflinchingly, and you'd wish he'd stop--it's too creepy, too painful, too something. But he doesn't stop, he keeps going, even when it's killing him--it's a trait he shares with many of the characters that populate his operatic horror/crime novels.

To say that Ellroy has a "jaundiced" view of the world is probably an insult to jaundice. In EllroyLand, the power brokers are pimps, the cops are thugs, sexuality is either perversion or pornography, and crude desires are the fuel that propels the World's machinery. Conspiracy is prevalent everywhere — in the "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (of which Blood's A Rover is the concluding chapter), Ellroy hypothesizes that the assassinations that seared the nation's consciousness — JFK, MLK, RFK — were the handiwork of a select group of hard-assed Operatives, morally-suspect provocateurs who maintained a bewildering series of relationships with various radical, governmental, and mob-related figures. It's hard not to be titillated by the theory — JFK's assassination and the subsequent Warren Commission Report helped usher the country into the Age of Paranoia, a time when even the most literal-minded American couldn't help but think that someone's been holding out on the truth. Ellroy's version of history, which should be outlandish and insupportable, is oddly, perversely, plausible.

The labyrinthine structure of Blood's A Rover made me almost sprain my wrist by flipping back and re-reading preceding pages — I could never remember who was on which side, who was being double-crossed, who was playing both sides against each other. At the heart of the story, though, Ellroy places two of America's most dubious post-war titans — J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes — as the biggest spiders in an almost infinite web of deceit and corruption. They remain in the background throughout the entire "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy, yet they're always aware of the various plots and relationships and machinations that the central characters in each book become enmeshed in. Again, this should be unbelievable, but it isn't; both Hughes and Hoover gave off such fear and mystery in their lives that it's easy to accept Ellroy's notion that these two strong-arms were spinning the world with their fingers.

I've read descriptions of Ellroy's literary style in other reviews but no one really nails the distinctive way he builds sentences. It's odd to read his books — Ellroy's voice is a hep-cat mix of jazz jargon, police-radio shorthand, mob talk, scatological outbursts. His sentences are clipped, propulsive; he makes verbs out of onomatopoeias and nonsense and he places you square in the brain of his characters as they hyperventilate their way through blasts of information. Everything is built for speed; even in the longer novels (Blood's A Rover runs over 600 pages) the narrative screams along like a nervy Benzedrine high. After a few impenetrable pages, you start getting it. It's similar to reading in a foreign language, a language you haven't quite mastered but still know enough to get by in. You can't peck at a book like this; you have to read it in big chunks. You have to get obsessive and all strung out on the story.

I'm pretty squeamish about gore and brutality and perversion so I can't quite explain why I like Ellroy's work so much. I have a soft spot for stories about low-lifes and rogues, but usually I gravitate more towards Tom Waits' tenderhearted losers than these buzzsaw creations. Maybe Ellroy knows that perversion and brutality lurk in all our Dark Places, whether we'd like to admit it or not. Stylistically, structurally, Blood's A Rover is virtually indistinguishable from Ellroy's last seven books, and who cares — this book, like the others, is a total thrill. Ellroy's stories are thoroughly creepy, disturbing and nightmare-laden, and I can't get enough of them.