“Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is Manson”.
This is how James Ellroy introduces himself at his readings, usually towering over his audience and sporting a loud Hawaiian shirt, while speaking in his trademark booming voice. Ever since publishing his first novel in 1981, Brown's Requiem, the native Angeleno has been the tough guy of American crime fiction, writing violent and uncompromising epics about the United States' seedy underside. He is the author of over 20 books, including novels, essays, short stories and memoirs, has garnered several prestigious awards, including Time's Book Of The Year in 1995 (with American Tabloid), and has had several of his works adapted into films (he dislikes all of them). Ellroy, however, isn't “just” a writer, he is a Personality with a capital P. He never minces words in interviews and is steadfast in his rejection of the modern world: every book is written by hand. He has reportedly never used a computer. Ellroy starts out with a handwritten outline, spanning several hundred pages, with every detail planned out, before he writes out a whole novel.
L.A. Confidential
Ellroy’s biography is almost as wild as his stories. Born as Lee Earle Ellroy, when he was only 10 years old in 1958, his mother, Jean, was raped and murdered. The case remains unsolved. He went to live with his elderly father, Armand, once the business manager of Hollywood icon Rita Hayworth. Young Ellroy's brush with murder led to a lifelong obsession, with him devouring crime novels by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Joseph Wambaugh. He was a mixed-up kid and out of bounds. His father died when he was 17. After a very short stint in the US Army, Ellroy's life spiralled out of control. His next years were marked by addiction to drugs and alcohol, homelessness and incarceration for minor crimes. After nearly dying from a lung abscess in the late Seventies, Ellroy decided to sober up, get a steady job as a caddie at a golf club and finally realized his one dream: to become a writer. In 1981, he published Brown's Requiem. His sixth book, 1987's The Black Dahlia, hit the big time. “Classic Ellroy” begins here.
James Ellroy was now a best-selling author, with his most famous novel L.A. Confidential still a few years away. And he has never stopped since: his latest book, The Enchanters, was released in 2023.
The genre of crime fiction, like so many others, seems over-saturated. No bookstore is without its “crime” section, with books upon books intended to titillate the reader with grisly tales. But James Ellroy rises above the deluge. He is not simply a “crime writer”, he is a real novelist—an auteur. And not just in the “crime genre”—the works of James Ellroy should rather be characterized as “noir”.
Agatha Christie wrote crime novels. “Whodunnits”, in which murder is some kind of eccentric parlor game between very polite people, that can be solved by elderly women and overweight Belgians. “Noir”, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily need to involve any kind of criminal activity (even if it very often does).
Ellroy is not simply a “crime writer”. He is a real novelist—an auteur. And not just in the “crime genre”—the works of James Ellroy should be characterized as “noir”.
A novel like Charles R. Jackson's alcoholic drama The Lost Weekend, or a film like Billy Wilder's monumental Hollywood tragedy Sunset Boulevard, feature no mystery at all. What they do have, however, is atmosphere and style. It's in the shadowy after-hours world it inhabits, the special set of characters, their ambiguous actions and, quite simply, death lurking around the corner. You don't read or watch noir (the term was initially used to describe the films inspired by the books) for the plot alone. What draws the reader into, say, Raymond Chandler is not the often very convoluted plots, but that we are able to experience how an essentially moral man like Philip Marlowe makes his way through a very crooked world. Jim Thompson's terrifying The Killer Inside Me frightens because the reader is locked inside the twisted mind of Deputy Lou Ford. James Ellroy has every right to stand beside these giants—to some, he even surpasses them. Let's see why.
Naturally, Ellroy dependendably delivers when it comes to thrills and excitement. Even though his plots tend to be overly complex, dense and at times somewhat difficult to follow, he always keeps the reader guessing and engaged. But, as mentioned before, the plot is not the main reason for reading. In Ellroy's case, there are three aspects that set him apart: 1) his “world”, 2) his characters, and 3) his language.
Blood On Sunset Boulevard
First, his “world”. James Ellroy is very open about recreating the Los Angeles of his childhood in his fiction. “Geography is biography”, as he once wrote.
Ellroy’s childhood LA was a city in which Hollywood, politics, business and organized crime mingled and interconnected, where the Sunset Strip was a restless party zone and jazz played everywhere—and everyone suspected a communist under their bed. It was an era where mob bosses like Mickey Cohen or Ben Siegel were household celebrities on a scale with movie stars. Tycoons like Howard Hughes proved that everything and everyone, from aspiring actress to politicians, could be bought. It was also an era of racial tension: the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 and the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War Two feature prominently in the first two books of the “Second LA Quartet”, Perfidia (2014) and This Storm (2019). During that time, the Los Angeles Police Department was a constant source of scandal, from racism to corruption and illegal activities. Studying the actual history, the reader is often surprised just how close Ellroy’s stories are to reality.
It was also an era of racial tension: the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 and the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War Two feature prominently in the first two books of the “Second LA Quartet”, Perfidia (2014( and This Storm (2019).
Take one of his most famous characters: the Irishman Captain Dudley L. Smith, a recurring figure in six Ellroy novels. To the outside world Smith is the very image of the upstanding cop, a true patriot and family man. But he is revealed to be a brutal and ruthless racketeer and killer, with a long list of heinous crimes. Digging into the relevant history, one comes across names like Guy McAfee, a LAPD captain who became one of the leading faces in organized crime, and several other policemen whose loyalty belonged to mob bosses instead of the law. On a grander scale, the FBI and CIA really did carry out operations like “Cointelpro”, the infiltration of civil rights and left-wing movements with their own agents, in order to discredit and disrupt the “enemy”. Ellroy has an incredible ability to bring this long-gone world back to life. His Los Angeles is a character of its own, a perverted and highly lethal wonderland. While the 50s and early 60s are mostly seen as “The Golden Years” or, during the Kennedy era, as “Camelot” (the Kennedy clan appears in several of these books, most notably the “Underworld USA” trilogy), Ellroy widely rejects this notion. In a way, he is demystifying this era of American history, digging up the skeletons in the closet and presenting them freely. But, because of the vividness of the setting, Ellroy’s reality develops an intoxicating allure of its own. His seedy and dangerous LA is a place you'd like to visit.
