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[Book reviews]

James Ellroy
State of the Art

BY CARLY CARIOLI

The frightening thing about talking to James Ellroy, the self-described “demon dog of American crime fiction,” is that in conversation his chilling, precise command of the language does not linger out of reach; it is at his beck and call, and he deploys it even more sharply off the cuff than in his novels. The books, like the music of a great bebop quartet, can be deceptive on this point: his language is all clipped vernacular, jabbing and feinting and dancing with a virtuosic improvisatory panache that — oh, hell, let’s just let him say it. “It’s a direct derivation of coarse American idiom,” he says over the phone from New York, on the eve of a book tour behind his new The Cold Six Thousand that’ll hit Boston this week. “It incorporates elements of Yiddish, Italian, French, and Spanish, profanity and slang and is a direct representation of the violence of the characters as well as the violence of the American self.”

Yep, that’s the one. Did I mention that Ellroy is also his own best critic? For, oh, about the seventh book running, he’s proclaiming The Cold Six Thousand — the follow-up to 1995’s American Tabloid, which was Time’s book of the year — to be his finest, and he might even be right. I tried to tell him otherwise, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

Ellroy’s finest novels (including The Black Dahlia and the incomparable White Jazz) did for the hard-boiled detective novel what Jackie Chan did for chop-socky: refined and turbocharged the language, intensified the violence, and dragged the form out of the morgue. Then Ellroy read Don Delillo’s Libra, decided he could do better, and wrote American Tabloid, which tied together the Bay of Pigs, Herbert Hoover, the FBI, Howard Hughes, the CIA, the Mob, and the assassination of JFK into a compulsive narrative of shocking complicity. That vast right-wing conspiracy expands and intensifies in The Cold Six Thousand (the second volume in a planned trilogy), which follows former CIA/FBI/Hughes heavy Pete Bondurant, Mob/Hughes lawyer Ward Littell, and a fresh-faced Las Vegas cop named Wayne Tedrow Jr., from Dallas to Vietnam to Memphis to California as they shape and are shaped by the decade’s consummate horrors. By the end Ellroy has, as he points out, linked the major events of the 1960s — now including the FBI’s suborning of the civil-rights movement, Hughes’s acquisition of Vegas, Vietnam, and the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy — into a single ruthlessly spun tale.

“What I think is achieved is a cohesive verisimilitude,” he explains. “The novels are about what I like to call the human infrastructure of great historical events. Satellite characters influence policy, influence history — and, yes, ultimately they’re caught up in it. If the human drama meshes with the unfolding of the historical narrative, then I’ve accomplished my mission: I’ve rewritten history to my own specifications.

“I think The Cold Six Thousand is far and away my best novel. The style is very highly evolved. The themes are more mature: it’s the story of Bondurant and Littell getting older, set against the hellish journey of Tedrow. The women characters are more evolved than in any other previous book. Barb [Bondurant’s wife] in particular is almost the conscience of the novel: she’s the one telling Pete, ‘What you’re doing is wrong. Don’t do it.’ You see, I judge these characters: these are bad guys, they know what they’re doing is wrong and they do it anyway. I think a true moralist — which is what I believe I am — can judge his characters if he lives in their skin. Part of me is living these characters’ lives as I describe them in the novels, and part of me is sitting outside going, ‘Pete, Pete, Pete, what the fuck are you doing?’ ”

Click on the link below to listen to actor Craig Wasson read from James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. http://randomhouse.com/catalog/audio/0-375-41915-2.ram (Real Audio clip courtesy of Random House)

James Ellroy discusses and signs The Cold Six Thousand and introduces a screening of the Feast of Death, a new documentary about his life and work, this Friday, May 11, at 5:30 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $2; call (617) 354-5201.

Issue Date: May 10-17, 2001