If you've ever seen Ellroy on Conan or elsewhere, the interview is par for the course. The author is a motor-mouth who can't stop throwing offensive opinions in your face.
How do you feel about Obama?Really, Ellroy's conservativism isn't surprising. One of the themes of the LA Quartet is that the purpose of the police is to be a Berlin Wall between the criminal element and the rest of society. A familiarity, or at least an understanding, of the potential ugliness of life is the base of becoming a conservative.
I hate him. I think he’s a coward, incompetent and I find him sinister. He’s the face of cancerous socialism under the guise of benevolence. His wife going on the Academy Awards by remote hook-up made them come across like Soviet apparatchiks. However, I don’t have a TV, cellphone or internet and I find the world untenable. I’m a big Tory. Big. Tory. There’s also a part of me that loves to say, “F*ck you, I’m a Republican.” I’m a Thatcherite and a Reaganite.
What can you tell us about your new project, the second LA Quartet?I'm not excited by the prospect of a second set of books. Revisiting characters at a younger age is usually a mistake, unless one has already planned it out in advance. That is, unless he's exploring the rise of Dudley Smith, the corrupt policeman whose machinations are at the center of the quartet. Since Smith comes into the series fully formed as a powerful and menacing man, there's room for exploration that won't effect our later understanding of the character.
I’m about to finish the first volume, called Perfidia – my biggest book – which will be published in Britain this fall. The new quartet takes characters both fictional and real, major and minor, from the first quartet and the trilogy, but places them in LA during the Second World War. It’s the month of Pearl Harbor, 6-29 December 1941. It seamlessly takes the quartet and trilogy, adds four novels, and makes my oeuvre as a historical novelist one inextricable 11-novel whole.
Even if Ellroy focuses on Smith, I won't be reading the books. He used to be one of my favorite authors and, though I love his books up until the last of the quartet, I can't get through his prose any longer.
The first of his I read was American Tabloid. I was greatly impressed. I didn't realize it at the time, but it ties in with some of the characters in his earlier books, tracking the machinations of the mob, the CIA and the FBI all through characters at the periphery. I advise anyone looking for an example of masterful, complex plotting to seek this one out.
I was so excited that I immediately dove into Ellroy's entire catalog. His first half-dozen books are good reads and he was established as a solid mid-list mystery/detective writer. Then came The Black Dahlia and he became a major American genre writer, even if everyone didn't know it yet.
The transition was a quantum leap. Ellroy was able to pull together a complex plot of secrets and double-crosses with a compelling love triangle and a Laura-style obsession with a dead woman and her life. All this while creating a fascinating picture of mid-century LA and its intersection of wealth, fame, and desperation.
My personal favorite of the quartet (as opposed to what I find the best objectively) is the next book, The Big Nowhere. Here we see Ellroy growing in strength. Where Dahlia followed one character with another being almost a second protagonist, in Nowhere he goes all the way and follows two main characters. They investigate from different angles of the same conspiracy, only occasionally coming into contact until the end. The technique allows Ellroy to create a more complex story while minimizing the reader's confusion and the world of LA he depicts is solidified and expanded.
(A tangent. At the end of Nowhere, one character makes a desperate dash to Mexico with a woman and mob money, hoping to hide out the rest of his days. The book ends on a note of crazy hope. My paperback edition had a "special sneak peek" of the follow-up, LA Confidential, publishing the first chapter of that book. In that chapter, the character who escapes is murdered along with his girl. At the time, I wished I hadn't read it immediately after finishing Nowhere.)
LA Confidential is Ellroy's best book. He ups the ante by using three protagonists. In the previous books, the two main characters are more or less opposites but Confidential's leads are distinct to themselves, less mirror images than complements. The three perspectives increase the complexity as one would expect. (Incidentally, the film version does a remarkable job of telling the story concisely.)
The quartet ends with White Jazz, which I dislike but is necessary to see the end of the series' villain, the aforementioned Dudley Smith. Ellroy makes good moves all around, keeping the story much more simple than the others and ending with realistic semi-successes (Smith's end is particularly appropriate without seeing him exposed and convicted for his crimes).
Good moves except for one element: Ellroy's prose. In Jazz, he writes in an impressionistic/jazz-influenced style that might be fine in a stand-alone book--though I didn't care for it on its own terms--but is too much of a contrast with the rest of the series.
After reading all of his back catalog, I returned to American Tabloid. I found I couldn't read it through again. Ellroy had abandoned the jazz prose of the previous book and took to writing staccato sentences, one after another with hardly a break.
I was disappointed but I understand. Tabloid was the first of his Underworld USA series and he covers a lot--a lot--of ground. If he wrote the more elaborate prose of, say Nowhere, the books would easily break the thousand-page mark. But it's a turn-off--Ellroy loses flexibility of tone by using only short, declarative sentences. Eventually, it makes everything important and thus nothing important.
You sound like you’re thinking about your legacy…I don't think Ellroy has to worry about his legacy. What he achieved with the LA Quartet will be an inspiration to crime writers--and more--for years.
I’m very much doing that. I want to get my sh*t in line. In case I go to the doctor and he says, “Ellroy, you f*cker, you’ve got six months to live.” I want to leave a great literary legacy. I will leave legal documents so no one can ever co-opt my characters or write an Ellroy knock-off book, like when Robert B Parker finished a Raymond Chandler novel. I came of age when being a writer was a big deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment