COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud
by Colette Bancroft

The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

RAYMOND CHANDLER STARTED IT, of course -- the transformation of Los Angeles into a hard-boiled metaphor of the American character, a twentieth century inferno of glamour and corruption, love and death.
It takes a lot of nerve to pick up where a master like Chandler left off. It takes brilliance to do so and make that city of fallen angels your own literary territory. But in 11 novels, a collection of stories and a stark memoir, James Ellroy has done just that.
The film version of L.A. Confidential, Ellroy's ninth novel and the third in a quartet set in 1940s-50s Los Angeles, is a red-hot hit, and deservedly so. It captures the flavor, if not the complexity, of Ellroy's novel, and Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey are dead perfect as Bud White, Edmund Exley and Jack Vincennes.
Like any movie made from a good or great book, L.A. Confidential falls short when compared to its literary source. By necessity, the novel's Byzantine but forceful plot was pruned into relative simplicity for the film and lost a lot of resonance along the way. Some fascinating characters dropped by the wayside, the action takes place in a far shorter period, and the resolution of the plot is downright sunny by comparison to the novel's bleak, painfully convincing finale.
Maybe the best thing about L.A. Confidential the movie is that it is bound to lead more readers to L.A. Confidential the novel, and -- for those both strong and bent enough to take it -- to the rest of Ellroy's harrowing, evocative, morally complex and beautifully written books.
The novels, and one collection of short stories, are set in L.A. and environs in the period stretching from just after World War II into the early 60s (except for Suicide Hill, which ventures into the 80s). Many recurring characters link them, both fictional ones -- notably the sinister LAPD Lt. Dudley Smith -- and historical ones, including mobsters Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato and legendary eccentric Howard Hughes.
L.A. Confidential has not one but three main characters: Bud White, Edmund Exley and Jack Vincennes. That pattern of using a triad of main characters, usually cops or ex-cops, is typical for Ellroy. These trinities are not simple good cop-bad cop-worse cop affairs, but complex relationships among men at varying stages of idealism and corruption, driven by fierce professional ambitions and irrational private passions.
Usually, as in L.A. Confidential, the three work as a team on one investigation while each one pursues some apparently unrelated case on his own -- although in Ellroy's paranoid universe all things truly are connected. And always, the three men shape one another in the course of the novel, with everything from inspiration to treachery.
Most of Ellroy's novels share a related structure: Point of view shifts from one chapter to the next among the three main characters. Ellroy manages this masterfully, fracturing events among his characters and offering us jagged pieces we must fit together, adding to the books' jittery tension by showing us a fundamental fact in one cop's case revealed to a man to whom it means nothing.
In many of the novels, Ellroy intersperses the narrative chapters with newspaper articles, police reports, psychiatrist's evaluations, letters and other documents notable for their stylistic accuracy (you almost expect to see misspelled words in the cop reports). They're distinct from but fit perfectly with Ellroy's own style, with its jazz rhythms, bull's-eye details and aggressive verbs.
A note to the uninitiated about Ellroy's style and substance: His cops and criminals talk like real cops and criminals. The crimes he writes about are often devastatingly violent and almost as often have a sexual component. Ellroy approaches them from a strongly moral point of view, but he does not flinch at describing them. If you are squeamish about obscenity, profanity, blasphemy or language that is racist, sexist or otherwise offensive, or about sex and/or violence, go read something else.

My Dark Places
If, on the other hand, you are already a fan of Ellroy's fiction, you may find it illuminated by his most recent book. My Dark Places (1996) is a memoir about the central event in Ellroy's life, the one that has shaped all his fiction.
On Sunday, June 22, 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy was found murdered. Her partially clad body had been dumped beside a high school campus in El Monte, California, where she lived. She had been beaten and then strangled, with both a cord and a nylon stocking. An autopsy would show evidence of what the coroner deemed consensual sex.
Geneva Ellroy was 43, divorced, a registered nurse who worked in an aircraft plant in Los Angeles. Her son, James, was 10 years old.
The boy had been spending the weekend in L.A. with his father. He came home from the train station in a cab, alone, to find the bungalow he shared with his mother swarming with police and press. His life would never be the same.
Ellroy begins My Dark Places with "The Redhead," a sparely written recreation of the initial investigation of his mother's death. It reads like one of his novels, with fast-moving descriptions of crime scenes, character sketches of tough cops, interrogations of carhops and landladies, reviews of similar cases, all interspersed with documents -- this time genuine -- related to the case. Ellroy writes about himself in third person: "The victim's son was pudgy, and tall for 10 years old. He was nervous -- but did not appear in any way distraught."
The search for Geneva Ellroy's killer begins intensely but is scoured to a ripple by the tide of crime washing over L.A. in the boom years of the late 50s. The cops write her off as a divorcee a little too loose with her favors who hooked up with the wrong guy. So sorry, sweetheart, but it happens all the time.
Part II, "The Kid in the Picture," is a searing piece of autobiography, as intimate and bruising as Part I was cool and distanced. Ellroy's switch to first person takes us into the desperate years after his mother's murder, spent in L.A. with his father, whose parenting skills were desultory at best. By 11, Ellroy has found a lifelong obsession, the Black Dahlia case.
Elizabeth Short, christened the Black Dahlia by a reporter, was found dead in L.A. in January of 1947, a little more than 10 years before Geneva Hilliker's death. Betty Short was a 22-year-old would-be actress from Massachusetts. Her killer tortured her, probably for days, burning and mutilating her while she was alive. She died either of strangulation or from drowning on her own blood after the killer sliced her face open from the corners of her mouth to her ears. Then the killer cut her torso in half, removed or rearranged many of her internal organs, sliced away various pieces of her body, carefully washed the corpse and left it in a vacant lot in L.A.
The case was a sensation in its day and has inspired countless books, fictional and not, including John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions. For the 11-year-old Ellroy, it was a Freudian bomb blast. He read about it, dreamed about it, slipped into a spiral of imbalance that had him burglarizing houses and flirting with Naziism by 14, strung out on booze and any kind of drug he could get his hands on a couple of years later, and spending the better part of his 20s homeless and high.
In short, Ellroy comes by the mean streets of his fiction first-hand.
At 27, Ellroy was scared into sobering up by a mental breakdown and a near-fatal lung abscess. A strange trio -- AA, golf and writing -- restored him to sanity and has more or less kept him there.
In Parts III and IV, "Stoner" and "Geneva Hilliker," Ellroy relates his own investigation into his mother's death. In 1994, 36 years after she died, he hired Bill Stoner, an about-to-retire homicide detective with the L.A. Sheriff's Department, a man as obsessed with dead women as Ellroy himself. Their search for Geneva Ellroy's killer -- and her son's search for his mother's true self -- make up the book's latter half.
It's a compelling story, told in resonant detail, but it moves finally further from the truth of Geneva Ellroy's life and death, not closer. The case becomes just that, a case, a study, a compilation of facts and interviews and theories. The emotional heat of the book's second section never returns.
Ellroy's most heartfelt attempts to grapple with his mother's murder lie in his fiction. Women as victims, as mysteries, haunt Ellroy's pages. His male characters -- and Ellroy's fictional world is very much a male ecology -- are to a man crippled in one way or another by their obsessions with women, whether they love them, lust for them, despise them, beat them or kill them.
Perhaps the most vivid example is the novel named for his other obsession, The Black Dahlia (1987). It is a harrowing riff on the case, a tale of interlocking obsessions and psychoses that are finally inexplicable. It is dedicated to "Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, 1915-1958. Mother: Twenty-nine years later, This valediction in blood."

Titles discussed in Colette's List
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Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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