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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
With his latest tale of epic conspiracy and evil, Ellroy takes crime fiction as far as it can go -- and maybe even farther.
Jun 13, 2001 | "There's nothing you could want to know about American crime in this century," James Ellroy promised me in an interview five years ago, "that you won't know by the time I've finished these books." "These" books were his proposed trilogy, "Underworld U.S.A.," of which "American Tabloid" (1995) was the first. I've just finished Ellroy's latest installment, "The Cold Six Thousand," and he can stop right there, because he's told me everything I ever wanted to know about crime in this country and a great deal I'm pretty sure I didn't want to know and wish now I could buy back my introduction to.
Until, I guess, he writes the next one. I often feel as if I should put brown paper covers on Ellroy's books when reading them in public; when I put them down, I feel like I should wash my hands. And, God help me, I keep right on reading. Why? Well, "The Cold Six Thousand" just made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Why do so many of you?
Because Ellroy knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and a few women, too, that's why. We don't read him for the mystery, because his books aren't mysteries. (Not even "L.A. Confidential," really; who cares about the identity of one rotten person in a city where everyone is openly rotten?) We don't read them for their plots, which don't equal the thrillers of Elmore Leonard. We read them to find out how evil people can be, to test the limits of our tolerance for seeing how low our species can slide.
How many other writers really understand evil? Well, Shakespeare, of course. Heinrich von Kleist (though not Goethe). Dostoevski (but not Tolstoy). Baudelaire, for sure. Not too many Brits or Americans. Graham Greene, on a good day (when he was on holiday, writing pulps like "The Third Man" and "This Gun for Hire" but not, oddly, in the Catholic novels), and Nelson Algren when he was in a really shitty mood. Ellroy may not be as good a writer as the above mentioned, but he knows a heck of a lot about evil people that they didn't -- for example, he knows what sort of hole a certain kind of bullet makes when it splats against the human skull and about the importance of taxicab stands in organized crime.
Heck, how many American writers even believe in evil? Most educated people of my acquaintance don't -- or, if they do, they see it in some watered-down form, as an unfortunate "social construct." (I love that phrase; I used to see it about five times a week in the Village Voice.) They change their minds only on the rare occasion when the kind of horrible thing they usually only read about in newspapers happens to them. American literature has never really made room at the grown-ups' table for writers whose primary theme was evil. The ones who got the closest, the ones who started in pulp -- Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson -- burned out or chickened out when it came time to attempt the work that might have gotten them into the dining room with the adults.
Ellroy once called himself "the greatest crime novelist who ever lived," and then wrote books like "The Black Dahlia," "The Big Nowhere" and "L.A. Confidential" to prove it. Now he wants to sit with the grown-ups, and if they don't make room at the table he's going to tip it over. One way or another, he means to make it, and on his own terms.
"Fuck being a crime novelist when you can be a flat-out great novelist," he once told me -- there never being a doubt in his mind that being either one was merely a matter of choice, of will. Ellroy took risks. He made a conscious decision, with "American Tabloid," to write a book that couldn't be categorized as a mystery or a thriller and thus risked losing his hard-won crime following.
