James Ellroy does not own a cell phone or a computer. He does not watch television and disdains pop culture in general. He has a Facebook page, but only to please his publisher.
Ellroy, the noted author of "L.A. Confidential" and the just-published novel "Blood's a Rover," prefers to live and work on his own terms.
"I dislike noise," Ellroy says. "I dislike tumult. ... I sit in the dark, and I brood and I think. I immerse myself in my work, in the books I'm writing. It works."
"Blood's a Rover" is the third and final installment in the Underworld USA trilogy. The first novel, "American Tabloid," is set in 1958 and culminates with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The second book, "The Cold Six Thousand," takes place from 1963-68. The current novel ends in 1972.
All three books present fictionalized views of American history, a conspiracy theorist's dream scenario of events that changed the country and the world. The assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are the pivot points, but a gallery of unwieldy, unsavory characters — rogue FBI agents, professional criminals, mob wiseguys and mercenaries for hire — move the narrative forward. Their actions are dastardly and profane; they work outside the purview of the law.
"This is pre-public accountability America," Ellroy says. "Bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority. Guys like Scotty Bennett (an LAPD cop) and Dwight Holly (a FBI agent), who have the good common sense to be afraid of each other, are calling the shots."
"Blood's a Rover" starts out with a fantastic heist of an armored car, before spinning story webs that have tendrils in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There are strange alliances and betrayals, infiltration of left- and right-wing fringe groups. While men like Bennett, Holly and Wayne Tedrow Jr. (an ex-Las Vegas cop who works for the Mafia and Howard Hughes) are the nominal movers and shakers in "Blood's a Rover," two women are the real protagonists. Karen Sifakis and Joan Rosen Klein both have ties to counter-culture movements while maintaining an alliance with Holly (and ultimately, others) that benefits their ideals and his missions.
The Klein character, Ellroy admits, is based on a woman he dated who eventually spurned him.
"It's that run-wild universe of men who realize their humanity late," Ellroy says, "and ultimately learn self-sacrifice because they're in love with a woman. Someone once asked me what my previous work, 'The L.A. Quartet,' (which included the novel 'L.A. Confidential') was about. And I said bad men in love with strong women. That would apply equally here, but this is the private nightmare of public policy, because the political stakes are at such a higher level."
Born in 1948, Ellroy's writing is straightforward, muscular and unsentimental. He sparingly doles out adjectives and adverbs in a staccato cadence. In describing Chicago in August of 1968, Ellroy writes:
"The Loop was hot. A choppy lake breeze goosed the thermometer. The cops wore helmets and short-sleeved shirts. They packed nightsticks and saps. The hippies wore deface-the-flag garb. They packed Coke bottles and rocks."
His fiercely individualistic writing style is in lockstep with his approach to fiction. Ellroy takes scenes from American history and adds twists and turns of his own invention.
"What I give you is the private infrastructure of big public events," he says. "So people understand that it's fiction. But you have history as subtext, you have real-life events, and real-life people and real-life characters are shown in private context almost exclusively. It blurs the reality, and it's the one question I never answer about these three books: What's real and what's not⢠Here, history aids me because there's a plethora of (stuff) written about the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 and J. Edgar Hoover in his dotage and Richard Nixon. But there's not a lot on Haiti and the Dominican Republic at that time, so that gives me latitude to fictionalize it."
Additional Information:Capsule review
Longtime readers of James Ellroy know what to expect: No-nonsense, adrenalized prose and a story that is astounding in scope and ambition. 'Blood's a Rover,' which takes place from 1968-72, features elaborate, multidimensional plots that hang together by the slenderest of threads. There are bad guys being pulled into the light; bad guys who embrace darkness. No punches are pulled; no characters are left unbloodied. Only a few walk away from shadows of the 1960s in this often-brilliant novel.
⢠Rege Behe
