Word: ellroy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...James Ellroy has told this story from his own childhood before, mainly to journalists attracted to his growing renown as a writer of dark, scarifyingly violent crime novels (The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential). The anecdote enhanced his reputation, setting him off from his competitors. How many other toilers in the thriller trade could claim a mother murdered in a crime still unsolved? But My Dark Places (Knopf; 355 pages; $25) rehearses this unhappy history with a lot more than instant publicity in mind. Part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on the kind of men who kill and the women...
...AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy (Knopf). This big, brazenly entertaining novel begins in 1958 and ends seconds before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In between, James Ellroy--a crime-noir cult writer making his mainstream debut--propels two rogue FBI agents and a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff through a fictionalized, nightmarish tour of five tumultuous years in U.S. history. Life is seldom horrifying and hilarious at the same moment. On nearly all its 576 pages, American Tabloid manages to be both...
...Ellroy sends these three rogue enforcers off on a bizarre fictionalized trek through five years of U.S. history: the pursuit of Hoffa, the Mob's unhappiness over the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the loss of the Havana casino revenues, the 1960 presidential campaign, the long debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Pete, Kemper and Ward play hair-raising roles in all of this, and much more besides...
American Tabloid is history as Hellzapoppin, a long slapstick routine careering around a manic premise: What if the fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon...
...Ellroy, 47, is a 6-ft. 2-in. walking testimonial to the redeeming power of reading and writing fiction; his life has been, in patches, as rough and messy as many of the scenes in his books. His parents divorced when he was six, and he shuttled between them for four years until his mother, a registered nurse and an alcoholic, was found murdered near a high school playground in a small town east of Los Angeles. "At the time, my bereavement was ambiguous," Ellroy says. "My mother was a volatile woman, and I thought she'd been mean...