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Ellroy’s Requiem | Novelist James Ellroy puts the final nail in his “Underworld USA” trilogy with the stunning Blood’s a Rover.

BLOOD’S A ROVER
By James Ellroy. Alfred A. Knopf. 640 pp. $35

“Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content. That conjunction gives it its sizzle.”
That’s how the narrator of James Ellroy’s new novel Blood’s a Rover describes the 600 pages that follow — but that description would apply equally well to any of James Ellroy’s books, which include 13 novels, a few collections of short stories and reportage, and a memoir, My Dark Places, in which he describes his real-life investigation, nearly half a century after the fact, of his mother’s murder back in 1958.

Taken together, those books form a massive, bloody, secret history of Los Angeles — a town shaped by corrupt cops, sex criminals, power brokers, bagmen, gossipmongers, gangsters, and the occasional doomed noble gesture. Ellroy published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, in 1981, but it was his seventh book, 1987’s The Black Dahlia — an obsessive mixture of historical fact and densely imagined fiction set in 1940s L.A. — that was his true artistic breakthrough. As Ellroy’s plots got more complex (he claims the outline for Blood’s a Rover was 400 pages alone), his prose got more condensed: with 1992’s White Jazz, he adopted the terse, telegraphic writing style that has become his signature ever since: his 2001 novel The Cold Six Thousand is practically written in point form.

Blood’s a Rover concludes Ellroy’s most ambitious project yet: the sprawling “Underworld USA” trilogy, in which he moves beyond L.A. and tackles the full scope of U.S. history: Vietnam, black militants, Cuba, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, laced with outrageously funny cameos by the likes of Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon. But it’s also the story of Donald Crutchfield, a callow young dipshit with a dream of becoming a private eye, a thing for older women, and a habit of peeping into strangers’ windows. He goes sniffing after some stolen emeralds, and ends up with horrible scars, both literal and metaphorical. He’s based on the real-life detective of the same name, but he’s also perhaps the most autobiographical character Ellroy’s ever written.

Ellroy says the book is a work of genius and probably deserves the Nobel Prize for literature, but as an avowed “Tory WASP heterosexual,” he doesn’t expect to win it. He’ll have to content himself with having solidified his reputation as one of the greatest American writers alive — not bad for a onetime homeless, alcoholic panty-sniffer.

James Ellroy spoke recently to SEE over the phone from Los Angeles. Here’s our conversation.

James Ellroy: Before you ask me a million questions, can I ask you something? Did the last hundred pages rip your heart out?

SEE Magazine: It kind of did! I don’t want to give away what happens to anyone reading this interview, but the book shifts its focus from the men we’ve been following for 500 pages to a female character — and it’s heartbreaking in a way you don’t really expect from a James Ellroy novel. Was this book any harder to write than the two that came before it, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand?

JE: It was easier. It’s much more emotional. It’s less densely layered, and considerably less stylistically rigourous than The Cold Six Thousand. That was very much the critique of my ex-wife, the novelist Helen Knode, who, incidentally, is from Calgary. She said, “Listen, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult stylistically.” Well, Helen and I got divorced, I had a nervous breakdown — which is where I got the character Dwight Holly’s nervous breakdown from — and I fell in love with a woman named Joan, and it kicked the shit out of me. I’ll never see her again, she’s moved on with her life. So this is the book you write when your world burns down and your women kick you loose.

SEE: What made you want to make Don Crutchfield a central character in this story? He’s certainly not the character you’d bet would survive to the end.

JE: It’s the idea that the dipshit kid is the voice of American history. In reality, Crutchfield is 10 years older — I did all the peeper shit. That was me. I grew up in that neighbourhood, Crutchfield did not. He grew up in Culver City and fell under the wing of [real-life private investigator] Clyde Duber and got to be a wheelman and follow people around in a souped-up car. I never got to do any of that stuff, and I could not have written the book without him.

SEE: You have this very distinctive style: extremely complicated plots told in very simple sentences. Is that limiting at all as a writer?

JE: No, it’s liberating. It allows you to exposit more information at a greater clip. It requires more concentration on the part of the reader, though. You know, my girlfriend got me that book by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just seemed flabby to me. Flabby. I could see where it’s going pretty quick. Corporate intrigue. All corporations are evil. Paramilitary intrigue. A crusading journalist with a past gets together with a tattooed punk rock chick. I could see it from the get-go. You could not see Blood’s a Rover from the get-go, could you? I don’t want to write a fucking book you can see from the get-go. I have a significant readership for very, very difficult books, and I am proud
of that.

SEE: It’s an almost psychedelic novel at times. A lot of it takes place in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which allows you to bring in these images of zombies and voodoo hexes, you have people taking these mind-altering potions, and you have this image of the stolen emeralds running throughout the story, which are almost like the mystical treasure in a fantasy novel.

JE: It is my most deliberately iconographic book. It is my book about women, it’s my book about race and gender, you have the character of the gay black cop, who has this weirdly equitable relationship with a white racist cop. They like each other, in their psychopathic way.

SEE: Do you think American history was shaped more by rational decisions — by laws, elections, leaders — or is it more the result of irrational forces — by wild emotions and hexes and bad juju and woo-woo, to use your words?

JE: Well, history is always held in check by the democratic process, which has served us very, very well. There are certain inequities in society, and as the world’s dominant power, America is almost always at war, as the new fellow in the White House is learning, despite his idealism. (It might have been nice for him to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize, don’t you think?) Anyway, back then, the races were coming together, everyone was bombed. I was bombed. I sensed history percolating in the margins, and it took me many, many years to put together a book pertaining to it.

SEE: Would you change the way history is taught in schools? Is there something kids need to know about American that they’re not getting from their teachers?

JE: Well, I’ll say this. We have a preposterous discourse going on in America right now of left versus right — all this bullshit. We have not had an American president who’s been an ideologue in my lifetime, except Ronald Reagan. If you look at American democracy, almost nobody is who you think they are if you look at them through the prism of popular culture. Roosevelt was willing to exclude blacks and women from the New Deal until Eleanor convinced him otherwise, which would shock most doctrinaire liberals. When he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed into effect the most permissive abortion rights law in American history. Try telling that to a liberal feminist! She will not believe you. People have very dumb ideas on politics.

SEE: Would you call yourself a feminist?

JE: You know, my girlfriend, who is a brilliant woman, a journalist — she’s appalled by my politics. I’m right-wing. I’m conservative. But I’m a feminist. But I have reservations about abortion. I’m opposed to gay marriage, and she’s appalled by that. I believe in American military hegemony, on the grounds that we’d better rule the world or someone worse than us will. I’m more of an authoritarian than a permissivist. And I’m not a liberal, and that shocks people. Blood’s a Rover is a book about a bunch of right-wing goons who turn left-wing, and no one knows what to make of that.

SEE: There’s a strong moral streak that runs through your books. What do you think of American culture in general? Are we in good shape?

JE: It’s depraved. It’s nothing but horror movies and teenage comedies about bombed-out kids on weed. I know this because I drive down Beverly Boulevard all the time and I can read billboards.

SEE: Hasn’t it always been this debased, though? Isn’t pop culture always mostly junk? Or is this something new?

JE: Well, there are actually a lot of iconic movies that I think stink. Like Chinatown. I think it’s full of shit. It’s bad mise-en-scène, contrived, full of plot holes. And nihilism of the worst sort. I’m thrilled they got Roman Polanski. Thrilled. My mother was raped and murdered. So there you go. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think you should molest children.