Few authors have become as synonymous with a time and a place than James Ellroy and 50's LA. He once said to an interviewer that he will never set a book later than 1972. His attendance with the past is only matched by his living in it. The apartment Ellroy resides in has no television. There's no cell phones, computer or Internet. He writes in long hand and sends the pages to get typed. He then corrects the typed pages.
The first step into Ellroy's matched many others. It was LA Confidential. The author was unknown to me when I had first seen the movie. All I knew was it was a film noir set in LA during the 50's. The serpentine plot coiled around me like a snake. A finely tuned machine where every gear was greased for maximum efficiency. When I heard that the film pales in comparison to the book, I took it into consideration but never really sought the book out. This is something that is said about every book to film adaptation. Years pass and I revisit the film for the 4th (?) time. A line catches me: "Dudley Smith, Stensland and Buzz Meeks go way back." It's a hook just big enough to catch me and reel me back into my curiosity with the source material.
The book he wrote before LA Confidential, The Big Nowhere, follows three policemen. Sound familiar? Their names are Danny Upshaw, Mal Considine and one Leland 'Buzz' Meeks. The setting might as well have been cut with mirror shards and snorted up the nostril- 1950. The height of the communist Red Scare. Where the House of Unamerican Activities was in full swing in Hollywood. If HUAC wasn't enough to entice me, throw in a serial killer for good measure and the book rocketed up to the top of my 'must read' pile. Upon reading the book, I entered a Boschian canvas of human depravity. All three protagonists were deeply unlikable yet compelling. The supporting cast includes Mickey Cohen and Howard Hughes. The plot is laced with teamsters, wolverines, necrophilia, incest, heroin, blackmail, and corruption up to your eyeballs. This is the proverbial Demon Dog in full swing. Teeth on the leg and won't let go until the bloody climax.
Let's pull the band aid of this post with a hasty tear: Ellroy has his fair share of demons.There's no getting past this. You don't write stuff like The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and American Tabloid without harboring ghosts. Ellroy's childhood has one deep, scarlet wound that would damage any fully functioning individual.
The rape and murder of his mother changed the course of his life. He was ten years old. The author refused to go to any therapist. He refused any confrontation of the trauma and instead chose to channel it into his work.
A documentary that facilitated my love of Ellroy is appropriately titled Feast of Death. It intercuts between excerpts from his semi-autobiography My Dark Places, a chronicle of the death of his coming to terms with the death of his mother, a Q & A for his latest book at the time and a dinner between him and a nuch of detectives where they discuss the now infamous unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short or, The Black Dahlia. The subject of his 1987 novel.
So if you want a guide down the dimly lit corridors of the so called American Dream in the 50s where obsessive detectives are prescribed murder inquiries as an antiseptic to their crumbling interior lives, then look no further. Just remember dear readers, this is off the record, on the QT and very hush hush.
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