Crime Wave – James Ellroy, 1999 ★½

Baby, I'm a Star

James Ellroy had graduated to the big time as a writer by the late 1990s; Crime Wave reads like a victory lap that goes a few loops too long.

The first problem with Crime Wave is summarizing it. A collection of articles originally published in GQ magazine, it includes a short story and two longer stories, but true-crime reportage and commentaries dominate. All this seems a good fit for Ellroy the crime writer.

Yet even when centering these pieces around his hometown and favorite city, Los Angeles, the results too often read like clunky self-parody:

Every third person was a peeper, prowler, pederast, poon stalker, panty sniffer, prostitute, pillhead, pothead, or pimp. The other two-thirds of the population were tight-assed squares resisting the urge to peer, prowl, poon stalk, pederastically indulge, pop pills, and panty sniff. This mass self-denial created a seismic dislocation that skewed L. A. about six degrees off the central axis of planet Earth. – Bad Boys In Tinseltown.

At the time Ellroy was riding high on a series of critically-successful novels as well as an Oscar-nominated film adaptation of his L. A. Confidential; here he comes off self-inflated and surprisingly dull.

James Ellroy in 1995, photographed by Ted Thai for Time magazine. His pieces in Crime Wave were originally published by GQ magazine between 1993 and 1999. Image from http://content.time.com/time/photoessays/10questions/0,30255,2016548_2186744,00.html

“Bad Boys In Tinseltown” addresses the movie adaptation of L. A. Confidential and Ellroy’s satisfaction with how it turned out. “Sex, Glitz, And Greed: The Seduction Of O. J. Simpson” notes how O. J. was a dumb guy who dug celebrity and blondes too much. “Out Of The Past” details Ellroy’s childhood fascination with a star accordion player whom he hunts down to discuss life and art.

In a brief introduction, GQ editor in chief Art Cooper notes Ellroy’s sizeable advances and fancy dinners as a way of touting his outsized talent. Ellroy just won GQ’s Man of the Year Award for Literature, he notes: “The two previous winners are Norman Mailer and John Updike. Mr. Mailer and Mr. Updike should feel flattered.” I guess.

Ellroy’s My Dark Places, about his mother’s murder, is deeply moving and impossible to stop reading. The Black Dahlia is a solid crime novel that kicked off a famous four-book run centered on the Los Angeles underworld, “The L. A. Quartet.” Even when I find Ellroy’s macho posturing and shambolic story structure hard to take, I admire his verve, wit, and ability to summon bygone eras.

But Crime Wave does not build his legacy, merely trades on it.

A snapshot of an L. A. landmark in the 1950s. "My life was chaos, but my intellectual focus never wavered: L. A. in the ‘50s/corruption/crime," Ellroy writes in one essay about his early career. Image from https://www.vintag.es/2018/04/los-angeles-from-the-1950s.html.

The worst excesses here are the fictional offerings, snapshots of the same scuzzy underbelly of 1950s Los Angeles we encounter in L. A. Confidential, only overcranked and underbaked. Two of them, “Hush-Hush” and “Tijuana, Mon Amour,” feature first-person narration by Danny Getchell, publisher of a gossip rag who digs for dirt on the rich and closeted.

Getchell speaks in an ultra-ironic hepcat alliterative argot that must have been more fun for Ellroy to write than for me to read:

I live to edify, entertain, enlighten, and enforce moral standards. It all entails enterprising entrapment. I’m a zealous First Amendment zealot. I contentiously contend that scandal skank scores free free speech to its fullest extension. – “Hush-Hush”

No kidding, this trope of using the same first letter over and over is gratingly constant, and not just in the Getchell stories, which at least suggests the prose stylings of a mid-1950s scandal sheet.

A 1957 issue of Confidential magazine, a model for Hush-Hush in Crime Wave. For Getchell, a lucrative side business is not revealing secrets of the stars in exchange for payoffs, or tips on other stars. Image from http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/confidential/headlinesconfidential.html. 

In “Hush-Hush,” Getchell uncovers a plot to out Rock Hudson, normally his line of work except the blackmailer in this case is a hated rival. In “Tijuana, Mon Amour,” it’s off to Mexico with Sammy Davis Jr. to free some Mexican child slaves with the help of a messianic Frank Sinatra.

“It’s my world,” Frank explains at the end. “Even God knows that.”

That Ellroy was consciously parodying himself and a cocktail-lounge aesthetic was blazingly obvious. But this didn’t help it go down. Ellroy’s cringe humor regarding Sammy’s ethnicity and the sexual predations of the legendarily well-endowed Ol’ Blue Eyes is too one-note and repetitive, as if daring you to gasp at how politically incorrect he is.

Ellroy’s writing style suggests that found inside some school locker circa 1961, but when he’s telling better stories this snide tone has a kind of ragged charm, even a sense of character and place, which pulls me in. The Getchell pieces are too unpolished and scattershot in that same way, Ellroy giving readers what he thought they wanted.

Danny DeVito in the 1997 film adaptation of Ellroy's L. A. Confidential. DeVito plays Sid Hudgens, a gossip writer similar to Crime Wave's Danny Getchell. Except Getchell also kills people . Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119488/mediaviewer/rm595211008/.

I would chalk this off to trial and error, but the other fiction piece in this book, “Hollywood Shakedown,” is even worse.

Here we meet Dick Contino, a real-life accordionist who achieved minor celebrity in the 1950s. After securing the real Contino’s permission, Ellroy remade him into a sex-and-marijuana-obsessed killing machine who in “Hollywood Shakedown” uncovers a police entrapment operation involving women prisoners whose sexual assignations with blackmail targets are secretly filmed by real-life director Ida Lupino.

“Hollywood Shakedown” has the germ of a good idea, but Ellroy spoils it by overplaying everything, with a kill-heavy plotline and Contino bulling his way through all comers like Mike Hammer:

Murder was a monkey on my back now. I found a context to make mayhem mine. Most men found it in war. I attracted it with my fear and put myself in peril to perpetuate it. I was a murder magnet.

See that alliteration again? Ellroy had a hitch in his swing he needed to correct; it gets in the way a lot here.

Does this look like the face of a killer? Dick Contino was a successful recording artist who survived a controversy when he tried to evade military service during the Korean War. He eventually did serve. Ellroy notes draft dodging would have improved his career a decade or so later. Image from https://www.cdandlp.com/dick-contino/artist/.

Ellroy’s non-fiction pieces are not as bad, often just so-so for the most part. Two exceptions worth pointing out are an opening piece, “Body Dumps,” which details a pair of unsolved L. A. murders decades apart; and “Glamour Jungle,” which chronicles the mysterious 1963 death of actress Karyn Kupcinet.

While neither piece is a true-crime gem, both are very readable. In “Body Dumps,” Ellroy uses his own mother’s murder as an example of the way unsolved cases tend to perpetuate their own cruel kind of logic, what he calls “the dead-end metaphysic.”

Knowledge did not equal provability. Faulty memories spawned misinformation. Hypothetical renderings imposed logic on chaotic events and were rarely confirmed by firsthand accounts. Evidence was misplaced. Witnesses died. Their heirs revised and retold their stories inaccurately. Consensus of opinion seldom equaled truth.

Ellroy by this point had already written My Dark Places, so “Body Dumps” works as a kind of sequel, counterpointing his mother Jean Hilliker Ellroy’s 1958 murder with that of housewife Betty Jean Scales, abducted and stabbed to death in 1973. Both were from the same city in Los Angeles County, El Monte.

Betty Jean Scales' final resting place in Whittier, California. Her parents believed her husband the killer, an idea Ellroy pushes back on in his essay. Image from https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/133208155/betty-jean-scales.

Ellroy and a police cold-case investigator look into several suggestively-similar cases to find a perpetrator for the Scales killing. They pick up some intriguing leads, and in the process Ellroy shows just how difficult investigating old murders can be. One witness’s truth is another’s lie; those who remember details most strongly can develop tunnelvision. It runs long but never drags.

The Kupcinet story is more fascinating to me, and Ellroy employs his enthusiasm for police technique to explore what made the case so hard to solve. Was Karyn strangled to death, or did she have an accident? Did police get sidetracked because of the subject’s Hollywood connections?

Karyn certainly did. The daughter of powerful Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet, Karyn came to Hollywood in 1960 to become a star, and soon set her sights on marrying actor Andrew Prine. Neither ambition was realized, which turned her into a pill-addled wreck within three years.

Ellroy’s way of writing true crime is terse to a fault, but his manner of relating uncomfortable truths commands attention. It works best with the Kupcinet piece, as focus was painfully lacking in Karyn’s short life.

Karyn Kupcinet. In Karyn's apartment, police found a note she wrote to herself that read in part: "I’m no good. I’m not really that pretty. My figure’s fat and will never be the way my mother wants it." Image from https://calisphere.org/item/68918d8bc7608b62e5b7a9969de6a917/.

She wrote journal entries about “selfish egoists” around her but spent most of her time obsessing on her appearance and weight. She wasn’t talented enough for the big time, and knew it, but she clung to her dreams. Her obsession with Prine led to her stalking him on dates with other women and sending him anonymous threats using magazine cut-outs. This made Prine a suspect when Karyn was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment just after Thanksgiving, 1963.

“Andy wasn’t an evil cat,” Ellroy writes. “He chased broads. He wasn’t a one-woman man. Karyn was a one-man woman.”

Ellroy doesn’t get into one mystery that connects Karyn (spuriously) with the John F. Kennedy assassination and often dominates talk about the case. Ellroy’s interest is Karyn herself:

She labored under a shroud. She thought showbiz was real.

Something of the same misconception clouds Ellroy’s work here. His consuming interest in celebrity, his own as well as others, becomes a millstone that drags down Crime Wave to a narcissistic level. Even writing about his mother’s murder in “My Mother’s Killer” begs the question whether Ellroy had anything new to say on the subject or just wanted to take a bow for what an awesome book My Dark Places is.

My Dark Places is an awesome book. Go read it; leave this alone.