Even some mystery-book fans short-change the subgenre known as the police procedural. Who needs all that cop detail and minutia taking focus away from the killer? Mysteries work best when the investigator is someone outside the system, no?
But James Ellroy is after bigger game than a cozy afternoon whodunit. In The Big Nowhere, he pushes the police-procedural formula into a dizzying array of social, sexual, and racial tilt zones. The amazing thing is not his hubris but how well it comes off.
January 1, 1950: Just after midnight, a sexually disfigured corpse with gouged-out eyes is discovered on a remote street in Los Angeles. The state of the body intrigues young investigator Danny Upshaw, whose need to know intensifies when a witness suggests a homosexual motive.
Will Upshaw’s own subterranean sexuality hamper his investigation? What about being pulled into a political campaign of dubious merit to expose Communist infiltration in Hollywood? Will he be assisted or resisted by two other protagonists, one an ambitious investigator for the District Attorney’s office; the other a sleazy ex-cop who now fixes problems for mobsters and Howard Hughes?
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| Los Angeles in the 1950s was on the move, with new construction everywhere and a booming population. The Big Nowhere depicts a city where money is everywhere but life is cheap. Image from https://www.grayflannelsuit.net/blog/time-capsule-los-angeles-development-boom-of-the-1950s. |
Before everything else, Ellroy plunges you into atmosphere:
Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and noisemaker blare that usually signaled New Year’s on the Strip, bringing 1950 to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meat wagon backup.
The Big Nowhere is a fast-charging, multi-layered narrative and the second book in Ellroy’s “L. A. Quartet” series, though the characters in it only occasionally and tangentially link up with those in The Black Dahlia, the first “Quartet” book, set in the late 1940s.
Like The Black Dahlia, events develop around a horrific murder. It also features the same creepy, depraved central character, not a person but the City of Angels itself.
What you get is a real freak show:
Criminal kingpin Mickey Cohen hangs out at a bar on Hollywood and Vine, joking at volume and length about his lackluster sex life while diners gawk from the surrounding tables “like he was a zoo gorilla who might bolt his cage.”
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| Mickey Cohen, a real-life 1950s mob boss of Los Angeles, figures prominently in The Big Nowhere. A case can be made the villains here are more likeable than the good guys; certainly true for the brutal but amiable Cohen. Image from https://allthatsinteresting.com/mickey-cohen. |
Professional anti-Communist and former Jesuit Edmund J. Satterlee preaches at a bored group of investigators about how deeply the Communist conspiracy has infiltrated American life, his demeanor “a cross between Harry Truman homespun and Pershing Square crackpot – and you never knew when he was going to shout or whisper.”
An aged, boozy morgue technician named Carty offers postmortem photos of yesterday’s biggest stars in exchange for a few bucks. “You pretend they ain’t dead, you can have fun,” he suggests.
So corrupt is this city that law and order come in the form of beatdowns and kickbacks. Upshaw sticks out for the way he spends his downtime studying criminology textbooks rather than looking for civilians to terrorize or switchboard operators to hit on.
Is he just shy, or not that interested in women? It’s a subject Danny is careful to ignore, apparently to the point of regularly drinking himself into a stupor. More powerful distraction comes in the form of a monster:
“He wears dentures, Danny. Most likely on top of his own teeth. They might be steel, they might be some other synthetic material, they might be teeth fashioned from animal carcasses. And he’s rigged up a way to mutilate with them and swallow. They’re not human, and I know this doesn’t sound professional, but I don’t think this son of a bitch is either.”
Ellroy
is never in danger of writing a dull book; only at times an incoherent one. So
many tangents churn simultaneously that I needed to keep a character list handy.
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| The arrests of 17 young Mexican-Americans in connection with what was known as the "Sleepy Lagoon Murder" of 1942 gets attention in The Big Nowhere, as it exposes the racist proclivities of many Los Angeles police officers and sets up a plot twist late in the novel. Image from https://thehundreds.com/blogs/content/combing-the-zoot-suit-riots-and-the-murder-at-sleepy-lagoon. |
Yet once I surrendered to the chaos and let Ellroy’s fantasia wash over me, the novel became a highly original and effective piece of fiction, the kind Sergio Leone might have put on screen with slam-bang action sequences, tough-guy humor, and an overarching fatalism served with a dash of hope. Ellroy’s fascination with cops is deep and intoxicating.
The central plotline involves Danny and the gay underworld he explores trying to uncover the killer from the opening scene. The irony of the case is that no one but Danny really cares about the crime; meanwhile, the case law enforcement does care about, regarding supposed union infiltration by Communist sympathizers, doesn’t offer much of a crime to investigate.
It all boils down to friends in low places:
“There’s a fine-print clause in that contract that states the [union] can be ousted if criminal malfeasance – and that includes treason – can be proved against them. And the Teamsters will work much cheaper, if certain payments are made to certain silent partners.”
Buzz winked. “Like Mickey Cohen?”
“I can’t shit a shitter.”
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| The House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, investigated Communist infiltration in the 1940s. "HUAC was good for business," a psychiatrist recalls. "Lots of remorse, ODs, suicide attempts." Image from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/House_Un-American_Activities_Committee. |
Buzz Meeks is one name I recognized in The Big Nowhere; he has a cameo in both the book and movie version of its sequel, L. A. Confidential. In The Big Nowhere his character arc makes him oddly empathetic despite his overall sleaziness.
The third main player, Mal Considine, likewise proves damaged goods early on, when we watch him slug his wife in the mouth. That he had cause to do this doesn’t make his brutality easier to digest. Nor does his willingness to ruin the lives of Communists to help him take his wife’s son away from her.
“Of all of us here, you’re the only one who comes off as even remotely idealistic,” Mal is told by another member of the anti-Communist investigation team, a ruthless detective lieutenant named Dudley Smith. “A kid gloves cop you are, kid gloves with a cruel streak.”
Smith may be the worst of the lot, but he has a point.
None of the characters are very likeable; even the Communists – who would probably be the rooting interests here if this novel was written by anyone else in the last 40 years – come off as supremely cynical manipulators with their own skeletons to hide. Ellroy’s protagonists freely traffic in crude ethnic banter, deal drugs, and beat people with casual aplomb, to the point where such things seem completely disconnected from any objection we might have about them now.
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| Jazz bars in the city offer the only places in the novel with any integration between blacks and whites. Image from https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/coronavirus-presidential-transition-free-speech-jazz-la/sittin-in-la-jeff-gold. |
At the same time, there is something decent, even moral about The Big Nowhere, a novel where every character, even the most evil, present to the reader a scarred humanity. It is that quality that, along with the juicy, colorful setting, that makes this such a galvanizing read.
All this being said, I don’t think I bought the overarching mystery or its resolution, which struck me as Ellroy trying to tie up too many loose ends rather than letting them flutter mysteriously and ambiguously after the last page. Nor did I accept Upshaw being brought into the Communist witch hunt as an undercover operative while simultaneously allowed to continue pursuing the denture killer.
Much of the magnificence of The Big Nowhere is not its mystery, but how well it works as a police procedural. Ellroy really cements you in a sense of what it was like to be a police detective in Los Angeles, with deep dives into everything from forensics to inter-departmental rivalries. This last point is critical as three different law-enforcement bureaus are spotlighted in this novel, two of them – the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department – bitter rivals because of their connections to warring mobs.
How the police work is at the heart of the story, for good and bad. Like how Danny is told to lay off his investigation by a generally well-meaning superior:
“We’ve got great duty here at this division, we thrive on tourism, and I don’t want it bollixed up because some queer slashed another queer hophead trombone player. Comprende?”
The Big Nowhere is from another time, and not just the early 1950s. In the late 1980s, you could still use slurs like “queer” and “fruit,” and harsher still, without the cultural backlash that would ensue today. Yet in its own time (the 1980s, not the 1950s), The Big Nowhere was bold precisely for the way it puts a critical spotlight on homophobia as a tool for hurting the innocent and protecting the guilty.
More than any particular theme or idea, what The Big Nowhere comes back to again and again is the debased nature of the human condition. Very late in the book, a killer tells a victim that he’s been “crawling in sewers for answers you’d be better off without.” Beyond the exquisite and heartbreaking energy of that moment lies a deeper truth, that whatever moral code one tries to adhere to or live by is ultimately compromised by the very nature of his or her humanity.
The last hundred pages of The Big Nowhere fail to sustain that moment, but they hardly need to. Ellroy delivers quite a ride.
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