James Ellroy’s Los Angeles is a depraved sinkhole of villainy and vice where a cop’s idea of bracing a suspect is breaking his skull or mangling his hand.
Women trade on male weakness for easy money. Everyone is ultimately corrupt. “You want to know what the big lie is? You and your precious absolute justice!” a rape victim tells her avenger before making sure she hurts him where he lives.
If you are into that sort of thing, I can’t imagine a better Charon for your journey to the underworld than Ellroy. And if there is one novel of his to push you on that journey, it would have to be this.
While notable enough in its own right, often mentioned as one of the great crime novels of its time, L. A. Confidential is better known as grist for one of those “shoulda-won-the-Oscar” movies people still talk about. It’s probably appropriate that a message of the novel is not to trust Hollywood, then, because this book is so different.
Please note. I didn’t say better. The movie is better. That’s because it’s more focused on serving its audience in an intelligent way. The book is a rollicking train ride of constant mayhem and murder, told quickly with a minimum of detail and a jazzy blend of racial invective, profanity, and slang that makes you feel you are one of the damned circa the 1950s, riding a buzz of bennies and Charlie Parker to who knows where:
SCREEEE – the sink shot back blood, bone. Bud yanked the hand out minus fingers – SCREEEEE fifty times louder. Stumps to the burner coils, stumps to the icebox sizzling…
The whores looked bad: a peroxide blonde, a henna redhead, too much makeup on too many miles…
Jack didn’t tell him Daryl was too tired to cause trouble: fucking your mother on roller skates takes a lot out of a kid…
And Ellroy fans know I left out the tough stuff.
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| A Los Angeles murder investigation is underway, October 1953. As a police procedural, L. A. Confidential features several meaningless murders unrelated to the main mystery but requiring investigation. Image from https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/14/us/gallery/tbt-lapd-1953-crime-scenes/index.html |
L. A. Confidential is the third book in Ellroy’s acclaimed “L. A. Quartet” series of crime novels featuring the City of Angels during its postwar boom of the 1940s-1950s. This time the mystery centers around a mass murder in a diner, a lot of stolen heroin, a posse of crooked cops, and some gruesome high-value pornography that may be key to reopening a series of murders thought solved years ago.
Like the prior novel in the series, The Big Nowhere, points-of-view shift between three characters, police detectives all: Straight-arrow Ed Exley aims for the top; Bud White aims to punish wife-beaters but settles for thug duty; Jack Vincennes aims for easy money by busting celebrities in exchange for scandal-sheet bribes. As the three butt heads, corruption swirling around the LAPD threatens to drown them all.
Vincennes lines up a bust of an up-and-coming starlet for a photographer in exchange for whisky he can bring to the cops’ annual Christmas party:
“She’s sitting in the dark, goofing on the Christmas tree. The door looks flimsy.”
Jack drew his .38. “Have the boys put the booze in my trunk. You want Grauman’s in the background?”
“I like it! Jackie, you’re the best in the West!”
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| Robert Mitchum getting busted for marijuana possession in 1948. In L. A. Confidential, Jack Vincennes is bribed to make this kind of bust by Sid Hudgens, editor of Hush-Hush magazine. Image from https://www.memoiresdeguerre.com/2014/10/robert-mitchum-s-1948-arrest-on-marijuana-charges.html |
If you saw the film, you may remember that this party goes south when some drunk cops beat up on Latino prisoners, a. k. a. “Bloody Christmas,” one of several real-life events incorporated into the plot.
Fans of the film will be happy to know many of its brilliant characters exist here, too, in deeper and sometimes more compelling form. Brutal policeman Bud White, played in the film by Russell Crowe, is even more unhinged in the book, though you understand if not sympathize with his fury. His antithesis and archenemy, Sgt. Ed Exley, Guy Pearce in the film, has a deeper backstory involving phony war-hero status and an over-privileged background he rebels against. Exley is the central character if anyone is, and with the plot running in 40 different directions, you appreciate his centering effect on the narrative.
There is a much bigger plot in the novel, Ellroy being both imaginative and inventive in his storycraft and intricate in his design. Yet as brilliant as he is in these departments, the result is very cluttered.
Jack Vincennes’ story is the most baroque of the three, and the most bogged down. Say what you will about Kevin Spacey, his performance as Vincennes in the film is the easiest thing to enjoy about it. In the novel, Vincennes is known as “Trashcan” and has a long subplot about chasing down some high-class porn that interests him:
He wanted to track the filth because part of him wondered how something could be so ugly and so beautiful and part of him plain jazzed on it.
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| This famous poster for the 1997 film is misleading. Russell Crowe is so distant he is dwarfed by each of Kim Basinger's breasts, while Danny DeVito, featured only in a few scenes, gets a bigger close-up than Guy Pearce, who plays the main character. Image from https://www.amazon.com |
Ellroy definitely has a kinky side as a writer that he works here, and he does justify it by connecting it to the main plot, but this becomes so strained a tangent I see how the film was better for mostly leaving it out.
If I had to explain L. A. Confidential to another type of reader, those who had already read prior “Quartet” books The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere and wondering what was next, it would be as a synthesis of their most attention-grabbing elements. The Black Dahlia plays up a heinous (and famous) murder by connecting it to a conspiracy of the rich and depraved, while The Big Nowhere presents the Los Angeles Police Department as a cauldron of seething racism. All this is brought back – with interest – in L. A. Confidential.
Focus thus becomes a problem. We have a lot of characters and stories to sort through, and what worked in The Big Nowhere as outsized if nevertheless convincing representation of life is here something of a gloppy mess, with a lot more gunplay and killing.
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| Jazz legend Charlie Parker, on sax, performs in 1953. Parker and his reputation for drug use gets a few mentions in L. A. Confidential. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-journey-charlie-parker-saxophone-180973393/ |
Put it this way: I was pulled along effortlessly though The Big Nowhere but found myself resisting more here, particularly at the many points L. A. Confidential diverged from its film adaptation. There are a lot of fine moments in this novel, but I found myself skimming through what seemed like chaff to the point of missing vital story points.
One element where L. A. Confidential doesn’t keep you guessing is the identity of the main villain, which is actually revealed on page two, along with the fate of the only main character left alive from The Big Nowhere. It’s a bold move that shows Ellroy characteristically ready to take chances and challenge readers.
As with The Big Nowhere, Ellroy wants to do more here than build a mystery. He revisits the racism and homophobia he worked into that book, and ties both more directly into the ruling Los Angeles establishment. In L. A. Confidential, the murder of six people at the Nite Owl diner is connected to a gang of black youths. Police brass is keen to keep it at that despite nagging questions.
The truth is never easy for Ellroy. The suspects’ alibi involves raping a kidnapped woman and then passing her around for money. When Exley, who wins plaudits for interrogating the suspects but has his doubts, raises his concerns with the rape victim, she naturally wants them to fry for what they did to her: “Correctly means six white people are more important than a Mexican girl from Boyle Heights.”
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| The real-life beatings of seven men by drunken cops in a Los Angeles police jail in December 1951 led to a city-wide scandal. In the novel, it is swept under the carpet until Ed Exley speaks out. Image from https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/page/401/ |
Exley is the all-American boy in this tale, for good and bad. In an early scene, he tries to prevent vigilante justice in a police jail, and testifies against the police officers responsible (including White and Vincennes.) This makes the reader like him, but Ellroy makes sure you know he’s ruthlessly ambitious and lying about his war record.
Ellroy keeps us on his side anyway, by setting him against Dudley Smith, the detective captain revealed in The Big Nowhere and again in the opening of this novel as our Moriarty figure. Smith’s open racism embarrasses even his fellow cops (“As good as he is, the man is off the deep end on coloreds,” one administrator notes) while his crookedness seems a matter of personal pride, as he explains to White:
“I’ve long been involved in containing hard crime so that myself and a few colleagues might someday enjoy a profitable dispensation, and that day will soon be arriving. As a colleague, you will share handsomely. Grand means will be in our hands, lad.”
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| James Ellroy in 2019. He always appears ready to punch the photographer in his portraits, but he's said to be more easygoing than he looks. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/james-ellroy-i-live-in-los-angeles-in-1942-1.3914524 |
Much of the suspense in this story, the best of it in fact, centers not on the Nite Owl Massacre or the porn or heroin investigations but rather if our three main characters can put aside their differences in time to recognize a common threat. Ellroy handles this masterfully; it’s the one element that works better in the book than in the film, and gives this steel-hearted novel a welcome redemptive arc.
For all the cynicism and cruelty on display, there is real empathy at work, which is why L. A. Confidential succeeds as well as it does. This comes through most clearly with Bud White, the most troubled and difficult protagonist, who works for Smith against Exley but also uses his muscle helping battered wives and murdered prostitutes no one else stops to notice.
Of
course, the main reason people like L. A. Confidential is its energy, a
police procedural that doesn’t stint on the gunplay. Add to it sharp period
ambiance and fearless gonzo humor, and you have a winner.
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