White Jazz – James Ellroy, 1992 ★★

Losing the Plot

Life is a subjective, scattershot experience lived in the moment. How can a fiction writer present this on the page?

Most don’t, understanding reading is enough of a challenge without subjecting their audience to real-time fog of war. Others, most famously James Joyce, employ a method known as “stream of consciousness,” of an endlessly percolating series of wildly disparate thought bubbles.

Then there’s James Ellroy, who seems to craft his plots with butcher paper and Post-It notes, and shoves that into his typewriter wholesale for readers to dope out. Life comes at you fast and hard; so does Ellroy. At least that’s how White Jazz goes down.

L. A. Confidential – James Ellroy, 1990 ★★★

Hollywood Swinging

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.

The Big Nowhere – James Ellroy, 1988 ★★★★

Nice Cops Finish Last

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.

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:

The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy, 1987 ★★½

Cruising for Danger with James Ellroy

James Ellroy is the most dangerous man in fiction, sometimes even to himself.

In this, the novel that made him what he is, Ellroy beats himself up over the real-life death of his mother by recasting her as the mystery woman of the novel’s title and delving into both the gruesome facts of her torture-slaying and the dark obsession she triggers in our two main male characters, Ellroy stand-ins both. It was Ellroy’s seventh crime-fiction novel; this time it was personal: