“James Ellroy”1

Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (U L B) 1998

Biography: James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1948. He is the son of Geneva (Jean) Hilliker Ellroy, a registered nurse, and of Armand Ellroy, a freelance accountant. Ellroy's parents divorced when the boy was four. From then on, Ellroy lived with his mother in L.A. The event that indelibly affected Ellroy's childhood occurred in 1958, when his mother was raped and strangled. This part of Ellroy's life is explored at length in his recent autobiographical memoir My Dark Places (1996), where the author, now in his late forties, describes his efforts to elucidate the murder, which remains unsolved to this day. After Jean Ellroy's death, Armand Ellroy was in charge of the boy's education. He proved a negligent and manipulative father. Under his tutelage, Ellroy grew into a rebellious teenager with criminal tendencies. To compensate for his psychological isolation, he adopted an aggressively theatrical personality, which led him, for instance, to profess pro-Nazi sympathies in order to provoke his schoolmates. He also became an avid reader of crime writing. The influences he mentions are, for instance, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross McDonald, and, typically, ex-cop Jack Webb's The Badge—a documentary of L.A. law enforcement in the postwar years. After Ellroy was expelled from high school, he joined the U.S. army but soon obtained a discharge by simulating mental instability. By the death of his father in 1965, Ellroy had developed into a petty burglar. He was arrested several times and at one point served a eight-month prison sentence. He was also a chronic alcoholic, who lived partly as a tramp in L.A. parks. Ellroy's behavior changed radically after he barely escaped death from pneumonia. After his hospitalisation, he joined the AA program, started working as a golf course caddie and wrote fiction on the side. His first novel Brown's Requiem (1981) was immediately accepted by an agent and soon

1 This paper was initially published in Post-War Literatures in English (Leiden, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, June 1998).

2 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” published. Since then, he has published about a novel a year, as well as a few short stories. In 1988, Ellroy married Mary Doherty, whom he later divorced. He is currently living near Kansas City and is married to author Helen Knodes. Ellroy's fiction has been awarded several prizes: Clandestine (1982) received an Edgar Awards nomination, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America; The Big Nowhere was granted the Prix Mystere for 1990. Blood on the Moon and L.A. Confidential were adapted for the screen, the former under the title Cops.

Critical essay. Apart for Brown's Requiem (1981) and Killer on the Road (1986), which are narrated respectively by a private investigator and a serial killer, nearly all of Ellroy's works qualify as "police procedurals": they describe criminal investigations from the point-of-view of law enforcement. Their protagonists are therefore police officers—some of them near-geniuses, others murderous hypocrites. These novels fit in fictional cycles: they have large, overlapping casts of characters scattered across several texts. Three partially interconnected cycles can be distinguished in Ellroy's production so far. The first of these, written in the early stage of the novelist's career, centers around detective Lloyd Hopkins (Blood on the Moon 1984; Because the Night 1984; Suicide Hill 1986); their setting is L.A. in the eighties, with occasional flashbacks to the sixties. The second cycle is composed primarily of the so-called L.A. quartet (The Black Dahlia 1987; The Big Nowhere 1990; L.A. Confidential 1991; White Jazz 1992). The quartet novels firmly established Ellroy's fame as an author of detective fiction. They provide a crime-fiction chronicle of Southern California in the forties and fifties and mobilise a considerable cast, including fictional and historical figures. In retrospect, Clandestine (1982), Ellroy's second novel, is the earliest instalment of this fifties cycle: it introduces the figure of law- enforcement maniac Dudley Smith, the central character of the quartet. Ellroy's shorter fiction—"Dick Contino's Blues," as well as other stories collected in Hollywood Nocturnes (1994), pursue the vein of the quartet in a lighter, more ironical form. After the L.A. novels, the writer opened a new stage of his career with the bestselling American Tabloid (1995). This work, drawing on Don DeLillo's novel Libra (1988), offers a fictional reconstruction of intelligence and organised crime conspiracies supposedly leading to the Kennedy assassination. Ellroy indicates that American Tabloid is slated to become the first instalment in a new trilogy called "Underworld USA," which will record the

3 entanglement of politics and crime from the Kennedy administration to the early seventies. Ellroy's most recent work, the non-fiction investigation My Dark Places (1996) goes back to the world of the L.A. quartet, but reframes it as autobiography. There, Ellroy's main themes are revealed to be anchored in the tragedy of his childhood.

Ellroy's fictional universe is the work of a writer who, as he admits himself, limits his reading and writing interests exclusively around crime, be it fiction or documentary. Although Ellroy claims that Chandler was an influence he was eager to outgrow, the 1930s and 1940s hard-boiled genre has exerted a lasting influence on him. His novels, apart for some superficial degree of postmodern narrative self- consciousness, perpetuate the tradition of existentialist crime fiction. They are stories where protagonists prowl the "brutal labyrinth" (Clandestine 3) of the city and are rewarded with glimpses of "wonder and justice" (Clandestine 163). Throughout, the existential confrontation with "wonder" is given a gender connotation. Ellroy follows in the footsteps both of Norman Mailer's existentialism and of the more violent among the crime-fiction writers—James Hadley Chase or Mickey Spillane—in that he makes the violence of masculinity and the obsession with feminine seduction the central mysteries of American life. The analysis below is structured according to the assumption that Ellroy's texts pursue a double enterprise: on the one hand, they contribute to what we might call a libidinal history of the contemporary United States, and, on the other, they act as an excercise in writerly self-fictionalisation. I imply thereby, first, that Ellroy's novels describe criminal transgression and law enforcement in America from a historical angle. More specifically, they describe the power system established by those Ellroy calls the "lowest level implementors of public policy," namely "bad white men, soldiers of fortune, shakedown artists, extortionists, legbreakers" (qted in Duncan, "Call" III, 2). This crime-fiction chronicle is predicated on the idea that power is inevitably complicit of sadistic drives: its main object is the clash between (sex) criminals and "bad men doing bad things in the name of authority" (Dark Places 209). Simultaneously, however, Ellroy's novels, like the cautionary stories detective Lloyd Hopkins tells his daughter in Blood, are "half parable and half confession" (81). They are the medium in which the author reworks his own traumas. Thus, I believe that Ellroy's texts can be scanned in concentric circles, as it were: we can start from

4 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” the outer layer of political and social history, and then to proceed to explore a personal thematics of desire. Ellroy's role as a politically-minded historical novelist is primarily of a demystificatory nature. Against the stereotypical belief that California has been the last-resort haven for American pioneers, he points out that Los Angeles "was built from land grabs and racial grief" (Dark Places 61). The city portrayed in Ellroy's Dahlia or Moon, for instance, is not the sunny paradise where the movie mythology of white America is being hammered out. Rather, it is a tangle of ethnic conflicts triggering such conflagrations as the 1940s Zoots suits riots or the 1965 Watts insurrection. Mexicans are subjected to housing bans and blacks, relegated to what racist cops call "niggerland" (Moon 12), are the victims of systematic police harassment. The denunciation of racist strategies of law enforcement is a leitmotif in Ellroy's novels. Though the texts are thoroughly unsentimental in the depiction of their African- American characters, Ellroy misses no occasion to state that the Los Angeles Police Department, instead of seriously addressing the issue of crime in the black ghetto, has cynically limited itself to "keep[ing] it south of Jefferson [Avenue]" (Confidential 71). Likewise, in White Jazz, mob-related boxer Reuben Ruiz explains that "the LAPD don't investigate colored on colored homicide" (16). Most ominous is Ellroy's contention that the management of segregation is orchestrated by means of the joint efforts of corrupt policemen and organised crime. Rogue cop Dudley Smith explains indeed that "a certain organized crime element should be allowed to exist and perpetuate acceptable vices that hurt no one" (Confidential 71). This means in practice that the sale of heroin to blacks should not be impeded. In these moments, Ellroy speaks in the voice of the most radical representatives of the African American community, who have equated the U.S. policy with regard to drugs to a genocide directed against blacks. Very consistently, in the recent racial controversies over the O.J. Simpson trial, Ellroy has refused to join the chorus of white commentators deploring Simpson's acquittal: "I was running low on white man's outrage," he writes; "[t]he LAPD kicked indiscriminate black ass for fifty-plus years" (Dark 314) and fostered KKK-style cops like O.J. Simpson investigator Mark Fuhrman. Symptomatically, the larger part of Ellroy's debunking of American history focuses on the much sentimentalised post-WWII decade. "[T]he fifties," Clandestine protagonist Fred Underhill insists, "weren't a more innocent time" (1) than the disillusioned present;

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American society did not have to wait until the Kennedy assassination in order to experience racial and political disintegration. Apart from racism, the other political trauma of the fifties Ellroy seeks to expose is the Red Scare. Anti-communist crusades are dealt with extensively in The Big Nowhere and American Tabloid and more anecdotally in Clandestine. In these texts, anticommunism appears as a pretext for down-to-earth power struggles and economic interests. Ellroy paints a suggestive picture of Hollywood politics when, in Nowhere, he portrays the movie moguls' professed Americanism as a ploy to silence union radicals and to hire employees at non-union wages. Likewise, in Clandestine, Fred Underhill is blacklisted as a communist and dismissed from the force for the sole purpose of covering up a botched investigation. Similarly, American Tabloid suggests that Jack Kennedy was the victim of a revenge conspiracy by anticommunist intelligence agents who, because of the Kennedys' political about-turns, had lost their lucrative connections with mob-related casino-owners in Havana. Yet Ellroy's brand of crime fiction can only offer a single-minded form of historical demystification. Indeed, the writer's contention that "[v]iolence is at the root of all intrigue," that "it's the basis of all threat ... in history" (qted in Duncan II, 2) reduces all aspects of society to a monomanical spectacle of corrupt cops and small-time hoodlums. Typically, political and class issues never occupy a central status for very long in Ellroy;. they are shoved to the novel's periphery, for instance, by what the writer calls his "tabloid sensibility" (qted in Duncan III, 6). Ellroy himself admits thats he is "voyeuristically curious about people's sex lives" (qted in Duncan II, 3) and that, as an L.A. native, he has always been eager to know "who's got the biggest wang in Hollywood" (qted in Duncan II, 3). This obsession with gossip is thematised in L.A. Confidential and in the aptly titled American Tabloid. The former novel depicts the movie industry as a self-styled moralistic enterprise spreading its bland official ideology by, for instance, building All-American amusement parks like film mogul Walter Dieterling's "Dream-a-Dream-land"—a Disneyland-style venue (Confidential 15). However, for the novel's cops and tabloid reporters, Walter Dieterling's morally sanitized movie world takes on the features of "Hollyweird"—a congregation of tax-evaders, real-estate lobbyists and sex felons. On an allegorical plane, the moral hypocrisy of the entertainment crowd is embodied in the existence in L.A. of a pornography and prostitution network, labelled "Fleur-de-Lys," which sells the services of prostitutes who have undergone plastic surgery in

6 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” order to become movie-star look-alikes. The network also lends pornographic albums depicting grotesquely violent sex-orgies. One may grow tired of Ellroy's appetite for superficial sleaze: it seems possible, for instance, to satisfy one's curiosity about the Kennedy murder without being repeatedly told that, as Marilyn Monroe's lover, the president was only "a two-point-four-minute man" (qted in Duncan, III, 3). Yet Ellroy's need to substitute his own insider's knowledge for official wisdom embodies, the author's more general impetus to point out that the essential truth of American society is always somehow elsewhere, hidden, displaced to "another secret history" (Duncan II,3). In the narrative structure of Ellroy's novels, the importance of secrecy and elusiveness is made visible in the writer's masterful use of interlocking plots with a conspiratorial connotation. Ellroy borrows this device from the hard-boiled tradition, yet he drives it to new levels of complexity. Ellroy displays indeed a genuine virtuosity for elaborating fictions that mobilise considerable casts— more than fifty significant characters in each of the L.A. quartet novels, for instance. These sprawling narratives are structured according to a logic of wheels within wheels, or rather, of interconnected systems of intrigue whose interlockings the reader can barely keep track of. Police investigations in the L.A. cycle, particularly, interweave at least two full-fledged criminal plots. These are, typically, revealed in sequence, as if one constituted the surprise revelation the other was meant to hide. In Clandestine, for instance, Fred Underhill's attempt to nail a sex killer first yields one credible suspect—Eddie Engels, a gay man sexually abused in his youth, who commits suicide after being brutally interrogated by Dudley Smith. However, two-thirds into the novel, Fred discovers the genuine killer, William "Doc" Harris, the mastermind of a heroin traffic, who killed his own wife Marcella as well as his own accomplices in the drugs scheme. In L.A. Confidential, a brutal barroom killing—the Nite Owl massacre—first leads the police to a gang of black youngsters. The latter are indeed kidnappers and rapists, and therefore ideal fall guys for the bar-room slaughter. Yet the murders turn out to spring from a drug-conspiracy involving mobsters and cops. What makes these interwoven stories particularly mysterious is the fact that, though connected by apparent coincidences, they mirror each other according to a logic of doubling reminiscent of the gothic. In Clandestine, Eddie Engels is an abuser of women, not a murderer. Yet the misogyny that characterises Engels proves to be a potent homicidal

7 motive when embodied in the figure of arch-fiend "Doc" Harris. Thus, Engels, though not legally guilty, is not innocent in poetic terms. In The Big Nowhere, communist Hollywood actor Reynolds Loftis is at one point suspected of being the perpetrator of a gruesome series of murders on homosexuals. Yet, in Ellroy's narrative logic, the figure of Loftis splits off into two, as it were, as the genuine killer turns out to be Loftis's son, a psychopath who, in a revenge plot against his father, carries out atrocities donning genuine wolverine teeth. By the same token, most of Ellroy's investigators are involved in criminal schemes and personal obsessions mirrored in gothic proportions by the actual killers’ deeds. Detective Lloyd Hopkins, in Blood on the Moon investigates sex killings out of a wish to protect women against the "destruction of innocence" (124). Ironically, this turns out to be the very motive that inspires the serial killer he is tracking: the latter attempts to save women's innocence by entirely liberating them from their lives. Likewise, in White Jazz, detective David Klein is a corrupt mob-connected figure, involved in shady real estate deals and, on a personal level, entangled in an incestuous bond to his sister. Fittingly, he finds himself obsessively scrutinising the activities of the Kafesjian family, a set of drug dealers and police informers whose intricate family story involves adultery and incest. In terms of verisimilitude, the interlocking plots and the thematics of doubling exert a distorting impact on the realistic and historical dimensions of Ellroy's texts. That the novels thus shift across genre boundaries can be brought forth by focusing on the writer's obsessional handling of cycle narration. The latter device seems on the face of it legitimated by realistic concerns. It seems indeed logical that the L.A. quartet novels should adopt the cycle format, since they focus on a common universe of characters, events and locale. It is also fittingly realistic that Ellroy's brand of cycle narration should make historical actors—movie moguls Howard Hughes and Walt Disney (under the transparent pseudonym of Walter Dieterling), L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen, the Kennedy family—rub shoulders with fictional characters. More surprising, the strands of Ellroy's cycles seem to know no clear boundaries. The Black Dahlia case, for instance, is mentioned well before the eponymous novel—in Brown's Requiem and in Blood on the Moon. By the same logic, Ward Littell, the dedicated anti-communist, is a secondary character in The Big Nowhere but a major one in the post-L.A.-quartet American Tabloid. This, combined with Ellroy's use of uncanny doublings and narrative echoes, leaves us faced with a

8 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” labyrinth of cross-references and (mis)recognitions, peopled with figures that, even when unrelated, share unexpected characteristics.

The pattern of recurrences, echoes and repetition in Ellroy's fiction, denotes in the writer a tendency to rework ceaselessly a set of personal obsessions. Among the elements that contribute to the game of repetitions, even the more superficial—the allusions to golf playing, the slurs against popular culture and rock and roll—are restated with such insistence that they stand out as idiosyncracies endowed with autobiographical resonance. As far as darker aspects go, Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places makes clear how the novelist's fascinated exploration of sexuality and violence is rooted in his personal life. The psychological mainspring of My Dark Places is Ellroy's attempt to come to terms with the sense of loss occasioned by the murder of his mother, and his resolve to make amends for not having tried to know her and understand before and after her death. Notably, he reminisces how he let himself be influenced by his father, who insisted on depicting Jean Hilliker as a promiscuous alcoholic. Ellroy deflates this negative image and reconstructs the context that led some of his acquaintances to pay credence to it. Also, he attempts, through the exposé of other investigations into murder and rape cases, to circumscribe the criminal drives that lead male sex offenders to commit such crimes. In this autobiographical logic, it appears that Ellroy's novels develop symbolic strategies meant both to explore and to nurse a wound. One of these devices, already present in the stories described above, involves an indirect form of self-projection: personas derived from Ellroy's life story are represented throughout the texts in manifold guises, albeit in displaced or caricatural form. Self-fictionalisation implies, for instance, that Ellroy places within his stories avatars of his own personality—self-portraits that are usually partial, even paradoxical. In Brown's Requiem, for instance, Frederick "Fat Dog" Baker and Walter Curran seem to embody past experiences that the novelist attempts to exorcise. The former is indeed both a tramp earning his living as a golf caddie and a extreme-right-wing fanatic; the latter is a genius-like intellectual crippled by alcoholism. First-person- narrator Fritz Brown, a private investigator, represents in this sense the figure of the surviving self, which has managed to leave behind the political and psychological pitfalls illustrated in the other two. A similar psychological dialectic informs Blood on the Moon, where detective

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Lloyd Hokpkins defines himself in contradistinction to his brother Tom, who, like "Fat Dog" in Brown's Requiem, is a white supremacist. The deeply autobiographical Clandestine develops Ellroy's technique of therapeutic self-fictionalisation on a broader scale. On the face of it, this novel might be read as an impossibly melodramatic narrative tangle. Yet its surrealistic accumulation of coincidences and mirror effects signals that it gives voice to an autobiographical thematic, though in a manageable, distanced fashion. The novelist himself indicates that the murder on "Doc" Harris's wife Marcella is closely modelled on the crime that cost Jean Ellroy's life. Moreover, Marcella Harris's son Michael is a straight portrait of Ellroy at the age when he lost his mother. By virtue of Ellroy's device of fictional self- projection, most characters in the novel appear as refracted avatars of this family triangle. All murdered women are figures of Marcella Harris, thus also of Jean Ellroy. Conversely, all the men—"Doc" Harris, the first suspect Eddie Engels, detectives Dudley Smith and Fred Underhill—are interchangeable in that they partake in the sadistically-oriented world of male desire. It is this logic of guilt by association that may have led Ellroy to portray his father, though never a suspect in Jean Ellroy's murder, as the Machiavellian Harris—thus endowing this character both with homicidal tendencies and intellectual gifts that his real father never had. Within this autobiographical pattern, first-person narrator Fred Underhill plays an interestingly double function: on the one hand, he is one of the predatory males: his obsessive interest in the Harris case stems from the fact that, in his flings as a bar-room playboy, he dated one of the murder victims. On the other hand, he has experienced parental loss, and therefore stands as a representative of Ellroy himself within the fictions. There are at least three such figures in the novel: the obviously autobiographical figure of Michael Harris, Underhill himself, as well as Underhill's wife, assistant D.A. Lorna Weinberg. Typically, it is in the character of Weinberg—on the face of it, the most remote from the autobiographical Michael Harris—that Ellroy most deeply allegorizes his feelings of loss: Lorna's pregnant mother died from the repercussions of a car accident in which Lorna herself was crippled—thus carrying visible stigmata of grief. The second set of strategies enabling the novelist both to revisit and assuage his personal trauma concerns the representation of violence. Ellroy claims that "[v]iolence is always very short, swift and to the point in [his] books" (qted in Duncan, "Call" III, 2). This is, however, euphemistic: if violent acts are swift, their aftermath and their

10 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” preparation are framed with a high level of ritualistic theatricality. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia illustrates this phenomenon. The novelist borrowed the anecdote of the unsolved Black Dahlia case—the 1947 rape, murder and mutilation of Elisabeth Short—from an actual criminal case, and adapted it to his own requirements. As the rape and murder of a woman, the Dahlia case acts as an exacerbated reminder of Jean Ellroy's death, with a horrifyingly higher level of homicidal violence. Within the text itself, references to Elisabeth Short's murdered body are reverberated in an obsessive pattern, from the discovery of the corpse, the full-length quoting of the autopsy report, to a gruesome scene where Dudley Smith uses cadavers in order to shake crackpot suspects out of their self-accusing fantasies. This image of violence, multiplied in mirror fashion, finds its epitome in the description of the shack where the murder took place. There, in a trope characteristic of Ellroy, we are shown a neatly framed tableau of horror: the spectacle of cruelty is simultaneously abject and orderly; the killer has neatly stored body parts in jars, and recorded his abominations in a carefully detailed "torture diary" (364). Contrary to what I implied rather optimistically above, Ellroy's Dahlia case offers no simple answer to the question whether the spectacle of cruelty in art can genuinely contain violence—whether the aesthetic formalism of story-telling fosters a therapeutic catharsis or whether it enhances aggression. Beyond the murder scenes proper, Ellroy explores this issue in more abstract terms through what we might call metafictional emblems: thanks to a technique of mise-en- abyme, the novelist embeds within his text depictions of cultural items (paintings, books, music) that adhere to a violent aesthetic similar to his own. In The Black Dahlia, for instance, the facial disfiguration the killer inflicted on Elisabeth Short is copied from a painting, which is itself inspired from Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs. The portrait—a hideously laughing buffoon—embodies the author's own aptitude to make an artistic statement with a sharp edge of cruelty. In Nowhere and Confidential, the Fleur-de-Lys pornography fullfills the same function. On the one hand, these pictures of sex orgies, overwritten with blood-red ink stains, have high-culture credentials. Claire De Haven, a communist activist and modernist aesthete, explains that they were shot by "[a] brilliant man called Paul Doinelle" (Nowhere 341), who reminds her of "Cocteau, only with more sense of humor" (341). However, the less culturally literate detective Jack Vincennes is embarassed to see that "part of him plain jazzed" on the

11 bizarre "filth" (Confidential 142). Vincennes wonders "how something could be so ugly and so beautiful" at the same time (142). The question raised thus—whether art transcends evil, whether it can serve as a therapy against psychological pain—is never resolved in Ellroy. In his lighter moments, the novelist does imply ironically that his texts might be no more disturbing than a scandal sheet comparable to the omnipresent Hush Hush magazine in the L.A. quartet, or the grade-Z science-fiction movies mobster Mickey Cohen finances in Dick Contino's Blues. Yet, these scenes are counterbalanced by others, like the characterisation of jazz music in The Big Nowhere, which restate the affinity of violent art with what it describes. In the latter novel, detective Upshaw prowls through music clubs in search of the wolverine killer; he hears a modernistic be-bop tune made up of "wailing, lilting, wailing" sounds that drift off into complex chord variations and "digr[ess] into noise" (Nowhere 53). By the end of the novel, Upshaw discovers that the saxophonist he was listening to is the killer himself, who was fascinated by wolverines notably because "[t]hey had a snarl that sounded like the high notes on his sax" (Nowhere 451). Ellroy's reflections on art and crime have a relevance that goes beyond an autobiographical search. It is through them that his fiction positions itself within the current debates on gender. On the face of it, the relation of Ellroy's novels to gender criticism and feminism is likely to be an antagonistic one. Although Ellroy—in My Dark Places, particularly—sends sympathy signals to his women readers, significant sections of his novels channel sadistic pornography (the rape, murder dismemberment, disfiguration chiefly of women and homosexuals) giving voice to the most aggressive male fantasies. From the point-of- view of antipornography activists like Andrea Dworkin or Christine McKinnon, for instance, such scenes naturalize gender relations based on physical dominance and rape. Also, the representation of sexuality in Ellroy fits in the increasing wave of violent misogyny that has characterised popular culture (crime fiction, Hollywood movies) from the 1970s to the 1990s, and that gives vent to masculine fears over the presumed slippage of patriarchal hegemony. These feminist strictures are impassable in their own terms, the more so as Ellroy's novels themselves lay bare their own inability to frame the spectacle of violence along redeeming lines. Still, I believe that the antipornography argument accounts for only part of the political momentum of Ellroy's novels. Indeed, the obsessive attention

12 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” devoted to sex murders in these texts is part of the author's deliberate agenda of exposing the inevitably violent underside of patriarchy. The writer indicates that, in Dahlia, he "tried to portray the male world that sanctioned [Elisabeth Short's] death" (Dark 209). From this perspective, a murder like the Dahlia case constitutes a moment of crisis when patriarchy turns against its own paternalistic ideology. Gender theorists like Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick have argued that patriarchal societies owe their cohesion to a system of exchange—the kinship and marriage system—in which women serve as currency: they are bartered about in order to establish social bonds among the patriarchs. In this perspective, the slaying of Elisabeth Short in The Dahlia induces a gender panic among L.A. cops because it implies that there are criminals in L.A. moved by a form of desire so aberrant that it leads them to radically destroy the very bond on which the men's order relies: they savagely kill a victim that, according to patriarchal logic, should instead be seduced, protected, disciplined or married off. The murder therefore raises two equally unpalatable insights: it suggests, on the one hand, that patriarchy includes sex murder among its normal modus operandi—and thus that the Dahlia slaying, however brutal, is a valid instance of the patriarchal traffic in women. In a different interpretation, it indicates that the system of patriarchy can never smoothly regulate desire and gender relations: it is bound to be an unworkable fantasy, either because masculine drives are inherently homicidal and cannot be contained by kinship and marriage systems, or because the male-to-male patriarchal system makes it so. In this controversy, Ellroy's novels do not quite settle for one interpretation of masculine violence over another: they rather display the two logics at work simultaneously. Ellroy's belief that there is an ineradicable brutality in men is, we have seen, well attested in his works. Conversely, the stories also demonstrate how violence is structured, possibly generated, by an institutional framework that might be called the evil order of fathers. Ellroy's predilection for police procedurals seems indeed rooted in the writer's need to depict male homosocial pecking orders where innocent rookies fall under the sway of corrupt father figures. Ellroy is at his best when he describes the rites of manhood—especially the absurd or disingenuous ones—on which male hierarchies are based. In Dahlia, the unequal hopes for promotion of officers Blanchard and Bleichert are pegged both to their status as former boxing champions, and to their glory (or lack of it) as WWII veterans. Here, boxing and war experience are emblems of manhood

13 meant to be bartered about as commodities. In a logic that closely resembles the traffic in women, these features turn the young men into attractive protégés to their superiors. In Dahlia, assistant D.A. Ellis Loew, for instance affects a passion for boxing, and therefore takes under his tutelage boxing aficionados, who are promoted accordingly. Ellroy voices his distaste for this system, first by indicating that in spite of the professed admiration for male exploit, the police hierarchy is foreign to any genuine heroism: real bravery is performed in secret, otherwise it is an official lie used for advancement purposes. In Confidential, for instance, future chief of detectives Edmund Exley's career is helped forward by wartime exploits that he faked in order to cover up his own ineptitude. Likewise, Exley's indeed considerable skills as a police interrogator were, ironically, schooled by a family friend who earnestly believes he managed to crack a major serial killer case twenty years ago—erroneously, as it turns out. More fundamentally, those who let themselves be defined by the male pecking order are no longer their own man. In Clandestine, when rookie Fred Underhill calls at Dudley Smith's door, he is greeted by the latter's young daugther, who introduces Underhill by shouting "Daddy, your policeman is here!" (119, emphasis mine). This formula unwittingly emphasises an actual relationship of personal submission. Ultimately, accepting the initiation into the male hierarchy entails becoming an accomplice to abject violence. In Clandestine, Underhill enjoys Dudley Smith's support as long as he is ready to beat up suspects senseless. The bond among the men is secured by the very consciousness of transgressing moral laws. Against this background of father figures, submissive sons and gynophobic hysteria, Ellroy deploys stories of "heavily compromised" redemption (Duncan, "Call" III, 5). Some characters of the novels are indeed able to shake off the burden both of corrupt authority and innate brutality in order to achieve some sense of integrity. The success of their conversion is the more rewarding as it is obtained in seemingly unredeemable circumstances, and, paradoxically, as it yields results that may be barely noticeable to outside observers. The figure of Ed Exley in L.A. Confidential is exemplary of this thematics: he is initially a coward under the combined domination of his father and of the latter's powerful friends. Worse, Ed lives in awe of the memory of his dead brother, reputed to be much braver than himself. Promoted by family pull and by his eagerness to snitch on his own colleagues, Ed is entrusted with the Nite Owl massacre investigation. When he shoots

14 Den Tandt “James Ellroy” the defenseless—and, as he later realises, innocent—black suspects, he finds himself praised for a gesture of fake heroism similar to his spurious war exploits. Though this particular investigation leaves him as painfully subjected to authority as before, Exley later manages to unravel a related string of sex killings in which his father's friends are implicated. Thus emancipated from his father's world, he remains a stern, unsympathetic chief of detectives, though a genuinely competent one. More endearing subjects of conversion are Danny Upshaw and Buzz Meeks in Nowhere. Upshaw is first tempted to join the ludicrous anti-communist witch hunts of Dudley Smith's evil posse. Yet he grows interested in murders on homosexuals his gaybashing colleagues refuse to investigate. The path of redemption, for him involves discovering his own homosexuality and eventually getting killed. Buzz Meeks, though very much a corrupt male himself, is disgusted by the process of character assassination that focuses on the death of young Upshaw. He therefore follows the gay murder investigation to its end. Redemption is also the logic that helps Lloyd Hopkins in Moon to exorcise his own affinities with murderers. In these examples, we discern that redemption serves as a narrative pattern enabling Ellroy to balance out the sociological and the autobiographical elements of his fiction: Hopkins is indeed one of Ellroy's self-projections. By reconstructing the logic by which this character may become reconciled with himself, the author both revisits his own past and also investigates the social sources of masculine aggression.

Bibliography

Works by James Ellroy:

Crime novels: Brown's Requiem. New york: Avon, 1981. Clandestine. New York: Avon, 1982. Blood on the Moon, New York: Mysterious Press, 1984. Because the Night. New York: Mysterious Press, 1984. Killer on the Road. New York: Avon, 1986. Silent Terror (Killer on the Road). Introduction by Jonathan Kellerman. New York: Avon, 1986. Suicide Hill. Avon, 1986. The Black Dahlia. New York: Mysterious Press, 1987. The Big Nowhere. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988. L.A. Confidential. New York: Mysterious Press, 1990.

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White Jazz. New York: Mysterious Press, 1992. American Tabloid. New York: Random House, 1995.

Autobiography: My Dark Places. New York: Random House, 1996.

Other: "Introduction." In Jim Thompson. Heed the Thunder. Armchair Detective Library, 1991.

Secondary Literature:

Academic Literature

Tucker, Duane. "An Interview with James Ellroy." Armchair Detec- tive. 17:2(Spring 1984) 150-155

Stone, Les. "James Ellroy." Contemporary Authors. 138(1992)143- 135.

Silet, C.P. "Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation with James Ellroy." Armchair Detective. 28:3 (Summer 1995): 36-40.

Frieburger, William. "James, Walter Mosley, and the Politics of the Los Angeles Crime Novel." Clues: A Journal of Detection. 17: 2 (Fall/Winter 1996): 87-104.

Duncan, Paul. The Third Degree Crime Writers in Conversation. Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1997.

Websites

Gray Paul. "The Real Pulp Fiction." Time (Domestic). 145:15. April 10, 1995. http://www.pathfinder.com/ @@pPP6IAUAv9edB.../domestic/1995/950410.profile.html

Cutter Alex "The Madhouse of the Skull: James Ellroy's L.A. Quar- tet." Website: Autumn 1996. http://www.easyweb. easyn- et.co.uk /-flux/madhouse html

16 Den Tandt “James Ellroy”

Eskine, Blake. "Case Closed" (Review of My Dark Places). Website: November 1996. 3pp. http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/ ar- chive/books/reviews/11-96/ELLROY.html

Miller, Laura. "Oedipus Wreck: The Salon Interview; James Ellroy." Salon. Dec. 1996. http://www.salonmagazine.com/ dec96/interview96.1209.html

Capen, Stephen. "Interview with James Ellroy." Worldguide. Web- site: January 17, 1997. 7pp. http://www.worldmind.com/ Can- non Culture/Interviews/Ellroy.html

Kelly, Steven. "The Sub-Definitive Ellroy on Ellroy." The Richmond Review. June 1997 http://www.demon.co.uk/ fea- tures/ellsound.html

Duncan, Paul. "Call Me Dog." Parts i, ii, iii, iv. The Richmond Re- view. June 1997 http://www.demon.co.uk/review/ fea- tures/ellint01.html

Garon, Jesse. "James Ellroy: The Guy Behind the Mad Dog; Ameri- can Tabloid." Beatrice Interview. July 1997. http://www.beatrice.com/ contents/interviews/ellroy.html

Magazine Reviews:

West Coast Review of Books. January, 1983: 43.

West Coast Review of Books. September 1983: 20.

Observer, May 13, 1984: 23.

Los Angeles Times Book Reviews. June 3, 1994: 18.

Spectator. July 21, 1984: 29.

New York Times Book Review. July 22, 1984: 32.

New York Times Book Review. July 6, 1986: 21.

17

West Coast Review of Books. September 1986: 27.

Armchair Detective. Spring 1987, 206.

New Statesman. June 19, 1987: 31.

Los Angeles Times. October 4, 1987.

Los Angeles Times Book Reviews.September 13, 1987: 16.

Christian Science Monitor. October 2, 1987, B5.

York Times Book Review. November 8, 1987: 62.

People. December 14, 1987.

New Statesman. January 22, 1988: 33. New York Times Book Review. October 9, 1988: 41.

Los Angeles Times Book Reviews. October 9, 1988: 12.

Post Book World. October 23, 1988: 10.

New York Times Book Review. September 3, 1989: 20.

Los Angeles Times. May 27, 1990.

Times (London). November 10, 1990

Publishers Weekly. June 15, 1990: 53-54.

People. July 2, 1990.

Los Angeles Times Book Reviews. July 8, 1990: 8.

New York Times Book Review. July 15, 1990: 26.

Bestsellers 90, Issue 4, Gale, 1990.

New York Times Book Review. June 30, 1991: 32.

18 Den Tandt “James Ellroy”

Armchair Detective. Winter 1991, 31.