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“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.