Conversations with James Ellroy Literary Conversations Series Peggy Whitman Prenshaw General Editor This page intentionally left blank Conversations with James Ellroy Edited by Steven Powell University Press of Mississippi Jackson To my father, Thomas Raymond Powell www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2012 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ellroy, James, 1948– Conversations with James Ellroy / edited by Steven Powell. p. cm. — (Literary conversations series) ISBN 978-1-61703-103-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-104-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-105-2 (ebook) 1. Ellroy, James, 1948–—Interviews. 2. Authors, Ameri- can—20th century—Interviews. I. Powell, Steven, 1983– II. Title. PS3555.L6274Z46 2012 813’.54—dc22 [B] 2011021821 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Books by James Ellroy Brown’s Requiem. New York: Avon Books, 1981. Clandestine. New York: Avon, 1982. Blood on the Moon. New York: Mysterious Press, 1984. Because the Night. New York: Mysterious Press, 1984. Suicide Hill. New York: Mysterious Press, 1986. Killer on the Road. New York: Avon, 1986; originally published as Silent Terror. The Black Dahlia. New York: Mysterious Press, 1987. The Big Nowhere. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988. L.A. Confidential. New York: Mysterious Press, 1990. White Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992. Hollywood Nocturnes. New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1994. American Tabloid. New York: Knopf, 1995. My Dark Places. New York: Knopf, 1996. L.A. Noir. New York: Mysterious Press, 1998. The Dudley Smith Trio: The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz. Arrow: London, 1999. Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. The Cold Six Thousand: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2001. Breakneck Pace. Contentville Press, 2001. The Best American Mystery Stories 2002. Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Destination Morgue! L.A. Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. The Best American Crime Writing 2005. Harper Perennial, 2005. Blood’s a Rover. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Editor (with Otto Penzler), The Best American Noir of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. v This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction ix Chronology xiii An Interview with James Ellroy 3 Duane Tucker/1984 Don Swaim’s Interview of James Ellroy 11 Don Swaim/1987 James Ellroy 20 Fleming Meeks/1990 Doctor Noir 25 Martin Kihn/1992 Interview with a Hepcat 36 Brad Wieners/1995 Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation with James Ellroy 40 Charles L. P. Silet/1995 The Beatrice Interview: 1995 53 Ron Hogan/1995 James Ellroy: Barking 61 Paul Duncan/1996 Dead Women Owned His Soul 92 Jesse Sublett/1997 “Confidential” Commentary 99 Rob Blackwelder/1997 vii viii CONTENTS Lunch and Tea with James Ellroy 104 M. G. Smout/2001 James Ellroy: The Tremor of Intent 114 Craig McDonald/2001 Interview: James Ellroy 125 Keith Phipps/2004 James Ellroy: To Live and Die in L.A. 132 Craig McDonald/2006 James Ellroy: The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential 149 Peter Canavese/2006 Engaging the Horror 158 Steven Powell/2008 Coda for Crime Fiction 169 Steven Powell/2008 James Ellroy: The Art of Fiction 176 Nathaniel Rich/2008 The Romantic’s Code 189 Steven Powell/2009 James Ellroy Previews Blood’s a Rover 201 Art Taylor/2009 Star of the Noir: An Audience with L.A. Confidential Author James Ellroy 205 Alix Sharkey/2009 James Ellroy and David Peace in Conversation 212 David Peace/2010 Index 219 Introduction As a novelist who has devoted much of the latter half of his literary career to both the mythmaking and myth-debunking of American history, James Ellroy has rather fittingly capitalized on his status as one of America’s most sought after interviewees to weave myths about his own life and work. As Ellroy would say to Ron Hogan in 1995, “every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I’ve created about my work and refine it.” Ellroy’s life story reads like a brutal, hyperbolized realization of the American dream. He was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles in 1948; his mother was a registered nurse and his father was a freelance tax accoun- tant and failed entrepreneur. His unusual upbringing was split between his divorced, promiscuous parents. Both his father and mother had the pro- pensity to exaggerate the truth or conceal it from Ellroy. When his mother was murdered in 1958, one of the first things Ellroy did after learning of her death was to fake tears; already Ellroy the storyteller was learning to formulate narrative and performance. Twenty-nine years later, Ellroy trans- mogrified his lust/hatred relationship with his mother with his fictionalized account of the murder of Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia. In doing so, he finds a fictional solution to his mother’s murder by proxy, but not an emotional solution. It would not be until he reopened his mother’s murder case with Detective Bill Stoner that Ellroy could find a compromised peace, an acceptance which Ellroy described in his interview with Charles L. P. Silet: “The only closure is that there is no closure.” Ellroy’s father’s death in 1965 after a series of strokes left the seventeen-year-old high school drop- out without a family and precipitated the worst years of Ellroy’s moral and physical decline—alcohol and drug abuse, a three-year period of breaking and entering into the upper-middle-class houses of Hancock Park to com- mit acts of sexual voyeurism, multiple arrests for petty crimes and several stints in the Los Angeles County Jail. That Ellroy could emerge from this life, reinventing himself as the crime novelist James Ellroy with the publication of his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, in 1981 is a testament to the American dream, albeit his iconoclastic version of it, as Ellroy says in the prologue to ix x INTRODUCTION American Tabloid: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.” Ellroy’s life story lends itself easily to distortion, and throughout the in- terviews in this collection Ellroy consistently tries to correct the miscon- ceptions of journalists. Yet he has also found misrepresentation useful. In interviews with Fleming Meeks and Martin Kihn, Ellroy explains how dur- ing the difficult early period of his literary career he marched into the office of respected crime fiction editor Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Bookshop, New York, and declared himself “the next King of American Crime Fiction,” even though the manuscript of his third book had been turned down by sev- enteen publishers. Although Penzler was unaware of this fact at the time, he was initially skeptical of Ellroy’s bravado. But this meeting would prove to be the start of a long and creative partnership between the two men. If this moment marked the beginning of Ellroy’s “Demon Dog” literary persona, it was also the genesis of his ability to weave myths about his life and work in interviews. Indeed, the opening interview of this collection may form a unique part of that mythmaking process, for Duane Tucker claims he never conducted “An Interview with James Ellroy” for Armchair Detective in 1984 and has suggested Ellroy may have used his name to write the interview himself. It should be noted that the former editor of Armchair Detective, Otto Penzler, claims that such a scenario is impossible and would never have been allowed. Ellroy himself declined to comment on the authorship of the interview, other than saying he had “no recollection” of it. However, there are a few instances within the text that suggest Ellroy did indeed write the piece himself. There is the use of the unusual term “contrapunctually struc- tured” in the interviewer’s introduction, a term Ellroy has used elsewhere to describe the parallel narrative of his novel Blood on the Moon (1984). Also, there is the conspicuous use of the term “ikon.” This uncommon spelling of “icon” appears twice in the Tucker interview. Parenthetically, in his later novels Ellroy deliberately misspells words by adding or changing letters to a “k,” a technique partially stemming from his fondness for alliteration and for American dialects. Tucker may have conducted the interview, and there may be a straightforward explanation for the inclusion of these terms and the unusual interplay between Tucker and Ellroy, which makes this inter- view read like no other Ellroy has ever given. Inevitably in a collection of this kind there is some degree of repetition, but Ellroy is very skilled at retelling stories and expressing opinions without them ever becoming stale or overly familiar: new details emerge with every return to an anecdote, ideas evolve and develop nuance, but occasionally INTRODUCTION xi the interviews record a remarkable change of opinion or a contradiction. In every volume in the Literary Conversations Series, the interviews are ar- ranged chronologically in the order they were conducted, not the order they were published. Thus, these interviews, spanning 1984–2010, address the full breadth and diversity of Ellroy’s literary career, from his debut novel, a private eye story, to the police procedural novels featuring the maverick detective Lloyd Hopkins, to the historical fiction of the L.A. Quartet and Underworld U.S.A. novels and his painfully candid autobiographical works My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse. Just as in every crime novel there are parallel narratives of discovery which intersect and modify each other—the mystery storyline with the personal, emotional investigation of the main protagonist into his own identity—these interviews explore the relationship of and the parallel, shifting, and intertwining narratives of Ellroy’s life and work.