What happens when America’s darkest crime writer sees the light?
Get our daily newsletterOn a dark Saturday afternoon in February James Ellroy, America’s pre-eminent crime novelist and chronicler of depravity and excess, was having problems with his central heating.I agreed that it was. Ellroy, who is tall and bald, and looks like a cross between Michel Foucault and Uncle Fester from the Addams Family, got up and spent a few moments peering and poking at the thermostat.
Ellroy’s breakthrough came in 1987 with “The Black Dahlia”, his seventh novel, which was based on a real-life murder. The novel was the first volume in his LA Quartet, a series of complex detective stories that doubled as a portrait of the city after the second world war. In Ellroy’s hands, the crime novel became a compound of historical saga, star-crossed romance, pastiche journalism and psychological case-study.
Ellroy and his father didn’t talk about Geneva Hilliker Ellroy. “It was as if, after the coroner’s inquest, the shroud was dropped,” he said. Ellroy took refuge in crime fiction. His father, who was “never cheap”, would buy him at least a book a week, at Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont Boulevard. He estimates that during the summer after his mother died, he read at least 25 Hardy Boys novels. The experience was “a mediated dialogue on my mother’s death.
In the mid-1970s Ellroy realised that substance abuse was impeding his other appetites. “I wanted to laugh, I wanted to read, I wanted girls, I wanted to sate my curiosities, I wanted to go to the movies. I loved art. I loved great music. I loved history. I loved looking at pictures in magazines.” He also had an idea for a novel. In 1977 Ellroy joined Alcoholics Anonymous and got clean: he liked the extremity of total abstinence.
Ackerman had brought along material for Ellroy’s next novel—a book about the US Treasury. His books often begin with a moment of inspiration. He says that the idea for “The Big Nowhere” – a conspiracy novel from the LA Quartet that touches on homosexuality, communism, the LA Dodgers, anti-Mexican violence and the legacy of the Holocaust—came to him in a second and a half on a lonely Saturday night in the winter of 1986. Its even more intricate successor, “L.A.
When Ellroy and Knode met he had recently entered a period of conscious self-restraint, even self-punishment. Editing “L.A. Confidential” he had turned against flourish, metaphor and scene-setting, developing a habit of “cutting words and cutting words” that resulted in a kind of staccato shorthand. He was also growing more isolated. His behaviour was characterised, Knode told me, by “churning, compulsion, unreachability, one crazy idea after another.
Ellroy describes the style as “chaos”: “Pete rotates. Wayne rotates. Pete moves stateside. Laurent’s there. Ditto Flash. They funnel stateside. Stanton stays in-country. Ditto Mesplède. Tiger Kamp runs low-supervised. The war escalates. More troops pass through. The kadre hits Saigon half-assed.” He and Knode reunited in 2015 when he was promoting “Perfidia”, the first of his new LA Quartet. Knode was living in Denver, so Ellroy bought a flat down the hall. Knode lives more conventionally than him. Her apartment has a kitchen table, wallpaper and a comfortable-looking sofa. The art on the walls doesn’t all involve dogs or crime.
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