American psychos

Noir master James Ellroy completes his bloody
Underworld USA trilogy with Blood’s a Rover

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

James Ellroy’s labyrinthine and brutally violent books have transcended the crime genre and segued, with buckets of blood and machine gun prose, into history. “That’s what I do now,” he says over the phone from Los Angeles. “I write historical fiction.”

He speaks like he writes. Each word is considered, chewed on and spat out. Deliberate. Profane. Funny. What you’d expect from a writer who, as he says, likes to “sit in the dark and brood. I clear my mind of distractions.”

Distractions are death for an Ellroy reader. His books are bafflingly plotted but as gripping as a chokehold, and thrust his audience deep into the gory, sordid depths of mid-century America. His latest novel, Blood’s A Rover, picks up where American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001) left off, following the bad white men behind the murders of King and the Kennedys. It’s 1968, Bobby Kennedy has just been shot, black militants are on the rise, Republicans and Democrats are gathering in Miami and Chicago to choose their presidential nominees and the Mob is looking for a new Cuba and eyeing the Dominican Republic. Although the trilogy takes place against the backdrop of reality, it’s the inner lives of the anonymous men and women behind the big events of the ’60s and early ’70s that Ellroy explores.

“The point is recreating the private and human infrastructure of big public events,” he says. “The dynamic that I act on is, get that human infrastructure, the private lives of the anonymous people, the fictional people.”

Blood is packed with characters both invented and real—Sal Mineo, Sonny Liston, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. If there is any one real villain in the trilogy, it’s Hoover—“Gay Edgar Hoover,” says Ellroy. It’s the big G-man who pulls the strings behind murders, Mob collusion and the sabotage of political and personal lives. Hoover’s private life has long been a source of speculation and rumour. There’s a mine of material for a writer like Ellroy, although he does exhibit some restraint here.

“I made up [Hoover’s] voice,” he says. “He’s a celibate homosexual. I don’t think he had sex with man, woman or beast, and loves banter with dangerous guys. I never believed for a second that he was a drag queen who comported in drag at the Waldorf Astoria—much too circumspect and much too ugly.”

But it’s the real characters who are, in some ways, the most fascinating, simply because the open secrets of their private lives explode so vividly. “I had a tremendous amount of fun writing them,” Ellroy says. “I’m damn good at this. It comes from a lot of time spent alone in the dark, thinking obsessively about this shit. The outline that I write from is so superbly detailed it allows me to live incrementally in individuals as I write them. So you take the rudiments of Sal Mineo—in The Cold Six Thousand he beats his lover ‘Donkey Dom’ Dellacrocio to death, so he’s got a little bit of a volatile mean streak even though he’s a fruit, right? But he’s got public name recognition value, he died a notorious death, and you put yourself in the mindset of him, Holly and Crutchfield and you apply concentration to it. It’s just like that: when in doubt, think. And do not be constrained by facts.”

The book gets darker and weirder when the action moves to the DR—and its geography helps. “I didn’t know where the Dominican Republic was, I assumed it was in Central America,” he says. “But I left myself an opening with the Caribbean at the end of The Cold Six Thousand. So I look at the fucking map and holy shit: Hispaniola is near Cuba, which ties into the Cuban fixation for the first two books, and the DR shares land with Haiti. What do you got in Haiti? Black people who speak French and practice voodoo. Voodoo chemistry, wild shit. Ties into black militants in LA. It’s cool shit. You just have to embrace it for that very fact, and realize that it’s your job as a novelist to create verisimilitude and that history is clouded by secrecy and collusive by nature.

“History is not what you think it is. And it’s fun to fuck with it.”

BLOOD’S A ROVER, BY JAMES ELLROY,
ALFRED A. KNOPF, 640 PP., $35