Life During Wartime - Hot Press meets James Ellroy

“Didn’t it break your heart? There is so much love in this book and the only people who get it so far are women,” says James Ellroy.

The self-styled Demon Dog of crime fiction is sitting in Brooks Hotel in Dublin, discussing his latest literary outing over lunch. Perfidia is the first installment of his second LA Quartet, set over 23 days commencing on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attacks.
Ellroy, who has 19 titles to his name, is best known as the author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia. His previous series of connected novels, the Underworld USA trilogy, saw him deviate from the crime genre to explore the world of historical fiction (albeit within a criminal milieu). He’s at it again here.
“I wrote this book in an acute state of yearning, heightened by the fact that I had my own house – my divorce pad – so I was sharply aware of it being over,” he says. “I was also acutely aware of the breadth of my career and lonely in a very poignant way. Perfidia is history as a state of yearning, yearning for national allegiance and romantic conjunction. It is my sense of common cause predated to World War 2: the western world united against the fascists and the Soviet beast, which were in reality one entity.”
The tome centres around the murder of a Japanese-American family and weaves a narrative tapestry which features real life and fictional characters, some of whom we have met in earlier books. These include Dudley Smith, the corrupt cop of the first quartet, and Kay Lake, the main female character in The Black Dahlia. The book is told in real time, within a short period when the spectre of war loomed large.
“It was essential to compress the time-frame and set it within the first few weeks of the war,” says Ellroy. “Life during that time was an expression of appetite. It’s a party – everyone is smoking constantly, drinking, taking drugs, there are four party scenes in the book. Life is fragile. There was a sense of ‘we could be next’. There was an egalitarian levelling of the social and moral code.”
At a time when life may be snuffed out in the blink of an eye, you take your thrills where you can get them, so the unlikely pairing of LAPD bad boy Dudley Smith with Bette Davis is not so far-fetched.
“She’s selfish, narcissistic and needs to be loved. She is a woman of appetite. Dudley and Bette has got to be!” smiles the author. “She is selfish and brittle in a way that Dudley would find attractive.”
From Hollywood’s golden age to the modern blockbuster – there is an eyebrow-raising moment in our interview when Ellroy starts to talk about the influence of Skyfall on the book.
“It is very interesting, Daniel Craig is a great Bond,” he says. “It has all this ridiculous shit as they all do. And I’ll tell you how out of it I am, as far as technology goes. There is a scene where he is in a pit with two giant komodo dragons, who probably weigh 2,000 pounds a piece. He is running over the back of one of them and I thought they were real! But all of it is interesting and all of it is against type. The key for me was, it was all about the defence of the West.”
Following the sprawling geography of the Underworld Trilogy, Perfidia sees Ellroy return to Los Angeles, the city that shaped him and his oeuvre.
“I moved to San Francisco for a relationship and when that broke up I had nowhere to go but back to Los Angeles,” he says. “I had to, and still have to, write TV shows to earn a living, so I had good reason for being there. I went back with both anticipation and resignation. The only beefs I have with it are the beefs of the digital age, which to me are interconnected with overpopulation – too many automobiles, dissolution of the civil code. I have almost been killed half a dozen times by young people driving their cars and looking at their phones.”
The author lives in a world free from the tyranny of mobile telecommunications and technology (he also writes all his books longhand). Is this essential for his work?
“I didn’t set out to ignore this world – I just do,” he says. “I saw the extent to which this world was driving people mad with this urgent need to keep up and I wanted no part of it.”
Both LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia have been adapted for film with varying results. He notes the former is a film to see and the latter to flee. He will once again be associated with the big screen as he is in the midst of working on a remake of classic noir movie Laura.
“I am setting it in London, so it’s a Scotland Yard story,” he reveals. “I didn’t want this to be anyway “street” and the only thing that I am taking with me (from the original) is the lonely haunted police detective and a woman with her face blown off in her apartment. It will be a contemporary setting, but I have a way around DNA and all that. All I want really is he falls in love with a portrait of a woman. That is my life in a nutshell: how could I not have that job?”
He is also working on a noir series with David Fincher, but given the precarious nature of television, will not be drawn on the project, which is only in the early stages.
But at the centre of his creative world are the books. He estimates the follow-up to Perfidia will take two and a half years to complete. At 66 years of age, the Demon Dog shows no signs of slowing down.
In the same way that Perfidia uses World War Two as a back drop, the previous trilogy was set in the treacherous days of the JFK administration. Ellroy speaks often about his obsession with history, and how he is compelled by the ‘secret human infrastructure of large public eve’.  
“I keep thinking back to a photograph I saw as a kid, a woman watching a parade down Wilshire Boulevard on VJ day 1945, a dark haired young woman,” he says. “I always wondered, ‘Who was she? Where’s she going? Did she lose a husband or a lover? Is her man coming home?’
“When you get to a certain point, retrospectively with history, it takes on a glow,” he adds. “It is elegiac and it makes us feel the tenuous nature of our own lifetimes. We are ephemeral. It brings home this: this is a fucking heartbeat. Love now. “

Perfidia is out now, published by William Heinemann