Taxi To The Dark Side

James Ellroy’s in pretty good mood for a man who not an hour ago terminated an interview with Today FM’s Matt Cooper because he didn’t like the line of questioning. With his six foot-three frame coiled into an armchair in the Westbury Hotel lounge, dressed in casual shirt, slacks and sneakers, the writer looks like he just strolled in off the golf course.

“I got a bad night’s sleep in London,” he muses at the conclusion of our interview, “sleep meds kicked in late, woke up a little hungover from ‘em – which I hate, cos I’m sober – had about eight cups of coffee which meant I had to take five pisses in 45 minutes, staggered out to get the car to go to the City Airport to fly to Dublin, they confiscated my nail clippers and my toothpaste, the guy with the Tommy Gun practically said, ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ – didn’t quite, but I could tell he wanted to ask – and here I am.
“I had a very fine interview with Declan Burke, a very fine interview with you, Pat Kenny on the radio, John Kelly on TV. In between a horrible radio interview with some guy named Matt Cooper who started giving me a bunch about Tiger Woods and fucking hookers, and I told him in effect to fuck off, this interview’s over, and I walked out. And it was the right thing to do. I got it out of my system, I had a hamburger, here we are. I figured you can turn the day to shit or you can just bemoan your bad night of sleep, and the day’s turned out pretty fuckin’ good.”
Ellroy is in Ireland to promote the publication of his second memoir The Hilliker Curse, which is essentially a biography of obsession, specifically an obsession with women. Like 1996’s My Dark Places, the first half is primarily concerned with the murder of Ellroy’s mother Jean Hilliker in 1958, a seminal event that fuelled the fire for fourteen crime novels, the greatest of which, The Black Dahlia, braided Ellroy’s own experience with the fabled Elizabeth Short case. The second half charts the author’s lifelong search to replace his mother with a soulmate, and also exhumes his past as a peeper, prowler, panty-sniffer, golf caddy, crime writer and professional obsessive, concluding with his wooing of the writer Erika Schickel, a now-divorced mother of two.
The book’s striking cover depicts a beautiful redhead whose eyes are obscured by the author’s name, suggesting that the woman’s identity has been eclipsed by Ellroy’s obsession. This is, Ellroy admits, no coincidence.
“It’s why there is the repeated motif in the book of, ‘They were indistinguishable and each and every one unique,’” he says. “There were so many of ‘em because I’m obsessive. I was looking for one woman because I’m a romantic and because I’m monogamous in my soul and because I want the real shit, the big shit, the deep shit, the Beethovian shit. I was constantly aware of myself as a pathetic love seeker, a predator, a buffoon, the whole time that I wrote this book.
“And what I realised very early on in the planning stages is that it’s an autobiographical essay as much as it is a memoir. By that I mean I get to be the younger, more obsessed, crazy, fucked up, masturbating-himself-to-the-point-of-death Ellroy as well as the more mature man who’s cracked up, attributing meaning to the younger man, which is a unique aspect of memoir. You can’t lie, you can’t misrepresent, but you can omit, you can emphasise, you can de-emphasise, and you can editorialise and attribute meaning at will.”
For Ellroy, there’s a correspondence between writing the great novel and attaining the unattainable woman. The novel can never be mastered, that is why some of the greatest minds in history, from Tolstoy to Melville, have repeatedly returned to it. She is the beauty that can be courted, but never tamed.
“I think it’s a very interesting and astute perception. I think if you embrace risk as a lifestyle, and adventure as a lifestyle, and decisiveness as a moral stance, you will be rewarded more often than not. I think you will be rewarded in love directly in proportion to the extent that you fail at love and get the shit kicked out of you.”
The new book describes how on The Cold Six Thousand tour some eight years ago Ellroy suffered panic attacks, insomnia and chronic bouts of hypochondria verging on obsessive-compulsive disorder. How did he continue to work through this period?
“I dredged it. I wrote TV and film work to earn money, which is nowhere near as difficult as writing fiction, and I wrote those three comedic novellas that are in Destination Morgue. They forced me to concentrate on a comedic version of my lust for women and they forced me to alliterate, so I had a mental discipline of writing in outrageous language, indulging myself in some of the baser aspects of my sense of humour. How many racial jokes, how much homophobia, how many dyke jokes, how many dick-size jokes can you pack into a 65-page novella? But I knew I did not have a novel in me. I was too tired. I had written too many big books, I had worked way too hard, I had made too many sacrifices, chiefly my marriage.”
Is his ongoing compulsion to rewrite American history a manifestation of the authorial god complex at work, the need to impose order on chaos?
“Yes it is. There is a quote that I love, there was a literary critic (David T.) Bazelon, and he was writing about Dashiel Hammett: ‘The core of Hammett’s art is the masculine figure in American society. He is primarily a job-holder. He goes at his job with a bloodthirsty determination that proceeds from an unwillingness to go beyond it. This relationship to the job is perhaps typically American. The idea of doing a job competently, or not competently, has replaced the full larger issue of good and evil.’
“That is a primer on the male detective figure. He throws himself into a case. He’s an interlocutor, he’s a surveillor, he’s an interrogator, he’s occasionally a combatant. He figures it out and he walks away. The best police detectives are like that. They have chaotic inner lives and they need to impose order on their lives by restoring order to the lives of other people.
“I am given over to promiscuity – although no longer – chemical dependency across a wide range, I’m horrible with money, I spend money like a pimp. I make good money and I’m determined to die broke. Two weeks before I met Erika Schickel, before we conjoined, I put a post-it note on my desk lamp and wrote, ‘No sports cars and no married women.’ I was mistaken. I am full of contradictory rages, fears, obsessive jealousies, covetousness, and writing big complex works of fiction allows me to keep it all in perspective.”

The Hilliker Curse is out now, published by William Heinemann.