Written in Blood

James Ellroy is courteous, polite and softly spoken. He gives considered responses and compliments our questions. On one occasion he asks if the room temperature meets with our approval. Before we depart he reiterates how much he enjoyed the interview and thanks us.

What’s wrong with this picture?
Not that we were expecting to be savaged by the Demon Dog of American Letters, but on the strength of his fire-and-brimstone approach to book readings, and the raucous nature of his interviews, we were fully prepared to flee from his hotel suite in tears – or at least with self-esteem trampled.
But this is not the case, for today we meet the man behind the bravado.
Ellroy is relaxing in his suite in the Mal Maison Hotel in Belfast in advance of an appearance at the Waterfront Hall to launch the third instalment of his Underworld USA trilogy Blood’s A Rover.
“It’s my big book of conversion, belief, faith and the importance of philosophy, God and mysticism,” he announces. “I’m thrilled that it’s done. I think it stands as a crowning achievement in my career. Now I have to do something better!”
Over the last 28 years Ellroy has published numerous crime novels, most famously his LA Quartet, which included his masterpieces The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, plus short stories, essays and his autobiography, 1996’s My Dark Places, an account of his attempt to reopen the case on his mother, murdered in 1958.
After the LA series, Ellroy made a conscious decision to steer away from crime and embrace historical fiction. The first book of this Underworld trilogy, American Tabloid, appeared in 1995, followed by The Cold Six Thousand in 2001.
The series traces political and criminal corruption from 1958 to 1972 using literary devices such as third person narration by each of the main protagonists and a telegraphic prose style punctuated by document inserts.
The concluding book follows the exploits of three characters who are embroiled in a clandestine melange of illegal activity involving the mob, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover. The title was created in the wake of a number of personal traumas, and these battle scars are evident in the book’s complexity and vulnerability.
“My life went down,” Ellroy says. “I had a nervous breakdown. My marriage died. I was looking to start over. I was looking to have a family, later in life. The relationship I moved on to didn’t work out.”
Although all the quintessential Ellroy elements are present; rapid fire dialogue, staccato prose and an old master’s consummate ability to paint tortured souls and their seedy, pernicious environs, there is a marked shift in the emotional range of the book. In this story, the principal characters, the ‘right-wing leg breakers’ as he calls them, all find solace and consolation with left-wing females. Also, the women in the book are well-drawn, multi-faceted individuals as opposed to the somewhat crude femmes fatale of earlier works.
“It’s a deeply romantic novel,” he says. “It’s about the romance of ideas and the romance of men and women. A lost boy (the character of Don Crutchfield, based on Ellroy), who is me, enters this matriarchal world, this world of strong older women. They care about him in a ruthless and measured way. They are primarily ideologues and they will him their paperwork.”
Ellroy has a well-documented preoccupation with the fairer sex, sparked by the murder of his mother at the age of 10, transposed to his fixation on Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia, and evident in the power of his female characters over their male counterparts. One revealing moment in Blood’s A Rover occurs when the character Crutchfield, a Private Detective, is queried on his high-risk lifestyle, “Why do you do these crazy things?” He responds; “So women will love me.”
Does this have any personal resonance for Ellroy?
“Yes! That is why I write books.”
Eight years have elapsed since the completion of The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy admits that when he finished that book, very little of this current plot was formed.
“I knew the mob wanted to plant casinos in Central America and the Caribbean,” he says. “But I thought the Dominican Republic was in Central America, not adjoining Haiti. It came to me very slowly because I was just played out after The Cold Six Thousand and I needed a rest for a while.”
“The three works exist seamlessly in a way that the LA Quartet books do not,” he continues. “I can’t believe that’s it’s over finally and it took as long as it did. I’m anxious to move onto the next thing.”
Given the unified nature of the trilogy, it is surprising to discover the author’s initial vision was quite different.
“I started out thinking American Tabloid would be a one-off,” he states. “Later I saw the narrative opportunites of writing a big book about the 60s. Then I could see this book. With this work I made a conscious decision to write a more accessible, reader-friendly, emotionally resonant book.”
In addition to its emotional depths, the book is also rich with black humour. The non-fiction characters, particularly Nixon, provide much light relief.
“Well he’s tremendously fun and he’s tremendously funny,” smiles Ellroy, “I knew that I had to exposite the necessary information about him but I didn’t know going in that I had the opportunity to make him as amusing as he ended up being.”
The character of Joan, a left-wing agitator who is responsible for the redemption of two of the principals, is based on the woman with whom he was involved after his marriage.
“I was aware that I was writing it to her and that I’ll never see her again and we ended badly,’ he says. “I was given the opportunity of living in resentment after that or attempting to honour her, which is what I chose to do. The book is dedicated to her.”
The relationship between Crutchfield and Joan is quite complex. At one juncture he professes:
I will avenge you,
I will honour the great gift of you,
You faltered and gave me your flag for safekeeping,
I will carry it for you now.
The tone and sentiment of these lines echo the closing paean to his mother in My Dark Places. How have his feelings about his mother changed since then?
“Yeah, you’re absolutely right, the form of address to her at the end is very similar,” he says, pausing to consider the question. “I saw how she has mediated my relationships with women and how important she is to that. I saw that she and I are primarily a love story rather than a murder story and if there’s a failing with My Dark Places it’s that I failed to realise that at the time.”
He revisits some of this territory in his next project, a memoir titled The Hilliker Curse, in which he expresses regrets about the way in which he publicised his books, utilising the story of his mother’s murder.
“It will be out next year,” he reveals. “It’s being serialised in the April, June, September and November issues of Playboy. It’s about women and me. It’s about my mother, so in that sense there is some repeat of the information in My Dark Places. Joan is in there.”
Another telling narrative strand is that Joan and another main character both lose parents at an early age as the result of injustices. The deaths dictate the course of their obsessive lives, somewhat paralleling Ellroy’s own journey.
“They have a social grievance and I don’t,” he muses. “They are people shaped by history in a way that I can only imagine, because I did imagine. They are people formed by trauma early on who have become fixated on a cause. My cause has always been the writing of books.”
Ellroy’s rapacious appetite for crime fiction stemmed from receiving Jack Webb’s The Badge as a present for his 11th birthday, and from then on he read the genre compulsively. After the death of his father a few years later Ellroy drifted into a life of petty crime, drink and drug addiction, only conquering his demons in the late 70s. After this turnaround he secured a job as a golf caddy which allowed him time to write. His literary career began with the publication of Brown’s Requiem in 1981. The era covered in the Blood’s A Rover corresponds to Ellroy’s lost years.
“I was living in Los Angeles and largely drug-addicted and alcoholic and involved in bad behaviour,” he says. “I generally recall history popping around in the margins of consciousness, but I was dim and I had no idea that I would ultimately co-opt history for my own dramatic designs. But I was always telling myself stories.”
One of his well-known bad behaviours was his penchant for peeping and breaking into homes and stealing lingerie. This is a weakness the character of Crutchfield also displays.
“Voyeurism has been a constant theme in my books and voyeurism is the great theme of detective fiction, (although) it’s rarely identified as such,” he notes. “I wanted to show detectives through Crutchfield as followers and tailers, as people who are interested in the lives of other people because they have no emotional life.”
Ironically enough, Ellroy’s own existence is not all that different.
“I work hard and I spend a lot of time alone,” he says. “I love to think and brood. I love classical music and that fills my need to worship art.”
Later that night at the Waterfront, Ellroy is back in character. He looms over the podium in defensive stance, gesturing and barking out his prose with ferocity. As we open our signed copy of the book and stare at his signature, our my mind floats back to our parting conversation. “You very obviously GOT the book,” he says. “It’s about the women. Women get this book more than men.”
And it is females that continue to drive this obsessive life’s work.