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Author Ellroy revels in getting down, dirty
Thursday, May 17, 2001 By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
James Ellroy likes combinations. There's his L.A. Quartet -- "The Black Dahlia," "The Big Nowhere," "L.A. Confidential" and "White Jazz" -- four books set in the seamiest, sickest sewers of Los Angeles. By 1992, he was being ranked among America's most edgy novelists.
Now, with "The Cold Six Thousand," he's completed the second leg of his Underworld USA trilogy, launched with "American Tabloid" in 1995. It's hard to do, but Ellroy's newest raises the ante in mainstream fiction for racial and ethnic invective, sexual perversion, drug use, sadism and violence.
He takes the heat in stride.
"You get a few pops everywhere you go for the language," he said over the phone a few days before his visit to Mystery Lovers Book Shop in Oakmont tonight.
The novel opens with an odious slur and never quits. There's no apology from the author.
"I'm writing the anatomy of racism in America," he said, "and I'm using the American idiom. This is a novel about hate, about the repression and subjugation of a people. If I use euphemisms like 'the n word,' I am only denying the ugliness of racism."
In his 20s, Ellroy lived on the streets of Los Angeles, supporting his drug and alcohol habit with shoplifting and break-ins. Now 52, he lives clean and sober in a conservative, comfortable Kansas City suburb with a wife and dog.
While he enjoys the payoff from his books, he hasn't curbed his appetite for the down and dirty. "The Cold Six Thousand" continues the conspiratorial theme of "American Tabloid."
The books are Ellroy's history of the 1960s as written by the plotters, thugs, prostitutes and killers. In his second installment, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are the work of a cabal of mobsters and businessmen aided and abetted by J. Edgar Hoover.
"This is a tale about the power of the dynamics of men, men acting in packs, the horror of consensus thinking," he said. "All of this was carried on in what I call 'pre-accountability America,' before Watergate and the rejection of the Vietnam War."
To prepare for the book, Ellroy hired two researchers and prepared a 343-page outline.
"I need to know what's real and what's not real," he explained. "If the fictional story attends to history, then you've written a good novel."
Ellroy will be reading from "The Cold Six Thousand" and he promises a lively event.
"I like to be entertaining. It's my way of expressing my gratitude to my readers. I give 'em a good time."
James Ellroy appears at 7 tonight at Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont. 412-828-4877.
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