James Ellroy

Is Blood's A Rover actually worth reading? I read the first two and can't muster the excitement for a third, though I'd probably be into it. Or should I read Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" instead? I am stuck in suburban Indiana for a week and there is a Barnes & Noble.

Cold Six-Thousand was lousy so I stopped caring.

The Hilleker Curse felt so contrived & phony I questioned ever liking falling for his schtick in the first place. what a poser.

blood's a rover is actually amazing

I'll read Blood's A Rover eventually but I've had w/this guy's sexual outlaw routine

i have never read any james ellroy but i figure if there are some fans they might like this extract from an interview, it's very strong:

http://www.falsedawn.blogspot.com/2012/02/sanja-ivekovic-paper-women-197677-from.html

finally reading Blood's A Rover, more head-spinning conspiracy & hardboiled verbal yuks from our guy

thinking the best comparison for Ellroy might not be Pynchon but Burroughs and/or Ballard, for the depth of his obsessions and the deadly maniacal precision of his prose

Ballard and Burroughs are good analogues - both are really, erm, repetitive thematically in a way that's similar to Ellroy

I think that Ellroy's repetition works in his favour, while it worked against Burroughs (try reading 'The Soft Machine' straight after 'Naked Lunch'). Ballard I'm not sure about.

speaking of obsessions, skills etc what about Ellroy compared to Woolrich, or Highsmith?

I'll take Burroughs over Ellroy any day just because his obsessions are more interesting and his technique more striking.

Ballard I like okay but I've read so many of his novels with the same plot, I get really tired of it

xpost

Highsmith is a better than Ellroy imo. Characters are psychologically richer, more credible for all their murderous quirks and everyday madness

better writer

highsmith isnt a very flattering comparison to ellroy but i think shes much less interested in 'systems'

woolrich is better than ellroy but in i think maybe less interesting as a thing that happened

highsmith blows him out of the water, come on now

don't think highsmith and ellroy have v much in common in as writers, tbh - ellroy = cop lover, highsmith = crook lover. ellroy more in the edmcbain, joseph wambaugh tradition- he's a writer of 'police procedurals' more than 'psychological thrillers'.

I just read that James Franco is directing a movie adaption of American Tabloid and also he plans on acting in it. Ffs why didn't HBO make a mini-series of it? Now it is fucked.

^^^i think this project was quashed, thank god. i couldn't possibly imagine which part in Tabloid franco thought he could play.

He would probably fancy a go at Wheelman "Dipshit" from Blood's A Rover.

reading Perfidia now, idk it's looong

any good?

's OK. feels a little slow. the machine-gun staccato short sentences aren't hitting me as hard. pro forma. maybe he's a little bored too? the pearl harbor/anti-japanese conspiracy angle isn't quite as juicy/compelling as expected but will finish regardless.

i could see franco as crutch but based on his plans he seemed only interested in doing tabloid as a single film, not as a longform series for the whole underworld trilogy.

re: perfidia - i really liked it and despite his style being kinda set in stone now there seemed to be enough freshness (esp. in the kay chapters) that it worked. honestly it's prob top 5 or 6 in his catalog. i will say that it moved slower than blood's a rover or tabloid.

of the biggest complaints that will result about the whole book, the easter-eggs-for-fans approach of having characters like ward littell show up as a young buck is a bit ehhh. in other instances it kinda works, like seeing dudley smith's goons from the LA Quarter books develop their slavish devotion to him.

finally, DUDLEY. although his seemingly gleeful utter vileness makes his chapters rank among the most uncomfortable protagonist material in JE's catalog (saying a lot there) finally understanding how he came to his racist beliefs is fascinating.

obviously i'm pretty in the tank for ellroy so take my opinions on those specific things with a grain of salt. but even with that caveat and me saying it's no L.A. confidential or blood's a rover (latter is his absolute best IMO, seriously), it's worth your time if you're not burned out on him.

finally finished Perfidia, have to say the slower pace made my interest flag after awhile. agree the voice of Kay made those chapters a refreshing departure for Ellroy. overall i thought it lacked the energy, the ELECTRICITY of Tabloid and Blood's A Rover. Dudley hooking up w/Bette Davis was "grand" but the best celebrity cameo was Jack Webb. casting Sgt Joe Friday as a panting cop lapdog/groupie was a gift to Dragnet fans the world over.

Webb's hardboiled schtick must've been a crucial influence on Ellroy's style. Joe Friday always gets the last word!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFVfwMnG4

he talks about webb all the time - he cites webb's book The Badge (which is like an "uncut" version of various cleaned-up dragnet cases, including the black dahlia) as a major influence on him. also goes out of his way to mock webb as a cop-groupie in perfidia and elsewhere, and considering ellroy's overall respect for cops - despite how often he paints police of bygone eras as varying degrees of corrupt - that's saying a lot.

have to say i thought the dudley/bette davis thing was kind of silly but oh well.

I haven't read perfidia (or any of the la quartet apart from the big nowhere) but I'm going to hear ellroy talk about it on tues, will report back

Started reading the first Lloyd Hopkins book, f

Oops

Forget the title. Some of the prose is a lil clunkier than the others I've read of his but it's vivid as Hell & kinda nauseating in places

About halfway through Perfidia. I really think it's a terrible book. Loved the first LA Quartet; wasn't madly keen on the Underworld USA trilogy, though I thought Blood's a Rover was markedly better than the two that preceded it. But this is awful, a big saggy mess. His prose, more than ever, has descended into self parody, so much so that the characters have become indistinguishable from each other – they all talk the same, think the same, act the same, regardless of race or sex.

The only thing that's stopping me putting it aside is the flow of stories about the child sex rings involving The Great and the Good in 70s/80s London, which serve as a reminder that Ellroy's imaginings about what people use power for might be closer to the truth that one might wish.