Lee Earle Ellroy – The Early Life of James Ellroy
Lee Earle Ellroy Mug Shot
Conversations with James Ellroy begins with a chronology which sets out the key dates and events in Ellroy’s life. It was my task as editor to compile this chronology. At first glance it did not seem particularly daunting as Ellroy has written two memoirs, several autobiographical essays and has discussed his life in hundreds, if not thousands of interviews. But the abundance of sources creates its own problems: there are contradictions regarding dates and places, making it apparent that some sources must contain inaccuracies that as an editor you don’t want to repeat. I also had to take into consideration that as a memoirist Ellroy tended to be vague regarding dates. I see two main reasons for this: firstly, in his early life Ellroy dropped out of high school, seldom held a job, went through periods of homelessness, struggled with alcohol and drug addictions, committed several crimes including burglary and shoplifting, and served short sentences at the Los Angeles County Jail. Given these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a lack of documentation regarding Ellroy’s early life, and his own recollections are written in a fluid, stream of consciousness style. Secondly, Ellroy once conveyed to me that he was purposefully vague about dates, as he wanted to keep some things private. For an author who has bared so much of his soul over the course of his career it would be hard not to sympathise with his desire not to keep some elements of his life out of the public eye.
Many readers may not be aware that James Ellroy was not born with that name, but was named Lee Earle Ellroy after his father. It was a name he would come to despise feeling it sounded too much like Leroy, and this hatred of his own name typified the luckless, self-loathing man he was for much of his early life. The purpose of this article is to look at the first thirty-three years of Ellroy’s life, although I skip some events due to the constraints of limited space, my aim is to set out as accurately as possible a historical record of the often frightening and disturbing life of Lee Earle Ellroy.
Lee Earle Ellroy was born on March 4, 1948, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of Geneva “Jean” Odelia Ellroy (nee Hilliker) and Armand Lee Ellroy. Ellroy was born just over a year after the discovery of the mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Short on a vacant lot at 39th and Norton, Los Angeles, on January 15, 1947. Miss Short was dubbed ‘the Black Dahlia’ by the press, and her unsolved homicide would become one of the most enduring mysteries in Los Angeles history and a lifelong obsession for Ellroy, being the subject of perhaps his greatest work of fiction.
Ellroy’s memories of his parent’s marriage suggest a very unhappy union: they fought, drank too much and had affairs. In an interview with Nathaniel Rich, Ellroy said, ‘I don’t remember a single amicable moment between my parents other than this: my mother passing steaks out the kitchen window to my father so that he could put them on a barbecue.’ Ellroy’s parents divorced in 1954, and Jean retained primary custody of her son. The relationship between his parents would continue to be hostile, and young Ellroy often found himself caught in the middle of their disputes. In 1958 Jean and her son moved to a new home in El Monte, just outside Los Angeles. Although his mother had promised him a bigger, nicer house, young Ellroy was shocked at how small and dilapidated their new accommodation was. On June 22, 1958, the body of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy was found in the shrubs outside of Arroyo High School. She had been strangled to death. The police began a murder investigation, but the case was never solved. Young Ellroy had been with his father the weekend of his mother’s death. They had been to the cinema to watch The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. When he arrived back at his mother’s house, he saw several police cars, and as he describes in his memoir My Dark Places, ‘A man took me aside and kneeled down to my level. He said, “Son, your mother’s been killed.”’
For his eleventh birthday on March 4, 1959, Ellroy’s father gave him two books, an anthology The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Jack Webb’s The Badge. The Badge contained a ten page synopsis on the Elizabeth Short murder case and Ellroy was immediately fascinated. He saw the parallels between the Elizabeth Short case and his mother’s unsolved murder, and grew a greater understanding of his mother as a result. Although he could not know it at the time, the unsolved homicide would become the subject of his seventh and arguably greatest novel The Black Dahlia (1987).
Ellroy’s formal education was hindered by his increasingly erratic behaviour. He attended John Burroughs Junior High School from 1959 to 1962 and then Fairfax High School from 1962. Fairfax High was predominantly Jewish and regardless of what his real views may have been, Ellroy would say and do almost anything to get attention. In his interview/article ‘Doctor Noir’ Martin Kihn records that ‘he [Ellroy] wrote a song criticizing American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell to impress a girl.’ However, he also engaged in outrageous acts of anti-semitism, joining the American Nazi Party, buying Nazi paraphernalia and singing the Horst Wessel song. In 1965, Ellroy was expelled from Fairfax High for fighting and truancy. Armand Ellroy’s health had been deteriorating for some time. On November 1, 1963, he suffered the first of several strokes. The young Ellroy became his father’s caregiver. Despite this, when he was expelled from school, Ellroy asked his father for permission to join the US Marines. Armand Ellroy refused, but he did allow Ellroy to join the regular army. Thus, in May 1965 Lee Earle Ellroy had a very brief period in the US Army stationed in Fort Polk, Louisiana, assigned to Company A, 2nd Battalion, 5th Training Unit. Ellroy was particularly unsuited to army life, Kihn describes his arrival:
While taking the Army oath, Ellroy realized he was making a big mistake. He started faking a nervous breakdown by stuttering, then tearing his clothes off and running naked through the Fort Polk, Louisiana, reception station.
Ellroy’s outrageous behaviour managed to convince an army psychiatrist to recommend an immediate discharge. Ellroy’s army career lasted less than a month; his father suffered another stroke and Ellroy flew back to LA to visit him in hospital. He died on June 4, 1965. Armand Ellroy’s last words to his son were ‘Try to pick up every waitress who serves about you.’ After his father’s death Ellroy’s life steadily fell apart. He seldom worked or had money. He cashed his father’s last three social security checks, and also received money from his mother’s insurance policy administered by his aunt in Wisconsin. He worked briefly for a psychic passing out handbills, and also found work in a pornographic bookstore, but was fired for stealing money from the till. 1966 to 1969 were some of the darkest years of Ellroy’s life; he went through periods of homelessness, sometimes sleeping in the parks in LA. He became an alcoholic, drinking copious amounts of scotch and Romilar CF cough syrup, and a substance abuser of amphetamines and Benzedrix inhalers. Voyeurism was Ellroy’s other all-consuming addiction. He would break into to the houses of young women who lived in the wealthy Hancock Park area of LA. His overriding purpose was sexual voyeurism, not burglary for money. He would search through the clothes drawers and sniff women’s panties. He would make himself a sandwich and pour a drink, before leaving the house and carefully covering his tracks. The Manson family murders in 1969 led to a paranoid atmosphere in LA and the arrival of several private security firms which patrolled Bel-Air and Hancock Park. The increased risk led Ellroy to stop breaking into houses. However, his list of petty crimes continued and led to a series of arrests and short term stints in the Los Angeles County Jail. Although he has given differing accounts as to the number of times he was arrested, Ellroy’s police record lists fourteen arrests between 1968 and 1973 for offences such as shoplifting and driving under the influence. Martin Kihn describes Ellroy’s first arrest as being quite dramatic, ‘someone reported having seen Ellroy sneaking into a deserted house, and a team of L.A. cops barged in with shotguns and arrested him.’
Between 1975 and 1977 Ellroy’s health was in a dangerously poor condition; he suffered two bouts of pneumonia and almost died of a lung abscess. He also had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with the rare condition post-alcoholic brain syndrome. These health scares persuaded Ellroy to clean up for good. He entered Alcoholics Anonymous and quit drinking. In 1977 he began working as a caddy at the Hillcrest Country Club but was quickly sacked after fighting with a fellow caddy. He then began a slightly longer tenure at the Bel-Air Country Club, and it would be caddying that provided the inspiration for his first novel. One of the less dramatic features of the life of Lee Earle Ellroy was his growing love of crime fiction, which began as a child. He started off reading the Hardy Boys and Nero Wolfe novels, later graduating to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald and Joseph Wambaugh. Even during his periods of homelessness, Ellroy devoured crime fiction, often sitting in a library for hours reading through detective novels and drinking scotch. Crime fiction would be the subject of his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, (Ellroy’s preferred title was ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ but this was later changed at his publisher’s insistence). In the novel, the protagonist Fritz Brown is an ex-cop, repo-man and low-rent private eye. Ellroy has described the novel as autobiographical:
Here’s a guy who looks exactly like me, has a German-American background, likes classical music, came from my old neighborhood, gets involved with a bunch of caddies. All that’s me.
Writing the novel was a challenge, as Ellroy described in an interview with Fleming Meeks, it began with a prayer on the grounds of the Bel-Air Country Club on January 26, 1979,
‘God,’ I said, ‘would you please let me start this fucking book tonight?’ And I’ve been at it ever since.”
Ellroy did not own a typewriter and the novel was handwritten. His writing sessions were often conducted on a bench at the Bel-Air, or in the caddyshack while the other caddies were sat around playing card games. Once the novel was completed, Ellroy quickly found an agent who sold the manuscript to Avon for $3,500. Brown’s Requiem was published in 1981, and upon publication Ellroy changed his first name and moved across country to Eastchester, New York, where he continued his writing career while working as a caddy at the Wykagl Country Club. As Ellroy explained in an interview with Craig McDonald, when changing his name he chose the name James from the pseudonym ‘James Brady’ which his father had used. ‘It’s just a simple name that goes well with “Ellroy.”’
Lee Earle Ellroy officially ceased to exist. James Ellroy would become one of the greatest American crime writers.
Conversations with James Ellroy is available to buy on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
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James Ellroy on the Rodney King Scandal
Conversations with James Ellroy features three previously unpublished interviews that I have conducted with Ellroy. In my first interview with Ellroy, I quickly found him to be gentlemanly and very pleasant, occasionally displaying flashes of the eccentricity readers have come to associate with his Demon Dog persona. Ellroy is an eloquent speaker, but he shocks his listener by inserting or interrupting his intellectual assessments with idiosyncratic, sometimes foul-mouthed urban speech patterns. Ellroy can be combative in conversations, and he is not afraid to express controversial opinions. When I asked him if there was any contradiction between his portrayal of corruption in the LAPD of the 1940s and 1950s in his LA Quartet novels, and his present amicable relationship and high regard for the LAPD, to my surprise, he came out with a vigorous and convincing defence of the LAPD Officers involved in the Rodney King beating.
On March 2, 1991, Rodney King was driving on the Foothill Freeway in the Greater Los Angeles area. He had been drinking and was over the legal limit, two police officers spotted the car speeding and gave chase. When King finally stopped the vehicle there were five police officers at the scene. The two passengers in King’s car were taken into custody without incident, but King resisted arrest. In their efforts to restrain him, the officers shot King with a taser, hit him with their batons and kicked him. The incident was caught on tape by a citizen who just happened to be in the area, and when the video was seen by the public it caused outrage at the apparent police brutality. None of the police were found guilty of using excessive force at the subsequent trial, and news of their acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots in which 53 people were killed.
You can read Ellroy comments from the interview which pertain to Rodney King below:
Interviewer: Would you say that current, or moderately current LAPD scandals like Rodney King or O.J. Simpson are more beyond the pale compared to the good work the LAPD does in the majority?
Ellroy: Well a couple of things. First of all, I wouldn’t call O.J. Simpson a scandal, it’s just, it’s not even a botched murder case—it’s a bad acquittal. And the second thing, Rampart wasn’t much of a scandal when truly dissected. Same thing with Rodney King if you see the entire three-minute tape. The fifty-six hammer blows that put Rodney on the ground, and the contact slash don’t look good, but moment to moment the entire three minute tape leads me to say, and I realize this is revolutionary, I don’t think they did anything wrong. There’s a moment when one of the policeman, and it might have been interestingly enough a man named Powell, kicked Rodney King in the head, which was the only out-of-line and out of policy thing that they did. Yeah he attacked Stacy Koon. The other people in the car were led to safety. He kept attacking: he took a taser, he kept getting up, getting up, getting up. He’s six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, and on angeldust, and you don’t engage people like that in one-on-one fights. And I think it was an aesthetic call that people made: they could either see this in the context of white racism and police corruption or overall police misconduct, or they could see it in a more localized context, which in this case, I think, is also a more broader context—that these are the exigent factors of police work, ad hoc, day to day. And you can’t let angeldust-addled shitbergs drive around at one hundred and ten miles an hour on the freeway, where they will kill people: interdict and suppress them. It doesn’t look good, the footage a million people have seen, many millions of people have seen. In a larger context, it reveals itself to be something entirely different, and so pointing to these things, and Rampart’s a crock of shit, and accepting them as historical fact is very dangerous and specious. And so what I’m morally obligated to do with interviewers is try to give them a different view of these speciously alleged facts.
Reading Ellroy’s comments I am struck by how cogently he argues his position, but it does not shake my belief that the police involved used excessive, even criminal force. Still, Ellroy has studied the case in far more detail than I have, and I grew up with a cultural understanding of the events which is in danger of seeing things out of context. For instance, I first saw the beating on video during the opening credits of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), a highly manipulative piece of filmmaking considering Malcolm X died nearly thirty years before the incident took place. However, I’ve pasted the video below and watching it again it is undeniably brutal and harrowing.
Conversations with James Ellroy is available to buy on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
Conversations with James Ellroy
Conversations with James Ellroy, which I have edited for University of Mississippi Press’ Literary Conversations series, is released this month. The book is a collection of interviews which James Ellroy has given over the course of his literary career. I am very proud of the book, which I think will be of great interest to James Ellroy and crime fiction fans everywhere, and over the coming weeks I shall be posting on this blog some articles about the book. Conversations with James Ellroy is available to buy on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. In the meantime here is the jacket cover and synopsis of the book:
“Morality in literature is largely the expositing of moral acts and their consequences, the karmic price of the perpetrators of the immoral acts, for having committed them.”
As a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous “Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction” persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image.
Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy’s complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine’s Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy’s remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim.
In Conversations with James Ellroy, Ellroy talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.
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Strange Bedfellows: Politicians and their Favourite Crime Novels
Houses of Parliament
A recent article in the Telegraph listed some of the books President Barack Obama is said to have read. His reading list includes several high brow titles, but I was pleased to discover the President also appears to be a fan of crime fiction. Obama has read both The Way Home (2009) by George Pelecanos and The Bayou Trilogy (2011) by Daniel Woodrell. If Obama can be considered as a fan of crime fiction then he is following in the footsteps of President Bill Clinton who named Walter Mosley as one of his favourite writers. Clinton was also photographed on Air Force One holding a copy of Dennis Lehane’s Prayers for Rain (1999), a relatively minor incident which led to a huge increase in sales of Lehane’s work. President Kennedy regarded Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love (1957) as one of his favourite novels, and also appears to have admired Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959). When Frank Sinatra informed JFK his next film was an adaptation of Condon’s novel, the President replied “Great, who plays the mother?”
If any readers can think of any other politicians who love crime (fiction that is!), please share them in the comment thread.
Bond Actors at their Best
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the James Bond films. There have already been several enjoyable tributes, with doubtless more to come throughout the year, as well as the release of the twenty-third Bond film Skyfall. As a self-confessed Bond addict I have compiled together a little tribute to showcase some of the best moments of the six actors who have played James Bond (in the official series). All of the videos have been uploaded by Bond fans onto YouTube and some will only partially embed, but if you click on the link it will take you straight to the site where the videos can be watched. Enjoy!
By 1962 when the first Bond film was released, the character of James Bond had already become iconic, due to the success of Ian Fleming’s novels, so it was important the producers found the right actor for the part. Sean Connery must have seemed like a risky choice as he was at that time relatively unknown. However, Connery soon dispelled any doubts with his portrayal of Bond as a fearless, ruthless and darkly charming secret agent. Connery’s success set the standard by which all other actors in the role have been judged. Bond’s introduction in the first film Dr No was vital to establishing the right tone for the character, and Connery pulls it off with aplomb. The clip below shows Connery’s first scene as Bond, playing Baccarat with the alluring Sylvia Trench:
George Lazenby’s stint as James Bond was limited to one film and has been much maligned. Replacing Connery was always going to be a difficult task and the producers decided on another unknown, but unlike Connery, Lazenby had no real acting experience and it shows. However, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service will be remembered as the film which showed Bond’s human side when after years of womanising the spy finally falls in love and marries, only for it to end in tragedy:
Roger Moore’s tenure as Bond seems to divide fans and critics alike. Personally, I’ve always liked Moore who holds the record as the longest serving Bond playing the character in seven films over twelve years. Below is a clip of one of the most inventive and thrilling scenes in the series taken from Live and Let Die. It’s not just super-villains Bond has had to deal with over the years, it’s also their pet sharks, snakes or in this case crocodiles! Just spare a thought for the stunt man who had to do this scene five times!
Timothy Dalton was perhaps the most distinguished actor to play Bond. He researched the role carefully, immersing himself in Fleming’s novels and giving a darker and grittier portrayal of the spy in his two films. Sometimes criticised for being stiff and humourless, this airplane fight scene from The Living Daylights proves the Bond films could still be tough without compromising on the ingenuity and inventiveness:
Pierce Brosnan deserves credit for rescuing the series after a six-year hiatus. He was the first actor to play Bond after the end of the Cold War and the films successfully modernised Bond’s image. In the scene below, taken from Goldeneye, Bond spars with the first female M, played brilliantly by Judi Dench:
After the disastrous Die Another Day, Daniel Craig was the first actor to play Bond in a reboot of the series. Before Craig’s debut in Casino Royale, there had been occasional attempts at continuity in several of the films, such as references to Bond’s brief marriage, which suggested that all of the actors were playing the same Bond. Casino Royale dispenses with this concept to be essentially an ‘origin story’ of how Bond earned his licence to kill double 00 status. Craig plays Bond appropriately as a young, cocky and obstreperous spy who gradually learns his craft the hard way and falls for the enigmatic Vesper Lynd along the way. This clip is from the conclusion of the card game at the titular Casino Royale:
Raymond Chandler on the Albert Anastasia Murder
Albert Anastasia Murder
Dick Dedrick’s excellent audio documentary Private Eyes: Chandler & Marlowe ends with a recording of Raymond Chandler’s July 1958 interview with Ian Fleming. At this late stage of his life, Chandler was widowed, depressed and drunk, but consented to the interview out of his respect for Fleming who held him in equally high regard. It is a sometimes difficult interview to listen to, with Chandler slurring his words and Fleming struggling to keep him focused. However, there are several moments when he shines, such as when Fleming asks Chandler about the recent murder in New York of Albert Anastasia, Boss of the Gambino Crime Family. Anastasia was sitting in the barber chair in the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel when two men rushed in and shot him to death. The motive, it is believed, was an internal power struggle and tensions with the other New York Crime Families. The case was never solved. The photo of Anastasia dead on the barber shop floor became one of the most iconic images in Mafia history.
Below is a transcription of Chandler and Fleming discussing how a Mob murder would be arranged:
Fleming: I see they had another killing last week in New York, one of these men connected with that dock union man, what was his name…
Chandler: Albert Anastasia
Fleming: Anastasia yes. How is a killing like that arranged?
Chandler: Very simply. Do you want me to describe how it’s done?
Fleming: Yes, yes.
Chandler: Well, first of all the Syndicate decides it– has to decide– he must be killed. They don’t want to kill people, it’s bad business nowadays. Then when they make the decision, they telephone to a couple of chaps, say in Minneapolis, who own hardware stores or something or other and have a respectable business front. And these chaps come along to New York, and they’re given their instructions. They are told– they are given a photograph of the man and told what’s known about him, and when they get on a plane, if they have to get on a plane…
Fleming: In Minneapolis?
Chandler: …they’re given guns. No, not in Minneapolis. After they get their instructions they’re given guns. Now these guns are not defaced in any way, but they are guns which have passed through so many hands that the present owners could never be traced. The company could say the first purchaser. So they go to where the man lives, they get an apartment across the street from him or a room, and they study him for days and days and days until they know just exactly when he goes out, when he comes home, what he does, and when they’re ready they simply walk up to him and shoot him. They have to have a crash car: Bugsy Siegel was a great man for a crash car. The crash car is in case a police car should come down the street and accidentally on purpose smashes the police car so the other fellows get away, get back to the plane, go home that’s all there is to it.
Fleming: So they drop their guns at the spot do they?
Chandler: They always drop the guns yes.
Fleming: And wear gloves?
Chandler: How many fingerprints have ever been taken off guns?
Fleming: Yes quite.
Chandler: They hold them by the butt.
Fleming: Yes, quite true. Of course they always appear to take them off in books, but I suspect that because by filing the material on the butt and scratching it well of course you make a rough surface that won’t take any prints at all.
Chandler: No, butts aren’t made that way. They’re made to be rough.
Fleming: How much would they get paid for that each?
Chandler: Ten thousand.
Fleming: Ten thousand each?
Chandler: If it’s an important man. It’s small money to the Syndicate.
Fleming: And then they go back to their jobs in hardware stores in Minneapolis.
Chandler: Yes, it’s quite impersonal. They don’t care anything about the man; they don’t care about his general life. It’s just a job to them. Of course they have to be a certain sort of people or they wouldn’t do it. I mean they’re not like us; we wouldn’t do it.
Fleming: No, it’s a difficult thing to imagine doing.
Chandler: Well, I’ve known people I’d like to shoot.
Fleming: For instance? Anybody in England?
Chandler: No, not in England.
Fleming: What did you want to shoot them for?
Chandler: I just thought they were better dead.
Sadly, Chandler died less than a year after giving this interview. It is apparently the only audio recording that exists of his voice, and although his poor health is all too obvious, I particularly like this part of the interview as showing Chandler at his best. His comments seem insightful yet playful, easily commanding the listener’s attention and ending with a piece of wickedly dry humour.
I have also found the entire interview on YouTube. It will appeal to Chandler and Fleming fans alike. Here’s the link.
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Terence Young – The Man Who Would Be Bond
Sean Connery, Terence Young and actress Claudine Auger during the filming of Thunderball
Terence Young is remembered today as the director of three of the first four James Bond films: Dr No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), and Thunderball (1965). The rest of his directing career was mixed: some genuinely good films, Wait Until Dark (1967) and Mayerling (1968), and many other films that were mediocre at best. Young himself is fascinating figure, but no biography has ever been written of him (although there is one Italian monograph which is a study of his films). However, he seems to pop up as a colourful character in the biographies of several famous figures. It was not until I read Ben Macintyre’s excellent Agent Zigzag (2007), about the extraordinary life of MI5′s wartime double agent and criminal Eddie Chapman, that I learned that Young worked with British Intelligence during the Second World War. Young was an intelligence officer attached to the Field Security Section of the Guards Armoured Division which saw heavy fighting at Normandy and Arnhem.
Young counted Eddie Chapman as a friend before the war. Young had a reputation as a sophisticated gentleman with a taste for fine wine, expensive clothes and beautiful women. Chapman, on the other hand, was involved with criminal gangs and was an expert safecracker. The two men’s paths crossed in London where the division between high society and the criminal underworld was not always distinct at the time. Macintyre describes the remarkable series of events that followed: Chapman was serving a prison sentence on the Channel Islands when it came under Nazi occupation. He was transferred to a prison in Paris when he offered his services to the Abwehr, German Intelligence. After being parachuted into England as a German spy, he immediately contacted MI5 in the hope of working for them as a double agent. Young was contacted by Intelligence agent Laurie Marshall to meet with his old friend Chapman and ‘build up his morale’. Young was glad to do this, and he also provided a character reference for Chapman saying he would make a perfect spy:
Young went on to describe the glamourous, roué world Chapman had inhabited before the war, the people he knew from ‘the film, theatrical, literary, and semi-political and diplomatic worlds’, and his popularity, ‘especially among women’. Could Chapman be trusted with intelligence work, Marshall inquired? Young was adamant: ‘One could give him the most difficult of missions knowing that he would carry it out and that he would never betray the official who sent him, but that it was highly probable that he would, incidentally, rob the official who sent him out… He would then carry out his [mission] and return to the official whom he had robbed to report.’ In short, he could be relied on to do whatever was asked of him, while being utterly untrustworthy in almost every other respect.
Young’s assessment of Chapman proved to be highly accurate. Young’s insight and experience into the real world of espionage must have surely influenced his contribution to the success of the James Bond films, just as Ian Fleming’s experiences in Naval Intelligence influenced his creation of Bond, even though the character inhabits a fantasy version of the world of a spy. Young also gave the cinematic James Bond facets of his own character. In an essay written for Her Majesty’s Secret Servant, Robert Cotton examines how Young schooled Sean Connery on how to be Bond:
When Connery arrived, far before filming began, Young saw his best opportunity to mold the actor in his own image. As Lois Maxwell related in one of Connery´s many biographies, “Terence took Sean under his wing. He took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.’ Some cast members remarked that Connery was simply doing a Terence Young impression, but Young and Connery knew they were on the right track. Then, late in pre-production, when Connery was almost ready to make his debut, Young took Connery on a lunchtime trip into downtown London, to his own tailor on Saville Row. It was time for Connery to “put on the suit’ as it were. It was time for Connery to become James Bond.
By the time Connery showed up for his first days filming, Young had changed everything about him. Connery no longer talked with his hands, one of Young´s most infamous pet peeves. He still moved perfectly, but Young had coached him on WHEN to move. Connery was already far from being a hack actor when he came to the series, but Young knew how to make Connery shine, and he did. Young had taken elements of his own personality and passed them on to Connery. He had turned Connery into a gentleman, and then he turned that gentleman into James Bond.
It’s a shame that having played such a big part in the success of the Bond films that the rest of Young’s work would not be so distinguished. He directed a highly fictionalised and rather disappointing film about Eddie Chapman’s wartime adventures, Triple Cross (1967), and has the dubious distinction of directing what is generally regarded as one of the worst films of all time Inchon (1982). An epic retelling of the Korean War battle, Inchon was partly financed by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon and starred, in a terrible piece of miscasting, Sir Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur.
Terence Young died in 1994, and because his reputation had steadily declined with each poorly received film, it is perhaps not surprising that he is largely forgotten today. But several years ago an intriguing rumour began to circulate on the internet. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces an article written by Mark Bowden titled ‘Tales of the Tyrant’ appeared in The Atlantic. Bowden presented a rather distasteful, fawning portrayal of Saddam Hussein and briefly stated that Terence Young had edited the film The Long Days (1980), a propaganda piece about Saddam’s early life. The claim was later repeated in the play It Felt Like a Kiss (2009), and is examined in this online essay, but on Young’s imdb page, his involvement is listed ‘uncredited’ and ‘unconfirmed’. Even so, its remarkable to think that Young may have still been involved in a murky world of intrigue at that late stage of his life and career. If the rumour is true, it is a stain on Young’s reputation, especially considering that Young often appeared to be a patriot with a social conscience, having directed the anti-drugs trade film The Poppy is Also a Flower (1966), financed by the United Nations. The film may have been made before the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, but the brutality of Saddam’s regime would have still been clearly evident. In the film, Saddam was played by his cousin Saddam Kamel, who was later killed on the dictator’s orders.
Regardless of this rumour, Young will be best remembered for shaping the cinematic character of one of our best loved spies.
The Elusive Centre: Megan Abbott and The End of Everything
Abbott's novel is loosely based on her upbringing in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Megan Abbott’s dreamy and compelling The End of Everything explores the strivings for an elusive centre: the central place, the definite reason, the moral certainty of childhood. Abbott’s narrator, thirteen-year-old Lizzie, begins the narrative almost without an individual identity: Lizzie’s personhood is bound up in Evie, her next door neighbour and best friend, whom Lizzie has known since infancy. Until Evie’s hair darkened and Lizzie’s body began to become more womanly, they were hard to tell apart. Their knowledge of one another has become instinctual, or so Lizzie believes, until Evie’s disappearance makes her reexamine her friend and thus herself.
Before Evie disappears, Lizzie and Evie seem on the periphery of things, marginalised by the relationships around them. Lizzie’s parents are divorced and have little time for her (as does her grunting teenage brother), whereas Evie’s home is dominated by Evie’s mysterious, sexual sister, Dusty, whose close relationship with her father is the envy of both girls. The Dusty/Mr Verver relationship upsets the household dynamic, excluding Evie’s and Dusty’s mother to a cipher-like existence.
When Evie disappears, the balance shifts dramatically, and Lizzie is both disturbed and guiltily excited to shift into the centre. Evie’s kidnap heightens Lizzie’s mother’s maternal instincts, and Mr Verver craves her companionship as Dusty becomes reclusive. But just as this seems a redressing of the balance, it is also another version of a distorted world, as Lizzie’s unspoken sexual feelings for Mr Verver and the fear of Evie’s molestation, rape, torture and even murder at the hands of her captor come to the front.
Abbott’s description of Lizzie’s physical and visual impressions, float before the reader like dreams, yet these powerful evocations are part of the fabric of reassessing and becoming as made evident by Lizzie’s attempts to find words, to find the truth, in these fleeting impressions and to describe what happened to her friend:
I’m watching through the kitchen window, the coffee pot chugging.
Sometimes, at night, he’s out there.
That’s what Evie had said.
When she said it, it was just a cold-spiny feeling, a bit of nighttime spookiness. But later, it snuck back into my thoughts, and I wondered about all the boys who trailed Dusty, who swarmed her in the school corridors, who wedged notes into her locker and buzzed about her. So many of them might flit around at night [...]
Mr Verver walks into the kitchen, his whole body jumping with energy. ”They think it could be something, ” he says. “They don’t know, but they think it could be.”
I feel a tingle on my tongue. I feel it because I think, Doesn’t he see what this means? Isn’t this scarier, a hundred times, the idea that wherever Evie is she might be with someone who watched her, for nights on end, from the dark sweep of a backyard tree, who watched, unhurried, unbothered, puffing and breathing and watching and–
Something clicks and shutters in my head, and there it is, there it is, tumbling from my half-opened mouth:
“The car. Twice. I saw a car go by twice.”
Abbott’s power lies in her descriptions, but also in what remains elusive to the reader, the tantilizing spaces which we are compelled to fill and adjust and reassess along with her characters. Although The End of Everything is a departure from her noir settings, Abbott retains her powerful style. My only reservation is having taught middle school myself, Abbott’s perceptions may exceed the capabilities of her narrator, although the wonder, the cruelty, and the uncertain striving of that age is powerfully present.
Like this:
Whose Line is it Anyway? – Film Noir Spoof
Every Christmas I like to post a crime fiction spoof to celebrate the season of good cheer. Below is a clip of Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles imporvising a film noir spoof on Whose Line is it Anyway?
Happy Holidays everyone! See you in the new year.
Jim Thompson, Crime Fiction, and the American West
I have just finished reading Jim Thompson’s second novel Heed the Thunder (1946), a western set in early twentieth-century Nesbraska. When I first came across the book I initially thought it must have been a departure from Thompson’s celebrated hardboiled crime fiction, but it was actually published before Thompson started writing crime fiction. Like John D. MacDonald and Chester Himes, Thompson began his writing career with more respectable ‘literary’ aspirations. But like many of his contemporaries, he found his greatest acclaim in crime fiction, although in Thompson’s case much of that acclaim has been posthumous. Heed the Thunder is a loosely plotted series of episodes set around the wealthy Fargo family: much of the focus is centred on the patriarch Lincoln Fargo, a Civil War veteran who served in the Union Army but held secret Southern sympathies. The book often reads as an overly self-conscious attempt to write a ‘Great American Novel’, but it’s possible to see why Thompson would later excel in the hardboiled genre. There is a pervasive sense of secrets and conspiracies forming between families, friends and communities. The narrative also moves inexorably towards violently horrific conclusions as the repercussions are felt from immoral actions, such as a longstanding incestuous affair between first-cousins. It is the younger generation of characters who seem to meet the most macabre of fates. The older characters tend to cling on living with their sorrow. Although not everyone seems to be ill-fated, a venal and incompetent politician is steadily promoted and even manages to do something charitable. One of the most notable qualities of the novel is Thompson’s skill for eliciting pathos through his sharp ear for regional dialects. The deathbed thoughts of one leading character are particularly moving:
I know now, maybe, what the Bible means when it talks about a sparrer falling – I mean, every time there’s a death, the whole world dies a little. There ain’t no death, no deed, no o-mission or co-mission that don’t leave its mark…
“We burn off a forest, an’ all we see is the cleared land, an’ the profit. We burn the forest because we say it’s ours to burn, an’ we can do what we want with what’s ours. We burn it, an’ the birds leave, an’ the grubs come, and the grain don’t grow so good. And there’s hot winds and dust.
“We plow up the prairie because it’s ours to plow, and we dam up the cricks because they’re ours to dam. We grab everything we can while the grabbin’s good, because it’s ours an’ because some other fellow will do it if we don’t. … And, hell, there ain’t nothin that’s really ours, and we don’t know what’s in the other fellow’s mind. …
Other crime writers would excel in the western genre, such as Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker and Frank Gruber. But perhaps Thompson’s greatness in this field came from his experiences living a wild and eccentric life. The son of a corrupt Texas Sheriff, Thompson understood the mentality of western towns where power is concentrated in the hands of a few and the ideals of the American dream are drowned in a sea of blood and lawlessness, themes he appropriated so successfully in western-themed crime novels such as The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop 1280 (1964). Heed the Thunder (which was also released under the the more pulp sounding title Sins of the Fathers) ends with an intriguing author’s note:
I was about to pronounce this book the first of a trilogy when the ghost of a hawk-faced old man prodded me with an ethereal cane, “How the hell you know it will be?” he jeered, “Goddam if you ain’t a good one!”
And upon the taunt, there came another, in choked explosive tones, “Maybe I had ought to cut his ears off, seein’ he don’t plan to use ‘em.”
So I will say this:
This may be the first volume of a trilogy; there may be a sequel to it – if, in the present book, I seem to have interested or amused sufficent readers to warrant such.
Sure enough the two sequels to Heed the Thunder never came. Thompson’s literary greatness lay elsewhere, in another genre.
