A James Ellroy Playlist: The Beat Poets
James Ellroy’s LA Quartet is set predominantly in the 1950s and the influence of jazz and film noir on Ellroy’s narratives is fitting given the cultural trends of the decade. But just as the 1950s was the apex of the film noir age, many other genres and art forms were thriving. The Western, Musical, Swashbuckler and Biblical epic all enjoyed their heyday during the 50s.
In this article I am going to explore a lesser-known cultural influences on Ellroy’s work – beat poetry. The Beat movement was peaking during Ellroy’s childhood and had an inevitable impact on him.
High School Drag
Given Ellroy’s conservative views, it’s not surprising that even as a child he associated Beat Poetry with the derogatory term Beatnik. The Beatnik was a media stereotype which portrayed the Beat Generation as a motley crew of drug addicts, criminals and hilariously pretentious artists.
High School Confidential was the first film Ellroy saw at the cinema after the murder of his mother – Jean Ellroy. It’s not surprising, given the timing, that it had a profound effect on the young Ellroy. Produced by legendary schlockmeister Albert Zugsmith, the film is nominally a crime story. A police officer poses as a student to go undercover in a high school and bust a narcotics ring run by the enigmatic ‘Mr A’. However, the film is too consistently outrageous for the crime narrative to be taken seriously, as it perpetuates stereotypes about beatnik culture. All of the students speak in jive and several are portrayed as sex-obsessed, while Zugsmith takes great pleasure in rubbing the audiences’ face in smutty content. Please don’t take this as overly critical. High School Confidential is a riot from start to finish, partly as it can’t help being a little fond of the subculture it is ‘warning’ against.
Ellroy was quite taken by the attractive actress Phillipa Fallon, whose reading of the beat poem ‘High School Drag’ is the highlight of the film. Do you see elements of Ellroy’s bookstore performances in this jive kats?
Vampira and The Beat Generation
Zugsmith followed High School Confidential with The Beat Generation. Once again, it’s a crime film drowning in beatnik satire. The basic premise is chilling. Ray Danton plays Stan Hess, aka ‘The Aspirin Kid’. Hess is a rapist who worms his way into women’s homes while their husbands are away. Charming and handsome, Hess knocks at the door claiming that he owes the woman’s husband money. Once inside, he feigns a headache and pulls out a tin of aspirin. While the woman is distracted getting a glass of water for him, Hess sneaks up from behind, assaults and rapes the woman.
Although he doesn’t murder his victims, Hess could be modelled on the serial killer Harvey Glatman. Known as the ‘Glamour Girls Slayer’, Glatman selected his victims by contacting aspiring models with offers of work. While in prison, Glatman was interviewed by detectives in connection with Jean Ellroy’s murder. As if the film couldn’t get more Ellrovian, Dick Contino performs a song at the climactic ‘Beat Hootenanny’, wherein Hess and Detective Culloran (Steve Cochran) fight it out amid a group of enraptured beatniks, who happily sing and dance and are completely oblivious to the duel unfolding before their eyes.
The Beat Generation features an actress who is referenced in Ellroy’s White Jazz. Maila Nurmi was a Finnish-American actress better known as Vampira, a character she created as the host of The Vampira Show. Part Two of White Jazz is titled ‘Vampira’, although reference to the character is quite brief. Dave Klein spots the portrait of ‘a ghoul woman’ on the shelf of Glenda Bledsoe, an actress he is keeping under surveillance for Howard Hughes. Glenda says of Vampira:
She’s the hostess of an awful horror TV show. I used to carhop her, and she gave me some pointers on how to act in your own movie when you’re in someone else’s movie.
The mention of Vampira must be something of a turn-on, as Klein struggles to hide his attraction for Glenda when she is describing the horror host: ‘Shaky hands – I wanted to touch her.’ Billed as Vampira, the alluring Maila Nurmi appears in The Beat Generation as ‘The Poetess’. She recites a beat poem, not dissimilar to ‘High School Drag’, with a cigarette in her hand and a white rodent on her shoulder. Although the poem is typically hilarious, the scene is quite chilling. Detective Culloran is watching The Poetess, and her recitation is interspersed with clips of Hess who is at that moment using his usual routine to enter Culloran’s house:
Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is available for pre-order from Bloomsbury.
Goering’s Gold is the latest novel by Richard O’Rawe, and the second novel to feature O’Rawe’s protagonist Ructions O’Hare. Ructions is a former IRA operative turned adventurer. When a piece of Nazi memorabilia leads Ructions to suspect that Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering may have hidden his looted booty in Ireland towards the end of World War Two, Ructions can’t resist the temptation of going on a treasure hunt. But when Ructions goes hunting for gold, he soon finds himself in the cross hairs of vengeful former comrades in the IRA, fanatical Neo-Nazis and dogged Security Services. It all amounts to a terrific romp, entertaining and hilarious in equal measure. I would put Goering’s Gold straight onto your Summer reading list.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Ricky O’Rawe about the novel… at least the conversation was supposed to be about Goering’s Gold. Ricky is a natural raconteur and has had such a fascinating life that we got a bit sidetracked. Like Ructions, Ricky is a former IRA operative. But I won’t say anymore here. I’ll let him describe his life in his own words:
Interviewer: Is there a touch of you in Ructions?
O’Rawe: Ructions has a wee touch of my personality. I always think that when you’re writing these things, there’s always a bit of you in the protagonist. Having said that, I wouldn’t be as clever as Ructions right. But I know people from my time in the Republican movement. People who were very, very smart, who would have been able to think on their feet, who would have a touch of the Ructions guy about them. Probably an amalgamation of three or four different guys who I met along my journey. There is a touch of me in him, I have to be honest. I like his humour. Sometimes he comes off with wee bits of humour, and that’s definitely me.
Interviewer: For the benefit of my readers, will you tell me a little bit about your background. It’s interesting that Ructions has fallen out a bit with the IRA leadership which is somewhat similar to you.
O’Rawe: My whole family is very republican. I’m one of these guys who come from a fairly pristine republican background. My father was one of the OC’s of the IRA in Belfast during the 1940s campaign, and he was interned and escaped out of prison. Tunnelled his way out of Derry jail and escaped with others. And he was interned again during the IRA 50’s campaign – the IRA has a campaign virtually every ten years. They never go anywhere! I was brought up in this republican culture, or ethos, call it what you may. When The Troubles broke out in ‘69, I was a student. I was doing A Levels. I’d just finished my O Levels, and the next thing was that The Troubles broke out and I joined the IRA and in no time at all I was on the run. And I ended up on the prison ship Maidstone in February 1972 and that was my studies. I couldn’t go to school because I would have been arrested and interned a lot earlier. So that was the sort of place my life was in for the next fifteen years. It was dedicated to the Republican struggle in the IRA and struggle for Irish freedom and, as I say, some of the people I’ve met along the way were Ructions type guys. Highly intelligent people. You would look at them and say, he looks a bit of a dodo but in actual fact there’s a great brain behind this guy’s bland facade. But I was in and out of prison four times. I was interned without trial twice. I was in for a kidnapping, which I beat in court, and then I got eight years in 1977 for a bank robbery. And I spent three and a half of those eight years on what was called the Blanket protest.
Interviewer: And that was the start of your drift away from the IRA?
O’Rawe: Well it was some ways. I ended up, during the second hunger strike in 1981, in the leadership position being PR of the Republican prisoners and de facto I was number two in the prison behind a guy called Brendan McFarlane. And four of the guys had died – Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreeesh and Patsy O’Hara – they had already died on hunger strike, and we were coming up to the critical point with the fifth guy, a friend of mine called Joe McDonnell. And the British Government, I put out a statement on the fourth of July, which was very conciliatory which broke down the five demands. And broke them down in a conciliatory way because we needed to reach out to the British to give them a way out. You can’t expect outright victory. And the British did respond. They responded with an offer which me and McFarlane accepted. They were gonna give all prisoners their own clothes, which is what we asked for. And they were gonna give us letters and stuff. The big one was the clothes, that was the one that defined whether you were a political prisoner or not, and they had broken that. So we accepted that offer, and sent a communication to the outside leadership. A call came in from Gerry Adams saying that they were surprised we accepted the offer. And they didn’t think that it justified the deaths of the first four men. So as a result of that, the hunger strike continued and another six men died. I was in an awful state. Truth be told, it was the most traumatic time of my whole life. And there’s nothing I could do to stop this thing, and it ended on October 3, 1981 with ten men dead. I got out two years later and I go back to the Republican Movement because I was still a Republican. I wasn’t one of these midnight guys who come in, have a wee look and nipped out again. I was there for the fight. I came out and Gerry Adams came to the house and grabbed me to do PR for the Republican Movement during the 1982 elections. I stayed until 1986 when my wife gave me an ultimatum. I was doing fifteen hour days down in the press centre. She says look, here’s the choice: you either stay with the Republican Movement or you come with me and your daughter, but you can’t have the two. So I picked my wife and my daughter. And that was when I left the Republican Movement – blackmailed out of it (laughs)!
By the way, (it was) the best decision I was ever forced to take in my life. She and I were only married six months and I was away for six years. And I come out of jail and I am right back in the business, knocking out 15 hour days, not earning any money for the house. Senior Republicans got £30 a week, a lot of guys only got a tenner. And I was getting thirty quid a week and my whole family, my daughter, my wife were suffering. And she was right, she just took the attitude – you’re shiteing on us again and I’m not having it.
Interviewer: You’re still quite involved in politics and you’re working a little with the SDLP.
O’Rawe: The SDLP invited me on to what they call their experts committee. It’s a very broad committee of environmentalists and ex-government ministers and people from the various political parties down south etc. And they said to me, would you like to come on and give some sort of republican perspective? I said, why not, of course, so I do work with the SDLP in that sense. I’m far too busy to be involved in party politics because I’m always writing. I’ve always got something in the pipeline. So I don’t have time to start immersing myself in party politics, and I never would anyway. I could never again commit to the discipline that comes from being in a political party. If somebody told me to believe something that I didn’t believe in it would be chaos. I would never be political again, but I do have opinions and I do express them if I’m asked, and I wouldn’t be behind the door criticising the SDLP, Sinn Fein, DUP, whoever. If they deserve criticism and I’m asked, they’ll get it.
Interviewer: While we’re on the subject of nonfiction, I’m very intrigued by the Gerry Conlon biography that you’ve written. How did that come about?
O’Rawe: Me and Gerry were lifelong friends. We lived beside each other, We were born and reared together in Peel Street in the Lower Falls. We lived in 6 Peel Street and the Conlons lived in No.7. There was three months between us in terms of age. So he and I virtually grew up together. I lived in his house, he lived in my house, and we grew up together and we were always great friends. And Gerry was different from me. Gerry was a crazy sort of a child right, one of these wee fuckers that was breaking into houses when he was about 10 or 12 you know. Whereas, I had a very strict upbringing and I wasn’t into any of that. Gerry was the sort of a kid that was just wild but I loved him. He was like a brother to me, truly. After he got out of the Old Bailey in 1989 I met him again in Belfast, and he and a guy called Brendan ‘Darkie’ Hughes, a very famous Republican, we all got drunk. Darkie Hughes was actually the guy who said to his (Gerry’s) father back in 1973 ‘get him out Giuseppe or he’s gonna get shot.’ So the three of us had a drink and got mad drunk. but then he went away to England and he had his tribulations in England. He ended up on crack cocaine. He ended up in Plymouth, moving down from London, trying to break the habit. He lived like a hermit in Plymouth. Very lucky to have a psychiatric nurse called Baz who talked him through it and walked him through it and he got clean. He came back in 2006. The minute he came home he phoned me up and said, come on out for a drink. So we met a lot of old friends, but it was about me and him. So we started going out for breakfast every week, sometimes twice a week and it was one of those situations where you could tell him anything. There’s very few people in life that you’ll meet like that. You can say whatever you want to say and it’s not going to be carried, and he and I had that sort of relationship.
I released Blanketmen, my first book, in 2005 and he loved it, absolutely loved it. And we were walking up Royal Avenue in 2006 and he said to me, I want you to write my biography. I said, Jesus Christ they made a film about you. Daniel Day Lewis portrayed you, and you’ve already written your own book, Proved Innocent, you’re well covered Gerry. He said, you’re talking balls. My life didn’t start until the day I got out of jail. That’s when the Gerry Conlon story begins.
And I had other commitments at the time. I had a screenplay with Northern Ireland Screen with a producer guy in Dublin and we were talking about running it as a film. It didn’t work out. He (Gerry) says, are you gonna do it? I says, well… He says, are you gonna do it, I want a commitment? I says, I’ll do it but it won’t be in a day. It won’t be tomorrow. So I gave it no more thought. Neither did he push me for it, because he knew eventually we’ll get round to it. I get a call from his sister Ann. She says, Gerry wants to see you. He’s in hospital. I says, what’s he doing there? She says, it’s not good. She told me he had two or three weeks to live at the most. He has cancer. It’s such a shock. So I went down to see him. It was very emotional for the two of us, because I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him again. He said to me, are you doing the story? You said you would and you haven’t done it yet. So I said, I’m gonna do it. Believe me, I will do it. So we had a very emotional farewell, and he died within about a week.
I had another book, I had Northern Heist lined up to do next. I had to set it aside and get whacked into the Gerry Conlon book, and started doing all the interviews. Had to travel down to Devon, had to go to London, had to go to Glasgow, Derry, down to Tipperary. It was one of those books you had to get on your bike and go and actually talk with people about him. It was one of those books which was very funny in places because Gerry was one of those characters, some of his stories were funny. I mean the antics of him and Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp was fantastic for me. Johnny Depp wrote the foreword. That’s a story on its own. I didn’t think he was gonna do it. It was actually Siobhan MacGowan (Shane MacGowan’s sister). She was a lovely wee girl and we were down interviewing her, down in Tipperary, myself and my daughter. We were walking away, she said to me ‘why don’t you ask Johnny Depp to do the foreword. Ask him, I think he’ll do it. He loved Gerry.’ So she gave me his email address. I bounce away an email, Johnny would you be up for it? I heard nothing for two weeks, I thought let’s get someone else to do it, and then word came through from Johnny Depp, ‘Ricky, I would love to write the foreword to Gerry Conlon’s biography. That is such an honour, and thank you so much for asking me.’
Interviewer: That is an extraordinary story.
O’Rawe: They’d (Depp and Gerry) been on this crazy drinking binge down in southern Ireland and they’d drunk the place dry, all around Cork and Killarney and all. They’d been to all these places and had a great time with the chicks, just real guys going let’s go mad. And he says ‘I remember going into a bookshop in Dublin and Gerry bought a book on The Beatles and I bought Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. I have it in my hands as I’m writing this.’
The story itself is fantastic. It’s now a screenplay. We released it in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and it sold out every night. It’s actually in the biggest theatre in Belfast, 1100 seater, the Grand Opera House at the end of July and it leaves there to go the way over the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a month. And it’s called In the Name of the Son. If I say so myself, it’s fucking brilliant! Humour, pathos, everything that’s lovely and hard times and funny times. You couldn’t really go wrong because his life was such a rollercoaster. He got through a million quid in under a year, and he ended up rifling through bins because every penny went to drugs. Went to cocaine.
Interviewer: I heard he had PTSD.
O’Rawe: But he fought it. He fought it like a champion and he beat it. I talked to his mate. His mate was also a crack cocaine addict, and he said he went on heroin to get off crack cocaine. He said he couldn’t beat it, but Gerry beat it.
Interviewer: What made you turn your hand to fiction with Northern Heist?
O’Rawe: I don’t like to be pigeonholed. I will write whatever takes my fancy, and Northern Heist came about… actually these things always come about with one single thought, and usually it’s a ‘what if’. Me and my daughter was sitting in a pub down in Belfast at Christmas. She doesn’t drink. She was having a coke and I’m having a pint of Guinness and we’re talking about the Northern Bank robbery. They got away with twenty-six and a half million quid. It’s all over the papers. The government down south, the government in London, in Belfast, all the political parties are saying that the Provos, the IRA done it right, carried the robbery out and truth be told, there’s no one else in Ireland who could have pulled it off, other than the IRA. It was such an intricate job, brilliant job. It was one of those jobs you’d give your right arm to be on (laughs).
Interviewer: Yeah? (laughs, a little nervously)
O’Rawe: So we were sitting talking about it, and she said to me ‘but what if the IRA didn’t do it?’ I said ‘Who would do it?’ And then we started talking and we came up with this genius of a criminal. This was a hell of a bank robbery. I mean, whoever thought of this was extremely alert, well tuned in and the genius of it was two parts. The first thing, it was a tiger kidnapping where they held the two families. They send the two bank employees in, and one of them brings in a big Manchester United kitbag, and they say to him, ‘fill that up with money, bring it up to the end of the street’ which he does. He goes up to the end of the street, sits at the bus stop. A guy comes up beside him, takes the bag and walks away and in that instance they got away with a million quid. But they also realised this bank is ours for the taking. There’s no cops, there’s no security. We can take this out, and not just take it out, take every fucking penny out of it. And then a big lorry lined up with two guys. They bring down the lorry. In the meantime, the organiser phones the two boys in the bank and says, start filling up the big trolleys. Fill them up with money, seal them up and bring them out to the loading bay. Which is exactly what they do, they throw some rubbish on it, and in the first haul they get away with 16 million quid. They send the lorry back again and take another 10 million pound out of it. And the genius of the thing was the IRA had to phone the cops up and tell them the place was robbed. From a writer’s point of view, it was fantastic. From a dramatic point of view it was potentially a great story, great novel. But it couldn’t be a great novel if it was the IRA who done it, so I invented this guy Ructions who, as I say, I knew the type of man that he was. I’ve met this type of guy right, on two or three different occasions, not often. These guys don’t grow on trees, but I met this type of guy and I amalgamated three or four different personalities and there’s a touch of me in him as well. So he then becomes the driving force behind it, and it works, but like in all novels you’re problem solving all the time. Number one: how does he get to know who’s working what, when and where, the intelligence on the bank? So I have to solve that. But I loved writing about this guy Ructions.
Goering’s Gold was challenging. Walking Ructions into a scenario where he’s chasing Nazi Gold belonging to Hermann Goering was challenging. You have to sit down and say how would this happen. You make it work because it’s human experience.
Interviewer: Have you always been interested in World War Two?
O’Rawe: I love Modern European History. I was actually studying in prison, before I came out. I love Modern European History and I love World War Two. I don’t love Hermann Goering. He was an absolute monster. But out of all the Nazis he was, far and away, the most gregarious right. He’s a total hedonist, and if he had had his way, there wouldn’t have been a Second World War. He advises Hitler not to invade Poland. He advises him not to invade Russia. Hitler, of course, ignored him. But all I think Hermann Goering wanted to be was the Minister of the Hunt and the Minister of Good Wine and the Minister of Champagne and the Minister of the Party. Even when you look at the Nuremberg trials, he was by far and away the most coherent and intelligent Nazi there. The rest of them were dour. He was laughing and he was almost enjoying it. They’re not sure, for definite, how he got the cyanide tablet. And in that wee mystery lies the nucleus of your book.
Interviewer: Have you had any feedback from old comrades who say, ‘I don’t like what you’re writing about us’?
O’Rawe: They all want to be Ructions! I don’t hang around with the lads anymore. I just don’t do it. After Blanketmen I was ostracised, but I went to a funeral not long after Northern Heist was released and not one but about twenty came up to me and said, ‘Am I Ructions? Was Ructions based on me?’ They all want to be this maverick, this genius who can pull this stuff off. They love the thought of it.
Tales From The Mall
I had the honour of being interviewed by Brendan (one of the EllroyBoys, whose show I appeared on a couple of times) for his podcast series Tales From the Mall.
The format of Tales From The Mall is intriguing. Brendan calls his friends, usually writer/artist types, from the Arizona Mills mall in Tempe, Arizona. He has a free-form interview style and no subject, be it politics, relationships, cinema, literature or religion is off-limits. Brendan and I talked for two hours and I decided it was time to openly discuss a book I have been dropping hints about on this website for some time.
Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is the first full-length biography of James Ellroy and will be published by Bloomsbury early next year. You can find more information on the book on Bloomsbury’s website where it is available for pre-order. I’ll be discussing the book on this site in the months ahead. But in the meantime, you can listen to me discuss it with Brendan on Tales From The Mall. He has a great show and it was huge fun to be his guest.
A James Ellroy Playlist: Rags to Riches
Scott Joplin: Piano Rags was released in 1970. Featuring Rags composed by Joplin and performed by Joshua Rifkin, the record was a critical and commercial success, leading to a revival of interest in Ragtime and a glowing reassessment of Joplin’s role as the ‘King of Ragtime’.
In the mid-1970s, while working at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles, a young caddy by the name of Lee Earle Ellroy gives a copy of Piano Rags to a close friend. His favourite track, Ellroy tells his friend, is ‘Magnetic Rag’.
Magnetic Rag
The Ragtime revival of the 70s continued apace. The Sting won Best Picture at the 1974 Academy Awards. The soundtrack featured Joplin compositions, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch. Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, and his life was adapted into a 1977 film starring Billy Dee Williams. It all amounts to an extraordinary, albeit bittersweet, legacy for a composer who died of syphilis, penniless, at the age of 48 in 1917. Ragtime abruptly died with him, although it lived on as an influence in Swing, Jazz and the Blues.
EL Doctorow’s novel Ragtime was published in 1975. Set at the height of the Ragtime era from 1902 to 1912, the narrative focuses on a wealthy white family who live in New Rochelle, NY. Lee Ellroy loved the novel. He had writing ambitions of his own and was working on a manuscript at home in the afternoons, after caddying in the morning. In 1981, Ellroy’s first novel Brown’s Requiem was published under his new name James Ellroy. Ellroy moved to Eastchester, close to the New Rochelle setting of Ragtime, and pursued his new writing career with burning ambition and boundless enthusiasm. Although his debut had been a crime novel, Ellroy ultimately wanted to write historical fiction. As an influence, Doctorow’s Ragtime was a work Ellroy admired but also struggled with. There is no dialogue in the text. Instead, the reader discerns the characters motivations through interior monologue as they react to the great events around them. Real-life historical figures are presented in an irreverent, sometimes unflattering, fashion. Their actions are not always logical or rational. Sometimes it feels like they have given themselves to the rhythm of their times. Ellroy himself would write about romantic dreamers who ‘dance to the music in their own heads’. Every time I listen to a rag it sounds like a short story told through musical mannerisms. It’s perfect music to accompany a flirtatious glance across a room or a happy walk on a Summer’s day.
The film adaptation of Ragtime hit the big screens in November 1981 while Ellroy was settling in at his new home in Eastchester. Directed by Milos Forman, Ragtime is a lavish spectacle which sadly died at the box office. The film does a good job of fleshing out the characters through dialogue and action. The narration to the trailer ends ‘Bad Time … Good Time … Ragtime’. The production of the film was caught in its own turmoil that, for better or worse, captured the spirit of Ragtime. A footballer turned actor lobbied hard for the role of Coalhouse Walker Jr. He felt the role of Walker (a well-mannered Ragtime pianist who ingratiates himself with a white family but is radicalised after experiencing racism), would have been the perfect part to make people take him more seriously as an actor.
Fortunately, OJ Simpson did not get the part. The role of Colehouse Walker went to the excellent Howard Rollins.
By the late 1980s, Ellroy’s reputation as a historical novelist was starting to grow. Today he is considered one of the greatest writers of historical crime fiction, although recent works have tended to be overblown. Perhaps that is the point. Ellroy described the WWII Los Angeles setting of Perfidia as a “time of fabulous fistfights, brief and passionate love affairs, populated by great real-life characters interacting with great fictional characters. It is the secret human infrastructure of enormous public events. It’s Ellroy’s Ragtime.”
NB: This post came about through conversations I’ve had with Ellroy about his musical tastes and how they have changed over time. His interest in Ragtime has waned over the years. The Ragtime revival, like the Swing revival of the 90s, has come and gone. We absorb our cultural environment and then we move on, sometimes not realising until years later the influence it had on us. Ellroy has always maintained that he ‘lives in the past’ and while he spurns the internet for that reason, the web has made these cultural gems of bygone days so much easier to rediscover. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a fine introduction to the era and its music. In one scene, Colehouse performs several rags to the unnamed New Rochelle family, and the description of his playing is as beautiful as the music itself:
The musician turned again to the keyboard. ‘Wall Street Rag,’ he said. Composed by the great Scott Joplin. He began to play. Ill-tuned or not the Aeolian had never made such sounds. Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music.
Wall Street Rag
A James Ellroy Playlist: Another Country
LP Hartley’s novel The Go Between has one of the most famous opening lines in twentieth-century literature: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Actually it’s just as famous for being misquoted as ‘another country’, which is what I thought it was until recently. It might be sacrilegious of me but I prefer the quote this way. The past isn’t foreign exactly, but it is ‘other’. Hartley, like James Ellroy and all of the great historical novelists, understood the romantic appeal of the past, and at the same time acknowledged that many of the social battles that were fought in bygone days and which ruined peoples lives have now been resolved, and the only debate that remains is why did anyone ever argue so passionately about them?
In the following post I am going to continue my examination of Dick Contino’s musical influence on the writing of James Ellroy. Contino’s promising career was virtually destroyed by the ‘draft-dodging’ stigma that stuck to him when he fled from pre-induction barracks during the Korean War. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment at McNeil Island, later served in the military and received a presidential pardon, but he never regained the stardom he had enjoyed at the peak of his popularity. However, during the 1990s, Contino enjoyed something of an Indian Summer. Thanks in part to his collaboration with Ellroy, which in turn formed part of a wider resurgence of interest in the Swing Era.
Hollywood Nocturne
Ellroy writes about the unexpected nature of memory in his essay ‘Out of the Past’. Dick Contino suddenly re-entered Ellroy’s consciousness in the early 90s. Ellroy’s recollection of him was faint. He recalled seeing Contino on television once as a child and his father making a derogatory comment about him being a ‘draft dodger’. Shortly thereafter, he saw Contino play the lead in the film Daddy-O. Ellroy did not think about Contino again until much later, although at least one event in his life paralleled Contino’s. Ellroy enlisted in the US Army in 1965. He quickly realised he had made a bad mistake and faked a nervous breakdown in order to be discharged, with the added bonus that this made him ineligible to be drafted for service in Vietnam. In Ellroy’s novel White Jazz, ‘a major sub-plot features a grade Z movie being filmed on the same Griffith Park locales as Daddy-O‘. Once he saw the influence Contino had indirectly played on his life, Ellroy resolved to find him. By the early nineties Contino had dropped off the map and Ellroy wasn’t sure if he was still alive. Ellroy re-watched Daddy-O and listened to ‘half a dozen of his [Contino’s] albums, revelling in pure Entertainment.’ Ellroy had to flesh out his personal memories to get a sense of how he might use Contino in fiction. It worked. Ellroy was able to locate Contino. They hit it off and Contino agreed to be the lead protagonist in Ellroy’s novella Dick Contino’s Blues.
Ellroy and Contino performed onstage together, with Ellroy reading from the text and Contino playing his beloved accordion. And then, as if by magic, that other country that is the past began to form around them in a big nostalgia boom. 1989 is usually regarded as the year the Swing Revival began in the US, the apex of which was the release of the double-platinum album The Dirty Boogie by The Brian Setzer Orchestra in 1998. Brian Setzer composed the song ‘Hollywood Nocturne’ for a big-screen adaptation of Dick Contino’s Blues which has yet to materialise (although those of who care hope that it will one day). The song later appeared on The Dirty Boogie. Listen to the lyrics ‘beneath a buzzing neon sign dressed in style so cool and refined stands a man from another time who’s calling out to you’ and think of Contino and how great this would sound over a Dick Contino’s Blues title sequence.
This Could Be the Start of Something
By the mid-90s Ellroy had taken to singing during public appearances on his book tours. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the confidence to attempt this if he had not already shared a stage with Contino. With Pink Floyd the Barber (later renamed The Double Naught Spy Car) as his backup band in the US, and touring with The Jackson Code in Australia in 1996, Ellroy’s signature song was his unique cover of ‘This Could Be the Start of Something’ by Steve Allen. Ellroy considered it a great Swingers song, although he employed the term in a different sense to Swing music! He rewrote the song with profane and topical lyrics. It traditionally begins ‘You’re walkin’ along the street, or you’re at a party’. Ellroy revised this line so that the song begins ‘You’re beating up Rodney King and starting a riot’.
Imagine how incendiary this would have been to Nineties audiences when the LA riots were still a recent memory! Sadly, footage of Ellroy performing his version of the song doesn’t appear to exist. But if you watch footage of the original then you can see why Ellroy loves it, and why it was a good song to revive in the nostalgia-laden Nineties. It’s a great LA song with a dash of innuendo. My favourite rendition is below. A star-studded affair recorded for The Steve Allen Show.
Another Country? Truly, they don’t make ’em like this anymore:
Ship of Blood: An Interview with Charles Oldham
Have you heard of the Berwind Mutiny? No? Neither had I, until I read Charles Oldham’s terrific new book Ship of Blood: Mutiny and Slaughter Aboard the Harry A. Berwind, and the Quest for Justice. It’s a true crime tale with an intriguing premise. On October 10, 1905 the schooner Harry A. Berwind was drifting aimlessly about thirty miles off Cape Fear. Boarding parties were dispatched from shore to investigate and they discovered the Berwind was the scene of a bloodbath. The captain and four of his crew were dead. Three surviving crewmen were locked up and charged with mutiny. Were the murders were committed by one rogue member of the crew or was it a conspiracy involving all three men who had been charged? The crux of the matter was that all but one of the victims was white, whereas the three men charged with mutiny were black. In the South at a time when slavery and the Civil War were still a living memory for many people, one would think there was only ever going to be one outcome. However, this landmark case defied everyone’s expectations.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Charles Oldham about the Berwind Case and his writing of Ship of Blood. An Attorney based in Charlotte, North Carolina, in person Charles comes across as everything you would want a lawyer to be – measured, analytical, empathetic, a gentleman orator and a good listener. Moreover, he’s a Carolinian to his core.
My opening question to Charles was how did he first get interested in the story:
I came across the story almost by accident. It was about three or four years ago after I had finished working on my first book (The Senator’s Son), which also dealt with a true crime story that happened in eastern North Carolina. It was around the same time period as Ship of Blood, the early 1900s. After writing that book, it had got some favourable responses and I knew I wanted to do a second one. So I was looking around for a subject and I came across the story of the Berwind Mutiny by chance. I found an article that was written about it and it was published in a Historical Review Magazine here in North Carolina. It’s not a very old article. It was written in 2014, but it summarised the basic dynamics of the story – the mutiny, murder trials and what happened afterwards.
I was really stunned that I had never heard of that case before as I am someone who grew up in North Carolina. I have spent most of my life being really familiar with eastern North Carolina, vacationing there. It’s part of my family heritage but I was really surprised that I had never heard of that case with all the twists and turns and how fascinating it was. I was very surprised that nobody had yet written a book about it. So I thought I’m looking for a subject for another book and this needs to be it.
Ship of Blood has a great sense of time and place. The culture, values and speech of North Carolina are beautifully evoked. Charles puts this down to North Carolina being:
Where I’ve grown up. It’s my family heritage, both sides of my family have North Carolina roots and I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve always been a history buff ever since I was kid. It comes naturally.
I ask Charles to tell me more about his background as an attorney. Did it help him when it came to researching and writing the book?
When I was practising law most of what I did was Criminal Defence, Civil Litigation. With a background like that I know my way around the courtroom quite well. So I’ve always had a thing for a really interesting courtroom drama which obviously this is. When I first came across the story I thought the history itself is fascinating with all the new studies which have focused on the Wilmington Insurrection over the past few years. I came across the story and I saw this is just a very fascinating postscript to everything that happened in 1898. I was very fortunate to find the transcripts of the trials. I found all of the appellate court documents. There’s a wealth of material out there.
I’m not gonna claim that I was the best attorney around, which I certainly wasn’t, but just having enough of a background to know my way around a court transcript and to have a pretty good idea of what I’m looking at when I dig up those old documents. I thought an attorney who has some experience in that type of thing is probably the best storyteller for this particular case. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I thought it was a convenient confluence of events.
We live in an age when race relations are back on the agenda. Did the parallels affect the writing process?
I’m coming along at just the right time frankly because when you look at the setting of the case – Wilmington, North Carolina, 1905 – the inevitable reality is that race and politics were inextricably bound up in that case. That was just unavoidable because of the history. It’s just within the past twenty or twenty-five years that a lot of other historians have looked seriously into the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, and we’ve had several really good accounts that have been published within the past few years. Up until then it was a very neglected chapter in our history here. And all of that is to the good as we’ve become more aware of the tragedy that occurred back then. I’ve certainly been the beneficiary of all that and what I’ve written expands and expounds on what has come before.
I’m just glad that I came across the story and I’m happy to say that the story ends well. The particular case of these three men who were put on trial when everyone was expecting that they surely would be convicted and hanged very quickly, but it actually turned out not to be the case. A lot of people in Wilmington acted against type, against prejudices that you would have expected them to hold and because of that justice actually prevailed in the end, which makes it a really fascinating tale.
What can the story of the Berwind tell us about justice and race relations in the US today?
I look at the story in the way people used to think about Watergate for example, and the Dreyfus Case in France. In the end the good guys won in both of those instances, and here in Eastern North Carolina in 1905, even in the very worst days of the White Supremacist movement there were a surprising number of people in Wilmington who actually listened to the evidence in this case and they realised that out of those three men who were put on trial, three black men charged with killing four white men, they listened to the testimony of these guys and they realised well one of them probably is guilty, and if anyone ever deserved the death penalty he did and that’s what he got. But they recognised that the other two were probably not guilty and people acted upon it and the newspapers acted upon it, and a number of people in Wilmington, even people who had taken part in that insurrection in Wilmington several years ago realised that justice needs to be done here. They were the ones who got behind these guys and found legal counsel for them and eventually took the case to the Supreme Court and eventually to the White House, the presidential clemency petitions.
I hope if anyone gathers anything from the book it’s a message of hope. Even in the worst days justice can prevail. Fast-forward more than a hundred years to where we are right now. As much as we hear in the press about Black Lives Matter and nasty incidents like George Floyd, our situation today is incomparably better than it was back then. Politics today is nasty but politics back then was nasty, brutal and bloody. If justice can prevail back then we are in much happier times today. If people can draw some sense of perspective from that then I’ve accomplished my purpose.
You’ve managed to accomplish that purpose by avoiding sensationalism. So many books in the True Crime genre rush for easy answers or jump to far-fetched conclusions.
I try not to go beyond what’s actually in the historical record. When I speculate about what might have happened I make it as explicit as I can that I’m sort of going beyond the record right here and I’m speculating a little bit. I try to keep everything footnoted and documented as best I can and make it clear to delineate what’s in the record and what goes beyond that.
Writing is an addictive, rewarding and frustrating process. Now that Ship of Blood has been published will you follow it with another book?
I have a couple of ideas that I’m mulling around a little bit. I definitely want to do another one. I’d like to find a topic which might have more of a national appeal. My first two books have both dealt with local stories from Eastern North Carolina, from the same time period, and I’d like to get beyond that but I’m not going to venture into the details on it yet because I’m not sure exactly what direction I’m going to go in. But I fully anticipate there will be a third book.
Ship of Blood is published by Beach Glass Books.
Nicola Black is a Scottish filmmaker whose work includes Designer Vaginas, When Freddie Mercury Met Kenny Everett and the excellent White Jazz, which is perhaps the greatest of all the documentaries which have been produced on the life and work of James Ellroy.
I’ve been corresponding with Nicola for some time, and when I recently published a piece examining the parallels between Ellroy and Manson Family victim Steven Parent, she notified me of a documentary she had been working on for several years, provisionally titled It All Went Down, which tells the story of Bobby Beausoleil and the murder of Gary Hinman, its links to the Manson Family, and most intriguing of all, Beausoleil’s role in Kenneth Anger’s cult independent film Lucifer Rising.
Lucifer Rising
Bobby Beausoleil was born in Santa Barbara in 1947. He had a fairly typical Californian upbringing for the time. He would visit his grandparents in El Monte where, by coincidence, one of the Manson Family’s victims (Steven Parent) grew up. His interest in music was sparked, as a child, when he discovered a guitar in his grandmother’s attic. As a teen he started getting into trouble, and after a spell in Los Prietos Boys Camp he began to drift between Los Angeles and San Francisco, becoming involved with the growing counter-culture movement. Beausoleil joined several bands and came to the attention of independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger was smitten by the good-looking Beausoleil and cast him in the eponymous role of his short film Lucifer Rising, in which Beausoleil would play the Fallen Angel. However, no sooner had filming commenced when things began to fall apart. There are various accounts as to why the production ground to a halt. According to Nicola, ‘One story is that the money for the film was spent on drugs rather than film stock; the other version is that Bobby stole the rushes after he and Kenneth argued, leaving for LA where he ran into the Manson family.’ Anger later completed the film Invocation of My Demon Brother using left-over footage of Beausoleil he had from the Lucifer Rising shoot.
The Murder of Gary Hinman
It was Beausoleil’s encounter with Charles Manson that would seal his fate. At first glance Manson and his lifestyle seemed very attractive to Bobby. Manson was an aspiring singer-songwriter with a handful of showbiz connections, and a bevy of beautiful followers eager to indulge in his free love philosophy. Another acquaintance of Manson’s was the music teacher Gary Hinman. Beausoleil and Hinman, at least nominally, became friends. They were both talented musicians and Hinman had once played at Carnegie Hall. Manson was under the impression that Hinman was the heir to a sizable fortune and sent Beausoleil, accompanied by two female followers Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner, to Hinman’s home in Topanga Canyon with orders to extort a slice of it. Hinman refused to give them any money. Manson travelled to the house by car, driven by his right-hand man Bruce Davis, carrying either a samurai sword or a bayonet (reports vary). He slashed Hinman’s face and ear with the blade. This began several days of torture. Manson told Beausoleil by phone to kill Hinman and make it look like the work of black revolutionaries. After he stabbed Hinman to death Beausoleil wrote ‘Political piggy’ on the wall with Hinman’s blood. Beausoleil was arrested on August 6, 1969 after falling asleep in Hinman’s fiat which he had taken after the murder. The Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family began on August 8.
Lucifer Resurrected
In 1968 Kenneth Anger travelled to Britain, where he ended up hanging out with the cream of Swinging Sixties entertainers. Eager to get Lucifer Rising back into production, he offered the lead role to Mick Jagger. Jagger declined, but recommended his brother Chris for the role. Soon after shooting restarted however, Anger started having arguments with Chris Jagger and sacked him. Anger met Jimmy Page at a Sotheby’s auction for Aleister Crowley artefacts. Both men were fascinated by Thelema and the Occult, and Page agreed to compose the score for the film. Anger and Page did not have a happy working experience together, and Anger was so incensed with the Led Zeppelin guitarist that he is rumoured to have put a curse on him. This is roughly when Bobby Beausoleil reenters the story of the film’s production.
Beausoleil had experienced some tough and turbulent years in prison. After being found guilty for Hinman’s murder, he was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment when the Supreme Court of California ruled that Capital Punishment was unconstitutional in 1972. During his trial and a subsequent sanity hearing for Manson Family members, Beausoleil appeared belligerent and still, it seems, in thrall to Manson.
Truman Capote interviewed Beausoleil at San Quentin prison in 1973 for a one-hour CBS special (which now appears to be lost). Capote’s In Cold Blood had been published in 1966 and quickly became a publishing sensation, but it was not well-known at the time how Capote had manipulated the prisoners at the heart of the story, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, for his own ends. If it had been, perhaps Beausoleil would never have agreed to an interview. History would repeat itself. Beausoleil had the youthful looks and buff jailhouse figure which Capote found very attractive. A transcript of their interview makes for strange reading. Time and again Beausoleil is moved to silence, as though he is wowed by Capote’s formidable intellect. One can’t but wonder if this is how their conversation really played out, or is it merely all part of Capote’s fantasy. Needless to say, it did nothing to rehabilitate Beausoleil in the public’s eyes.
Beausoleil had been transferred to Tracy Prison when he learned that Jimmy Page was no longer involved in Lucifer Rising. He wrote to Anger offering to compose the soundtrack himself which he did over a three-year period with the Freedom Orchestra, musicians made up of his fellow inmates. Recording the score was particularly difficult given that band members would be paroled and transferred to other prisons, and they had restricted access to a small recording studio which had been built with the proceeds of a grant. Nevertheless, Beausoleil’s score perfectly complements the film which by the time it was finally released in 1980, played like a demonic cocktail of the 1960s psychedelia and 1970s fascination with devil worship. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a good film, but it is filled with striking imagery, weirdly memorable moments and it almost seems to be anticipating the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Despite Anger’s penchant for falling-out with the people he worked with, there are still appearances by Jagger, Page, Marianne Faithfull and Donald Cammell. Even if you do not enjoy the film, Beausoleil’s score is a haunting and moving piece of music, full of creative and well-judged experimentation, which stands up well on its own.
Reinvention and Redemption
Beausoleil continued to compose and release music throughout the 1980s and the experience appears to have been life-changing for him. He began to increasingly distance himself from the Manson Family. His story about the Hinman murder also began to change. His most consistent account of the murder is that Hinman was killed over a drug deal gone wrong. In this version, Hinman supplied Beausoleil with mescaline to sell to a biker gang called the Straight Satans. But the drugs Hinman provided were sub-par. Fearing retribution from the bikers, Beausoleil confronted Hinman in his home and demanded he provide compensation. They argued and ultimately Hinman was killed. Another story which has spun off from this is that the Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders two days after Beausoleil’s arrest in an effort to fool the police. ‘Pig’ was written in blood on the front door of 10050 Cielo Drive by Susan Atkins to try and make the LAPD think that Hinman’s murderer was still at large, when in fact Beausoleil was already in custody (remember Beausoleil had written ‘Political piggy’ at the Hinman crime scene). If this story is true (and that’s a big if) it backfired spectacularly. The LAPD only linked the Manson Family to the Tate-LaBianca case once Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office Homicide Detectives informed them of its similarities to the Hinman murder. By trying to help Beausoleil, the Manson Family only ended up incriminating themselves.
When Nicola began work on her documentary, Beausoleil had been recommended for release by the parole board, and she envisaged her film ending with Beausoleil telling his story as a (relatively) free man. However, Governor of California Gavin Newsom reversed the parole board’s decision (as he did more recently with Sirhan Sirhan) and Beausoleil remained incarcerated. The spectre of the Manson Family continues to haunt him. Clearly Manson and his followers’ horrific crimes still cause the families of the victims emotional suffering, and there is no doubt that Beausoleil committed the worst crime of all in taking another man’s life. But perhaps after spending more than fifty years in prison, and working hard to be a constructive member of society from behind bars, it is time he was released. Whatever happens, I do hope Nicola gets to complete her film. The footage I’ve seen so far is excellent. She has audio interviews with Beausoleil, a terrific interview with Kenneth Anger and much more. More importantly though, she has a story which, in all its complexity and mythology, needs to be told.
A James Ellroy Playlist: From Cooley to Contino
In James Ellroy’s world, icons are only as interesting as their fall and their flaws. Ellroy finds ‘rogue cops and shakedown artists’ to be more compelling than the lofty figures of politics or showbiz. When he does take an interest in a celebrity, it’s usually for the secrets that lie behind the persona which can either make them appear more human or more sordid than their glamorous facade. For the latest instalment in my series on James Ellroy and music, we are going to take a look at two stars of the fifties who reached the dizzying heights of fame only to come crashing down with an almighty fall, and are, therefore, perfect specimens to be fictionalised in Ellroy’s work.
Shame on You
Spade Cooley was known as the ‘King of Western Swing’. His breakthrough hit was ‘Shame on You’ in 1944, and it’s slut-shaming lyrics ‘Ran around with other guys / Tried to lie when I got wise’, would prove to be chillingly prophetic. Cooley was convicted of murder after beating his wife Ella Mae Evans to death in 1961. Cooley suspected his wife was being unfaithful and his murderous rage was sparked by his belief that Ella Mae had joined a free love cult.
Ellroy’s interest in Cooley was personal. In My Dark Places, Ellroy notes that Cooley performed at the Desert Inn in El Monte, the same venue where Jean Ellroy was spotted with the Swarthy Man the night she was murdered. Ellroy also states the ‘quasi-Ink Spots’, who recorded a version of ‘Harbour Lights’, which is referenced repeatedly in White Jazz ‘played there’. Ellroy followed Cooley’s murder trial, the longest in county history at the time, with great interest. Cooley makes sporadic appearances in Ellroy’s fiction. The most notable being in LA Confidential where he is portrayed as a violent misogynist who Bud White suspects of murdering underage prostitutes. However, the real killer turns out to be a member of Cooley’s band, the fictional ‘Deuce’ Perkins.
During his incarceration, Cooley’s health declined rapidly. He was due to be paroled on February 22, 1970, reportedly after lobbying for his release from Governor of California Ronald Reagan. However, on November 23, 1969, while on a 72-hour furlough from his prison hospital unit, Cooley died of a heart attack during a benefit gig for the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of Alameda County.
Below is a Soundie of Patsy McMahon singing ‘Shame on You’ with Spade Cooley’s band.
Lady of Spain / Contino Medley
At the height of his popularity Dick Contino was known as the ‘World’s Greatest Accordion Player’. He found fame when he won the Horace Heidt/Philip Morris talent contest in 1947 with his rendition of ‘Lady of Spain’, which became his signature piece. Like Cooley, he would suffer a spectacular fall from grace, albeit his sins were notably less grievous than the King of Swing’s. Contino was drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War. In a panic, he fled from pre-induction barracks at Ford Ord. He was subsequently sentenced to six months imprisonment at McNeil Island Correctional Center. Although he would go on to military service, and would receive a presidential pardon by Proclamation 3000, the scandal did lasting damage to Contino’s career.
Ellroy had fond boyhood memories of seeing Contino perform on television during the late fifties when the accordionist was trying to rebuild his career. Years later, he managed to track down Contino in Vegas. The two men quickly became friends, swapping stories of LA lore, and Contino agreed that Ellroy could use him as the lead character in the novella ‘Dick Contino’s Blues’. In the novella, Contino crosses paths with Cooley. In Ellroy’s narrative, Contino once had an affair with Cooley’s ill-fated wife Ella Mae: ‘I remembered Fresno, Christmas ’47 – I was young, she was lonely, Spade was in Texas.’ Contino’s wife Leigh Snowden asks him to stop Cooley from beating Ella Mae. Contino drives up to Cooley’s ranch with ‘Shame on You’ playing on the car radio. He finds Cooley in a drunk, stoned and belligerent mood. He sedates Cooley and carries him to his bed, putting him aside his sleeping wife. ‘Keep it hush-hush, dear heart – for both our sakes’ he whispers to Ella Mae in her slumbers. The fact that Contino listens to ‘Shame on You’ as a precursor to this scene is telling. There is a triumvirate of shame with these characters. The shame of the cheating spouse, the shame of Cooley who the reader knows will go on to commit the worst crime of all, and the shame of the trysting lovers Contino and Ella Mae, whose passion is enhanced by the knowledge that what they have done is wrong.
Below is my favourite footage of Contino, performing with the June Taylor Dancers in 1957. This was filmed several years after the draft-dodging scandal, but Contino’s still got it. Find someone who looks at you the way the dancers look at him…
An Interview with Joshua Melville about AMERICAN TIME BOMB: ATTICA, SAM MELVILLE, AND A SON’S SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
Joshua Melville has an unusual family history. His father was a bomb-setter, radical and (depending on your definition of the term) terrorist. Sam Melville was connected to at least eight bombings in the United States in 1969, finally being convicted of bombing the Federal Office Building in 1970. No one was killed in Melville’s bombings. However, a little over a year after he was convicted, Sam Melville was dead, killed in the Attica Prison riot.
Josh Melville was only a boy when his father was killed, and it’s fair to say that he never really knew the man. He has gone on to have an extraordinary life of his own, working on Wall Street and the Music Industry and authoring several books on the latter under the pseudonym Moses Avalon. Now he has turned his writing skills to address his father’s story and a controversial period of recent American history when left-wing militant groups such as the Weather Underground were prepared to use violence to protest against everything from the Vietnam War, Capitalism, Imperialism and Racism.
The result is American Time Bomb: Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers. Prior to reading my review copy, I was a little apprehensive. I was worried the book would be a one-sided political screed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. American Time Bomb is an extraordinary mixture of memoir, mystery and social history. I devoured the book over a weekend and heartily recommend you do the same. Melville’s writing is at turns compelling, funny and always empathetic. Qualities he exhibits in person when I interview him about the book via Zoom.
One of the first things I ask Melville is to describe the book’s long gestation:
When I was approached to do a book about my father it was maybe 87-88. Then I realised I didn’t really know much about him, and didn’t know how I felt about everything he had done. The bulk of the book covers approximately three or four years of the initial research. Then I took a hiatus around 92-93. I kinda realised I wanted to get on with my life. There wasn’t a story here that I thought I could tell. I didn’t really have an angle. I didn’t understand how to tell it. I was still processing all of it. And then I met a great woman and I decided to have a family and focus on that, and then intermittently over the years little pieces would surface. I’d meet people who knew my father and would give me another little piece of the story, and I realised there was really a lot more here than just the initial research.
I guess it was around eight years ago when my wife said ‘when are you gonna write that book that you were starting to write when I met you?’
And I’d written other books in the interim and she said, ‘if you don’t write it now you’re probably never gonna write it.’
I was 51 at the time and I thought, well you’re right. I said ‘one of the reasons I haven’t written this book is because we’re raising two kids now and writing this book will easily be two or three years of my life with little time to do much else.’
She had just left her very lucrative job and started her own consulting business, so it was kind of bad timing all around, her starting a new business, me putting my career on hiatus to work on this book, but we both thought it was an important thing to do and she was very supportive, and so I did it. It ended up taking about five years, and then another two years to sell the book and then even after we sold the book the publishing company wanted to wait until the fiftieth anniversary (of Attica). So, all in all, this version of the book, the whole book itself is a thirty year process.
For a book which has taken a generation to research, write and complete, the theme of generations, families and coming of age is especially pertinent. As Josh transitions from adolescence to adulthood to parenthood he begins to view his father through different eyes, particularly as he learns what his mother told him about his father’s acts was not always accurate:
There wasn’t one aha moment when it came to me realising what my mother knew or didn’t know. That was the process itself. First realising that the story she told me was incomplete and there was an almost Disneyfied version of the story where my father was the victim in each version that she tells me. And then realising that my father was anything but a victim: that he was very cognisant of what he was doing, and made a very lucid decision to do this with his life. I don’t think I can point to the exact moment in time when I realised ‘oh my God, this is really the reality’. It was an arc. It was a process that happened over years.
And then at some point you just realise, a lotta people in their growing up, their transition from adolescence to adulthood, they realise that our parents lie to us. They’re doing it mostly because they think it’s for our own good, and most of the time it probably is. Being humans we tend to resent our parents for the things they lied to us about, focusing on the few times they lied to us when it turned out not to be for our betterment. Sometimes forgetting that most of the time it’s for our protection.
The other half of the journey was after realising my mother lied to me, then putting it into perspective – was this a reasonable lie to tell to me at age twelve and to continue to perpetuate these lies into my young adulthood? There’s that scene in the book where she finally confesses her reasoning which is ‘you remind me so much of him.’ She was afraid I would go down the same path and that’s what she was trying to protect me from.
Joshua Melville certainly didn’t go down the same path as his father. He went to work for a Wall Street Investment Firm. Was this an act of rebellion against his father?
It was an act of survival. I really needed my independence from my mother and I needed my own apartment. Living in New York City that didn’t come cheap. And so I needed a job that paid well and I was lucky enough to find one. The act of rebellion was probably quitting that job and going into music, partially in a romantic notion of following my father in some way, in a benign way as opposed to a radical way. Partially because it looked like a fun thing to do. The irony is that I learned that the music industry was just as corrupt as the banking industry (laughs), just in its own way.
In one memorable scene Melville is lunching with a colleague known as ‘Closer Dan’ when he finally confesses his family’s radical past. Rather than judge him for it, to his surprise, the salesman takes out a photograph of his younger self with long hair and admits he too was a student radical.
When he says that the Peace Movement was about saving sixty thousand lives, but he distils it to that analogy, ‘if you wanna save sixty thousand lives (in the US) just take away peoples driving licences for one year.’ That was a mind-blowing moment for me. In my interviews with radicals I asked, ‘Why did you do all this? What was the point?’
‘People we’re dying in Vietnam’ (They would respond and he’d repeat the line about the driving licences.) At which point they’d say ‘what about the two million Vietnamese (killed in the War).’
Okay, but that’s not supposedly what it was about. It seems like there’s sympathy for the enemy when it suited their argument, but when it didn’t suit their argument they focused on the corruption within the United States. I was never really able to get them to admit that a lot of the reasons for doing what they did were very personal to them. They weren’t really these big social causes. They were personal. That was a revelation to me to realise that a lot of it was just them having anger at their parents or society or just the rebelliousness that comes with being young, and living at the time when there were so many young people (the Baby boomers of the time made up the biggest demographic of the country, much as Millennials do today). It created this permission to be angry about this. It was cool to be angry at society. It was cool to hate your government. It was cool to hate your parents, and only a step away from that made it cool to decide to blow up buildings. It was acceptable at the time.
By the nineties, however, new forms of Domestic Terrorism were emerging in the US which were far more deadly and insidious than anything Americans had witnessed before.
Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing I think forever changed the public perception… even [of] people on the Left who had advocated the Weather Underground and bombings that were committed by radical groups in the early seventies. Now the public perception was that all bombings were just terrorist acts regardless of their intention or their methodology.
It’s important to point out to your readers that no one was ever killed in any of my father’s bombings and that’s by design. He was an engineer and he made sure the bombs were placed in such a way that it would only destroy property. He chose his targets based on political significance, not on convenience. And he chose his methodology to cause the least amount of collateral damage, and that’s what distinguishes my father and people in his class from what we would today call Islamic terrorists or Domestic terrorists or any of the versions of terrorism that we use in today’s conversation. That changed pretty much in the nineties: lots of plane hijackings, the Oklahoma City bombing. That changed public perception. Now suddenly if a bomb went off, there was no rationalising it in any way, shape or form.
One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the moment by moment reconstruction of the Attica Prison riot. Melville gathers all of the information and testimony he can regarding how his father was shot to death as authorities retook the prison from its mutinous inmates. Melville displays no bitterness in his writing he just wants to learn the truth. He is even empathetic towards Vincent Tobia, the man who bragged about shooting and killing ‘Mad Bomber’ Melville at Attica.
I wish I could have gotten the chance to interview him (Tobia). I did try. The closest I could come was one of his best friends who was also his law partner. I don’t think that he felt he did the wrong thing. I only know that after the Attica verdict came in he and his wife split up. He was estranged from his son which got worse after the Attica verdict. This all happened within the same year and then the next year he died of a heart attack. I’m just being a journalist. I’m just reporting what I learn. Prior to the Attica verdict he was living in a community where he was surrounded by his fellow cops who surely would have agreed with what he did. But after the verdict, when there was a shift in public perception and a shift in blame, the State had been held legally responsible, I think that probably changed the climate in Buffalo and the Tonawandas where he lived and navigated. I’m sure that contributed to his early death.
It took a decades-long legal battle for the survivors of Attica and their families to receive justice. Noted Civil Rights attorney Elizabeth Fink led the battle on their behalf, but she was no admirer of Sam Melville and would prove a thorn in Josh’s side for many years. To Josh’s surprise, Fink reveals this animosity stemmed from an off-colour comment Sam Melville once made about her weight.
It was surprising when it happened. I had come to the conclusion that she was marginalising my father to win the case. So it was surprising to learn there was a personal issue there. Elizabeth Fink was not a terribly popular woman except among people who were very close to her legal circles. She was not an easy person to deal with and even people who respected her would say, ‘Yeah. Liz was a handful.’ But I didn’t dislike her and I’m not sure my father disliked her either. He probably just didn’t give her the attention that she wanted, and so there was this issue. In spite of what she said, I do think her reason for marginalising my father in the Attica narrative was to win the case. It was probably just a convenience that she also didn’t like him. Her not liking of him was basically a transference onto me and seeing me as a threat to her litigation which I didn’t think I was at the time but looking at it now twenty, thirty years later, I can see why she would perceive me as a threat.
I spoke to Josh shortly after the first anniversary of the Capitol Riots. Does he see a parallel between his father’s struggle and the current divisions which are rife in American society?
I think it’s really hard to not see parallels between Antifa, BLM and the current political state of the country and the Weathermen, Black Panthers and SNCC and Nixon. I do think there are lessons to be learned here. One of the reasons I wrote the book now, and felt it should it come out now… and I actually wanted it to come out a year earlier but Chicago Review wanted to wait until the fiftieth anniversary of Attica. They felt it was really an Attica book. I never saw it as an Attica book. I saw it more as a social revolution book with Attica as its climax.
The situation as it exists today, in the last year of this country, with what’s happening in certain major cities, a lot of destruction, protests or riots or whatever words you chose. As bad as it is, it could get worse. The late sixties and early seventies are the analogue or template for what could happen if we as a society don’t start listening to each other and becoming more civil towards each other about discourse. We will eventually see more Sam Melvilles and more bombings, and I think this time not as much conscientiousness towards the safeguarding of human life. I think that’s clear. More civilians were killed in the last year or so in the so-called peaceful protests than were killed in all of the sixties and early seventies bombings and protests, and that’s just in the last year and a half. So we’re in a different state right now. We have more technology. We have a greater ease of availability to weapons and firearms and ability to destroy that’s much less expensive.
On the other side, government surveillance technology has improved ten thousand per cent. They (the FBI) had to do what today would seem like quite primitive surveillance techniques, hanging out in a car on a street corner. Now they can trace every credit card movement, every telephone call, every email. The ability to catch domestic terrorism, if we can use that term, is much better now. The FBI has way more tools at its disposal which makes you wonder, why did they allow so much violence in the country to persist over the last year and a half? You can do as some media outlets do and say, ‘well let’s blame the liberal Blue State mayors’. But the FBI is not governed by Blue State mayors and the FBI did virtually nothing to stop this and I can’t believe they don’t know who the leaders are. That is an impossibility given the technology they have at their disposal. If they could have figured out who the leaders were fifty years ago, and they did, certainly they can figure out who they are now. So if they’re not arresting them its obviously because they are agreeing with this agenda, and that’s a pretty radical shift in terms of the authorities endorsing various forms of violence and insurrection.
So if we got to the point where there would be more Sam Melvilles it would be much worse than isolated little bombings here and there like it was in 1969, and much worse than Attica was in 1971. As bad as Attica was, we will see more prison uprisings with more deaths. We will see more violence in the streets. Unless we learn to start listening and stop being so extreme in our viewpoints and understand that we have to try and unite together as a country.
American Time Bomb: Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers is available to purchase now.
Andrew Vachss (1942-2021)
I was saddened to learn Andrew Vachss died on December 27th. An attorney, author and activist, Vachss’s series of hardboiled novels featuring Burke (ex-con private investigator, survivalist and vigilante) became classics of the crime genre.
I interviewed Vachss in May of last year. It was for a book which I am currently writing on James Ellroy. Vachss and Ellroy were friends from the mid-80s to the early 90s. Setting up the interview was like a scenario out of one Vachss’s novels: I had to mail a letter to a PO Box address in Chicago to contact him, once I passed that hurdle, Vachss wouldn’t agree to the interview until Ellroy had given his permission. Ellroy kindly wrote to Vachss, initiating their first contact in thirty years, giving his blessing for the interview.
I finally spoke to Vachss by phone on a Sunday. He was in his law office in New York and explained to me that he could be called away at any moment if a legal issue arose that required his attention. I was floored by his hectic schedule considering this was a man in his late seventies. It’s hard to believe, only seven months later, he is not with us anymore.
Vachss died two days before Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on five counts of sex offences. It was a shame Vachss didn’t live to see it. The more powerful the abuser, the more he seemed to relish in their downfall. Take for example, his analysis of the Roman Polanski/Samantha Gailey case, which is completely unencumbered by Polanski’s exalted reputation in the Arts. It was Vachss’s hard work and dedication that led to President Clinton signing the National Child Protection Act into law, otherwise known as the ‘Oprah Bill’. Photo below is courtesy of Mike Ripley.
Thank you Andrew Vachss for everything you did. It was an honour to talk to you.
Postscript: I’ve dug up a blurb Vachss wrote for the first edition of The Black Dahlia. It’s quintessential Vachss:
THE BLACK DAHLIA hits you like Chinatown directed by Caryl Chessman. With it, James Ellroy surges to the forefront of contemporary American mystery fiction—Krafft-Ebing in one hand, a chainsaw in the other.
The Venetian Vase 