Ellroy Reads – Black and Blue by Ian Rankin
I have a very special episode of Ellroy Reads for you today. I take a look at Ian Rankin’s breakout novel Black and Blue, and describe how it was inspired by James Ellroy’s appearance as the Guest of Honour at Bouchercon in Nottingham, 1995. I also talk about how James Ellroy gave Rankin his label as the ‘King of Tartan Noir’.
An Explosion in New Ferry
My wife and I moved to Bebington in August 2016. It was an exciting time as we had bought our first house together. We loved Liverpool but we were ready for a change. We had lived for many years in a bedsit in Kensington and the crime and poverty in ‘Kenny’, as the locals call it, had really soured us on the city. A move to the Wirral promised a fresh start and our house was perfectly situated, just a few minutes walk from Bebington railway station, the beautiful Port Sunlight Village and New Ferry. We expected a quieter, more sedate life, and it was, until one night a shocking event made the area the subject of national television and press coverage.
On March 25, 2017, my wife and I were at home watching the film A United Kingdom when the house seemed to shake from the foundations upwards by this loud bang. I thought someone had ramrodded a car through the door. After letting slip some choice language, I decided to investigate. I went out into the street and saw other people stumble out of their homes in morbid and shocked curiosity. I followed the sound of the explosion. The ‘Homes in Style’ furniture shop adjoining a dance studio in New Ferry had been set alight less than half a mile from us. There was smoke in the air and a metallic tang penetrated the back of my throat the nearer I got to the epicentre of the blast. I was walking towards the area other people were streaming away from in a general state of chaos. It looked like a war zone. The emergency services arrived and shooed me back. I’m not claiming any sense of bravery in walking towards the blast. I went through a combined sense of shock, curiosity and a vague notion that I might be able to help. I was of no help, as it happens, and returned home.
The explosion, which was described in court as ‘colossal’, had been caused by Pascal Blasio, who was the owner of ‘Homes in Style’. He was deeply in debt and started the blaze in a desperate and cack-handed attempt to swindle the insurers out of £50,000. Blasio had removed the insured furniture from the store the day before the explosion. His harebrained scheme cost 78 people their homes, and caused 81 physical injuries, at least one of which was life-changing; it was so severe. As if by a miracle, no one was killed. Blasio was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for causing the explosion, and eight years for fraud to be served concurrently.
After a day or two, the story slipped from national attention. The people who were the most deeply affected had to struggle with the misery Blasio had unleashed on their lives by detonating the largest explosion in Merseyside since World War Two. In many ways, life went to back to normal and the area became the peaceful community that attracts so many city dwellers looking for a quieter life.
But none of us who heard that explosion and witnessed its aftermath will ever forget that fiery night in New Ferry.
James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction
For the latest episode of Ellroy Reads, I talk about the process of getting my PhD on James Ellroy published into the book James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction. Writing this book was crucial to me landing the role of Ellroy’s biographer several years later.
Hope you enjoy the episode and please remember to subscribe. I’ve decided to take an extended break from X so I can focus on my latest book-length manuscript, which is due in a few months. Hopefully staying off X will stop me from offending any Michael Jackson fans as well! I’ll still be posting on this website and on YouTube as well.
Ellroy Reads – Little Odessa by Joseph Koenig
For the latest episode of Ellroy Reads, I discuss a great living writer who doesn’t receive much attention anymore, but was once tipped to be one of the greatest stars of crime fiction. Joseph Koenig burst onto the scene in 1986 with Floater which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Debut Novel, but it was his follow-up Little Odessa which really brought him to the brink of stardom.
I talk about Koenig’s enigmatic persona, his friendship with James Ellroy and why he disappeared from view for nearly twenty years. Enjoy the episode!
A Body in Blacon
I grew up in Blacon, Chester. Blacon has a reputation for being one of the roughest areas in Chester, which will strike some of my British readers as a contradiction in terms. Chester is a beautiful historic city in the north-west of England, famous for its Roman Walls and Tudor Rows. It’s a scenic and relaxing place to explore on foot. Retired LAPD detective Rick Jackson once told me he visited Chester after a particularly traumatic homicide case. He needed somewhere peaceful to unwind, as far away from Los Angeles as possible. Chester has always been a great place to visit.
Nevertheless, Chester does have it rougher areas and Blacon is one of them. When I was a child, the rumour was that Blacon was the largest council estate in Europe. I don’t know how much truth there was in that. Since the early 1980s, council housing has steadily been sold off in Britain. Blacon itself is an architectural hotchpotch with old army housing standing alongside high rise flats. My parents enrolled me at the Bishop’s Blue Coat Church of England High School in Boughton. My older siblings had gone to Blacon High School, but my mum and dad felt that I would be better served in a school out of town. It was at high school that I began to realise how different my upbringing was from a lot of the other pupils. They hailed from the wealthier areas of Chester such as Upton and Handbridge, and for them Blacon was a dirty word at best, an aberration at worst.
One day when I was sixteen, I witnessed something that brought home just how ‘other’ Blacon was to the rest of Chester.
My friend Neil had a weekend job refereeing football matches. One morning, I went to watch Neil referee in Clifton Drive, which was at the bottom of a small hill directly below my family home. I went along to the game with another friend, Siddy. There was a clearing near the football field where cars would park and the drivers would engage in drugs, dogging and God knows what else. The clearing was empty when we arrived, moments before the match started. By half-time, Siddy and I were bored so we left. As we departed we noticed there was a car parked in the clearing. It had not been there when we arrived. The passenger door was ajar. Something from inside the car was holding the passenger door open. Siddy and I looked at each other quizzically. Something wasn’t right here, we told each other silently.
We approached the car and saw that it was a lifeless body holding the door open. The driver’s side was empty. From memory, the car had a nardo grey paint coating but it may have been a cheaper knock-off. The dashboard was littered with powder, a burnt-spoon, a plastic bag and various other items of drug paraphernalia. The passenger had overdosed and tried to exit the car as he was dying. He died half-in, half-out of the car. The driver had fled in panic, leaving behind a corpse in his car. It had all happened in the first half of the football match, while we were watching Neil referee the game. A crowd began to gather. Siddy and I were doped up to our gills on pot, my vice at the time, and we didn’t want to hang around for the police, so we left.
We never heard anything else about the corpse in the nardo grey car.
Postscript: I’ve shared this story from my past as it is the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, and it felt appropriate for a crime-oriented website to share a True Crime story of my own.
One of the reasons I am grateful for this blog is for the opportunity to promote my work to an international audience. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy received excellent publicity in the UK, with great reviews in all of the leading newspapers. But it barely received any coverage in the US, even after it won the Edgar Award for Best Biography. So without this website, many readers in the States, including Ellroy fans, would not have heard of the book.
Thanks for reading and here’s to the next sixteen years.
Ellroy Reads – Six Days of the Condor by James Grady
Six Days of the Condor by James Grady is one of the most stunning debuts in genre fiction. At the age of twenty-five Grady was catapulted to literary stardom, helped in no small part by the successful film adaptation Three Days of the Condor.
I talk about Grady’s incredible journey as a writer in the latest episode of Ellroy Reads. I also talk about his friendship with James Ellroy, and the episode begins with a brief message from the show’s ‘sponsor’.
If you like what you see, why not subscribe and join the ever-growing Ellroy community.
Andy Rohmer is the pseudonym of Eduardo Ramos, a Portuguese diplomat who, in recent years, has written some wonderful books on film criticism. First, there was the Writers-On-Film series, which looked at every novel in certain authors careers and every film adaptation it inspired. Now Rohmer is working on the World History: The Hollywood Version series, which looks at a specific period of history and the high and lows of every Hollywood film it has inspired.
There are probably more films about World War Two than there were volunteers in the Home Guard, so readers may be relieved to hear that Rohmer is going through history chronologically and his latest volume focuses on Early Antiquity, which Rohmer defines as 10,000 to 480 BCE. Film buffs will delight in his choices. Do you want to read about how director Robert Aldrich put the lamentable fate of Sodom and Gomorrah onscreen? This is the book for you. Was Rossana Podesta alluring enough to play Helen of Troy and become the face that launched a thousand ships? Rohmer has the answer.
Andy Rohmer is an amalgam of Andrew Sarris, the film critic, and Éric Rohmer, the filmmaker. Eduardo Ramos has chosen his pseudonym wisely. His books are full of love for cinema, a witty appreciation of when it goes horribly wrong, ‘ignore the camels’ he says of The Ten Commandants as they weren’t present in the Middle East until about a thousand years after the film is set, and most of all, an enduring wonder at everything cinema can achieve.
Add World History: The Hollywood Version – Early Antiquity to your library, and perhaps you might want to check out the other volumes Rohmer has written.
Ellroy Reads – The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh
Before I introduce the latest episode of Ellroy Reads I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who responded to my request to review Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy on Amazon and/or Goodreads. You have tilted the review average away from the trolls who were leaving one-star reviews after my online dust-up with them. There’s still time to review the book if you haven’t already. Every honest review helps.
In this week’s episode, I discuss Joseph Wambaugh’s non-fiction classic The Onion Field, which concerns the kidnapping of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and the subsequent murder of Campbell. James Ellroy always loved the book and spoke at a memorial to Ian Campbell in 2012. Watch till the end of the episode. I give an update on how I came to be the target of online trolls, for those of you who are interested.
Ellroy Reads – Gideon’s Day by John Creasey
Ellroy Reads is back with a look at Gideon’s Day by John Creasey. Often considered the father of the police procedural novel, Creasey was phenomenally prolific and successful as an author and Gideon’s Day is the novel that launched his Superintendent/Commander Gideon of Scotland Yard series.
I also give a brief update at the end of the episode about events I alluded to in my previous post on this website. Thanks for watching everyone and do remember to subscribe for more great episodes delivered straight to your inbox.
Summer Plans
For the past few months I’ve been using this website to post videos from my YouTube show Ellroy Reads. I’ve been having a blast recording the show and have more episodes planned. Thank you to everyone who has been watching, and do subscribe if you haven’t already. However, I feel that this website should have more diversity and Summer is the time I usually spending writing some long-form essays, so over the next few months I’m going to be posting articles about real-life crimes I was involved in, or perhaps I should say I had ringside seat to these crimes before anyone misreads my motivations. Stay tuned. I think you’ll enjoy them.
On another subject, I seem to have inadvertantly incurred the wrath of some Michael Jackson fans. My crime was to make the following tweet or post on X:
Within minutes I was bombarded by angry responses from an army of Jackson fans accusing me of every form of prejudice under the sun. It went on for days and got quite unpleasant. Although the conversations became more positive as they went on. Some people came to my support and colleagues approached me at work with warm words. Was my tweet justified? From a freedom of speech point of view, I had every right to say what I did. Regarding the other issues at stake, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment thread. Hopefully, we can keep it more civilised here than it was on X.
One of the tactics the Jackson trolls employed to try and make me take down the tweet was to leave one-star reviews of my biography, Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy on GoodReads. This is blatantly unfair as they haven’t read it. The book has already been nominated for and won several awards and made critics year-end lists, so there’s little they can do to tarnish its reputation. However, the effrontery of it rankles me.
If you have read Love Me Fierce in Danger and liked it, or even if you didn’t like it, please go to GoodReads and Amazon and leave an honest review. Hopefully, this will prove to the MJ trolls that they can’t intimidate an author by dragging his name through the dirt.
Aside from that, I am currently writing another book and editing a special James Ellroy themed issue for a prominent journal. It’s going to a be a busy Summer! Thank you all for your continued support.
The Venetian Vase 