Elmore Leonard’s Rules of Writing: Avoid Prologues
Elmore Leonard
If you ever want a quick reminder of the recently departed Elmore Leonard’s genius, it’s always worth revisiting his 10 Rules of Writing. The most oft quoted rule is the closing one, which Leonard said, ‘sums up the 10’. Put simply: ‘Try to leave out the part the readers tend to skip’. But for this post I want to look at rule 2, Avoid Prologues:
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
I can’t fault Leonard’s argument. and you can see how it connects to his own work. In his best novels 52 Pickup (1974) and Killshot (1989) there is no real mystery. Instead, Leonard presents a series of bizarre, violent and loosely connected events. Who needs a prologue for that? However, let’s look at two examples of prologues in a crime novel, one written long before Leonard set down his rules of writing. Firstly, True Confessions (1977), John Gregory Dunne’s novel loosely based on the Black Dahlia case. The novel begins with the heading ‘NOW’ and contains the first-person prologue of retired detective Tom Spellacy. The prologue, as its title states, is set in the present day, and Spellacy is musing on the discovery of the corpse of Lois Fazenda, dubbed the ‘Virgin Tramp’ in the novel. Fazenda is Dunne’s stand-in for Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia:
Anyway, when I got there, Crotty was bending over the second half of Lois Fazenda. The top half. She was naked as a jaybird, both halves. There was no blood. Not a drop. Anywhere. Just this pale green body cut in two. It was too much for Bingo. He took one look at the top half and spilled his breakfast all over her titties, which is a good way to mess up a few clues. Not that it bothered Crotty. “You don’t often see a pair of titties nice as that,” was all he said. Respect for the dead, Crotty always used to say, was bullshit. Dead is dead.
This sets the tone for the dark, grisly humour which runs throughout the book. The next section is titled ‘THEN’, and is a third-person narrative set in the late 1940s. This forms the bulk of the novel and covers Spellacy’s original investigation. The epilogue reverts back to the ‘NOW’ heading, and Spellacy’s first-person voice. Dunne’s NOW/THEN present day/past setting of the novel is an example, I believe, of a prologue that works really well in a crime novel. Although strictly speaking it may not be a prologue at all. The first ‘NOW’ section covers twenty-four pages and is split over six chapters. A prologue always precedes the first chapter therefore just postponing the inevitable in Leonard’s view. However, the ‘THEN’ section also begins as chapter one. Also, this longer section is essentially the backstory to the present day Tom Spellacy we meet in the prologue and epilogue, reversing Leonards’ claim that ‘a prologue in a novel is backstory’.
Dunne’s use of prologue and epilogue is referenced in James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover (2009). The novel was Ellroy’s long awaited conclusion to the Underworld USA trilogy and was billed as covering American history from 1968 to 1972. The first two volumes of the trilogy, American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), covered 1958-1963 and 1963-1968 respectively. I’m sure more than a few Ellroy readers would have been surprised when they opened up the novel to find the heading ‘THEN’ followed by the first scene, an armed robbery written in the first-person, set in 1964. This is followed by the heading ‘NOW’, the first-person narration of Don ‘Crutch’ Crutchfield set in the present-day, then we cut to ‘THEN’ again (confused yet?) and things commence in 1968, the main five year time span of the novel, and back in third-person. We end with ‘NOW’ and we’re back with Crutchfield in the present day, oh and did I mention there’s an epigraph before the first ‘THEN’?
By and large I think Ellroy just about gets away with his rather complicated tribute to John Gregory Dunne, but you can see he’s veering dangerously close to what Leonard talked about when he said avoid, ‘a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword’. If you’re going to break the rules of the master, do it well.
If you’re lucky enough to live in or close to New York City, try and catch this wonderful event at the Paley Center for Media on November 14:
James Ellroy, modern master of historically inflected crime fiction and author of L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid, and Thomas Mallon, novelist and essayist, author of Henry and Clara and Mrs. Paine’s Garage, will explore the continuing fascination the assassination of President John F. Kennedy exerts on popular narrative, the significance of the Kennedy assassination to the American experience, and the ways in which the thematic richness of the event has reverberated through our culture in the subsequent decades.
Full details here.
James Ellroy Day? – January 26
The LA Times reports that James Ellroy’s latest novel Perfidia, the first of a ‘Second LA Quartet’, will be released in the autumn of 2014. Ellroy has published a letter on the Sobel Weber Associates website in which he goes into detail as to what will comprise the plot of the new novel and series:
My design for “The Second L.A. Quartet” is unprecedented in scope, stylistic execution and dramatic intent. I will take characters -– both fictional and real-life — from the first two extended bodies of work, and place them in Los Angeles during World War II –- as significantly younger people. The action will begin the day before the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and will carry an enormous range of people through to the end of the war. Massive police investigations, political intrigue, grand love affairs, war profiteering, Axis sabotage plots. Four 700-page hardcover novels that will span the homefront breadth of the greatest worldwide event of the twentieth century.
And, now, Volume I -– PERFIDIA.
The story unfolds, in densely structured real time, between December 6th and December 29th, 1941. Los Angeles is at the cusp of a titanic and horrifying world conflict. Political divisions – Isolationism versus Interventionism – rage. Anti-Japanese rancor is escalating and then the bodies of a middle-class Japanese family are found, in their home.
This is glorious news for Ellroy fans. The plot seems expansive and fascinating, covering some familiar territory which readers of his earlier work will recognise, but also containing plenty of new ideas. There will probably be a formidable publicity campaign between now and the book’s release, so I thought I would share on this website a story Ellroy told to interviewers Fleming Meeks and Martin Kihn which was reprinted in (shameless plug alert!) Conversations with James Ellroy.
Ellroy is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest crime writers working today, and as he enters this new phase of his career it worth looking back at when and where his writing career began. According to Kihn, Ellroy began writing after a near epiphany on the Bel-Air Country Club, LA, where he was working as a golf caddy:
Finally, on January 26, 1979, he went out onto the green, stared up at the sky, and prayed: “Please, God, let me start this book tonight.” That night, standing, writing on his dresser, he did. Ten months later, he sent it to four agents listed in Writers Market 1980, all of whom responded positively within a week. The man he went with sold it to Avon as a paperback original for $3,500.
In the interview with Fleming Meeks, Ellroy tells this story with a greater sense of irreverence, not mentioning the date and perhaps underplaying its significance:
“I was on the golf course. And I actually sent up a prayer to my seldom sought, blandly Protestant God. ‘God,’ I said, ‘would you please let me start this fucking book tonight?’ And I’ve been at it ever since.”
Note here the blasphemy and profanity which somehow seems appropriate for Ellroy’s entry into the crime genre. The novel he began that day was titled Brown’s Requiem and was published in 1981, and although it wasn’t a great success, Ellroy never looked back. He was still recovering from a long period of alcoholism, drug addiction and homelessness when he started writing, and it’s worth commemorating that a simple prayer of a golf caddy on a modest salary and with a slew of horrific experiences behind him was the genesis of a remarkable literary career.
So when January 26 (or James Ellroy Day if you prefer) comes round next year, I’ll be raising a glass to the Demon Dog and all of his best characters.
Here’s to them.
The Ship That Died Of Shame – Review
I know about ships. They’re wood and metal and nothing else. They don’t have souls. They don’t have wills of their own. And they don’t talk back, or so I told myself a thousand times. A thousand times I went over it all from the beginning. The beginning, like almost everything else about me, went back to the war, to motor gun boat 1087.
So begins the narration of Skipper Bill Randall (played by George Baker) in an ambitious but almost forgotten film, which portrays both the excitement and tragedy of war and the bitter disappointment of servicemen who cannot adapt to peacetime Britain and sink deeper and deeper into a world of crime. The Ship That Died of Shame (1955) was adapted from a short story by Nicholas Montsarrat (author of The Cruel Sea) and directed by Basil Dearden for Ealing Studios, the wonderful production company whose classic series of comedies —Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Ladykillers (1955)–often had an undercurrent of darkness in their portrayal of the apparent gentility of British life. War films were common and popular in 1950s Britain. Films about the Royal Navy’s role in WWII, Battle of the River Plate (1956), Above Us The Waves (1955) and the adaptation of Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (1953), provided some of the best examples of the genre. They did not prove as popular with all the critics. One anonymous reviewer for the New Statesman complained they propagated a jingoistic view of wartime glories at a time, following the Suez Crisis, when British influence in the world was declining.
A dozen years after the Second world War we find ourselves in the really quite desperate situation of being, not sick of war, but hideously in love with it…while we ‘adventure’ at Suez, in the cinemas we are still thrashing Rommel…The more we lose face in the world’s councils, the grander, in our excessively modest way, we swell in this illusionary mirror held up by the screen. It is less a spur to morale than a salve to wounded pride; and as art or entertainment, dreadfully dull.
The criticism, however, is a small-minded one. The best war films of the era could merge thrilling action with a moving portrayal of the psychological costs of wartime on the people who lived and fought through it. At first glance, The Ship That Died of Shame appears to be just another well-constructed war film. When the story moves to a post-war setting, it becomes one of the most compelling of the relatively few British noir thrillers that were made in the era. Bill Randall and his crew, the brave and loyal Birdie (Bill Owen) and the charismatic but venal George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough) seem a perfect team aboard MGB 1087, and their courage holds fast during dangerous raiding operations along the coast of Nazi-occupied France. Randall is a brilliant seaman, but as he is confesses when the film begins, his view of boats is not a Romantic one. The real love of his life in onshore in the form of his beautiful wife Helen (Virginia McKenna), but after Helen is killed in an air raid, he feels that all his he has left is his boat and its crew. After the war, Randall finds it difficult to adapt to life on civvy street. A chance meeting with Hoskins leads to a lucrative offer. Hoskins has become involved in a smuggling ring transporting black market goods from France to Britain. Randall is clearly a moral man but he allows himself to be persuaded that it is harmless to ship products like wine and chocolates to a country suffering post-war austerity (rationing finally ended in the UK in 1954). Randall’s spirits soar when they buy and restore his beloved MGB 1087 for their criminal enterprise. Things go well at first, but The Ship That Died of Shame is a dark film that becomes progressively more disturbing. They move from smuggling cargoes of luxury goods to cargoes of guns and ammunition. On one voyage, their cargo is human, Randall is shocked to discover the man is a fugitive child killer (and probable paedophile). The partnership between Randall and Hoskins becomes untenable as Randall becomes increasingly disillusioned by their work whereas Hoskins further embraces evil.
The Ship That Died of Shame is a wonderful genre hybrid of noir and war film. It features a stellar cast, all at the top of their game. Roland Culver is brilliantly snooty as the upper-class villain Major Fordyce who declares he went into smuggling after the war as he ‘got a bit tired of working for the plebs after fighting for them.’ Richard Attenborough has become such a national treasure that I had forgotten how good he was at playing villains. George Hoskins should rank alongside Pinkie Brown and John Christie as one of the most memorable and disturbing characters he has played.
As the characters’ acts become darker, MGB 1087 becomes a character in itself. Its engines shut down for no apparent reason, and it maroons them in violent storms. The more amoral they become, the more the ship seems to push them into danger, contradicting Randall’s opening statement that a ship has no soul. It gains a soul while they lose theirs.
Break
Things are very busy with work right now. I’ve got lots of ideas for blog posts, and I’ll be blogging again around late October. See you then.
Remembering Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard, one of the giants of American crime writing, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 87. Leonard was one of a few truly great writers who kick-started my passion for crime fiction. His characters were tough and yet endearingly odd. His stories were often bizarre but still believable. He maintained a consistently high quality of writing in his prolific output. Over at the Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce has put together a collection of tributes from crime writers, critics and bloggers, to which I have contributed a few words. The tribute is split into two parts. You can read it here and here.
Thank you for the great stories Dutch. We will be reading them for a long time to come.
James Ellroy and David Peace: History Repeats Itself
James Ellroy and David Peace. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
I have never liked football, so I won’t be reading David Peace’s latest novel Red or Dead about Bill Shankly’s tenure as manager of Liverpool Football Club, although judging by the reviews so far even the most diehard football fan would struggle to wade through this 700 page plus epic tome. Iain Macintosh reviews the book in the Mirror and slams Peace’s mind-numbingly repetitive prose style. Here is a passage from the novel he quotes from:
Every morning Liverpool Football Club trained in the wind. Liverpool Football Club played in the wind. And Liverpool Football Club beat Arsenal Football Club in the wind. Every morning Liverpool Football Club trained in the rain. Liverpool Football Club played in the rain. And Liverpool Football Club beat Leyton Orient Football Club in the rain. Every morning Liverpool Football Club trained in the mud. Liverpool Football Club played in the mud. And Liverpool Football Club beat Birmingham City Football Club in the mud.
And he adds wearily, ‘It goes on like this all the way down the page with every conceivable meteorological condition carefully catalogued until you’re screaming, “For the love of God, man! Just say FC!”’
I admire David Peace. He has written excellent historical crime fiction, and when I saw him speak in Belfast a few years ago he came across as intelligent and charming. He is well known for being a fan of James Ellroy, and you can some of the themes of Ellroy’s LA Quartet transplanted into Peace’s Red Riding Quartet. Peace’s novel on the miner’s strike GB84 (2004) looks back on that event as a form of endless cycle of conspiracies, not dissimilar, although smaller in scale, to Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. Of course the similarities in their work go further than just theme and plotting, Peace has been heavily influenced by Ellroy’s sparse, reductive prose style, and this seems to be where he has gone wrong with Red or Dead. Peace has always dabbled with a certain clipped prose, giving the reader fragments of thought and dialogue, and gradually this style has become more concise, and this is where it seems history has repeated itself, and repeated itself, and repeated itself. According to story by Nat Sobel, James Ellroy came across his now signature prose style almost by accident after an editor demanded he make cuts to LA Confidential (1990), but he was reluctant to lose a single character or scene:
James came to my house to talk about what we could do about it. I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a joke I said to James, ‘Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words.’ I meant it entirely as a joke. But I started going through a manuscript page and cut out about a dozen words on the page. James said, ‘Give me that.’ I gave him the page. And he just kept cutting. He was cutting and cutting and cutting. When he was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA. I said, ‘James, how would they be able to read this?’ He said, ‘Let me read you the page.’ It was terrific. He said, ‘I know what I have to do.’ He took the whole manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book and developed the style. That editor never knew what we had to do, but she forced him into creating this special Ellroy style, which his reputation as a stylist is really based on. It came from her, sight unseen, saying ‘Cut 25 percent of the book.’ He wound up cutting enough without cutting a single scene from that book.
Personally, I think Ellroy’s style had been evolving for some time, and there is a danger to putting it all down to a sudden epiphany. In any event, Ellroy achieved great critical acclaim with his new writing style, and he continued to adapt it with great success in his novels White Jazz (1992) and American Tabloid (1995). Then, in 2001 The Cold Six Thousand was published and this is where many Ellroy fans and critics thought he had taken the style to far. Here’s an example:
He saw Fed cars. He saw Fed surveillance. Feds perched down the road. Feds watched the meets. Feds checked licence plates.
Local Feds – non-FBI – Dwight Holly’s boys.
Wayne Senior was distracted. Wayne Senior was tract-obsessed. Wayne Senior missed the heat. Wayne Senior talked. Wayne Senior torqued Wayne. Wayne Senior worked to impress.
Does this look at all familiar to the quote from Red or Dead? Sure, there is the lack of adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions which is a hallmark of Ellroy’s style but by refusing to allow any modifications to the sentence, he dooms the book to a dreary repetition, just as Peace has done with his latest work. Incidentally, The Cold Six Thousand is also around the 700 page mark, so we have an idea where this style takes us in terms of length. I know fellow Ellroy fans who gave up reading the novel halfway through. I have read it twice now, and I like it, but that’s because it covers five years of fascinating American history from 1963 to 1968. The story is strong enough to forgive the stylistic indulgences and there are moments in the novel where the style actually helps the action come alive. Still, it’s a grueling read and Ellroy has practically disowned it in some interviews. In his latest novel, Blood’s a Rover (2009), he returned to a more engaging style. Many fans breathed a sigh of relief, perhaps Peace should do the same. Even football fans would admit that the game can be boring at times, but its easier to forgive occasional stretches of boredom in a ninety minute football game than it is in a pretentious magnum opus about the sport. Besides, a boring game might come alive suddenly, Peace seems to have to a style too rigid for that to happen.
One issue in which there seems to be a big difference between Ellroy and Peace is the two men’s political views. Despite both men writing of the past as a web of conspiracies Ellroy is a conservative, a Tory in his own words, whereas Peace is a man of the left. An article in the New Statesman about the politics of football sums up Peace’s intentions with Red or Dead:
In an interview in the forthcoming edition of the Blizzard, a quarterly in the vanguard of the new, post-Hornby football writing, Peace describes Red or Dead as “a Socialist Book. I think Shankly’s socialism was fundamental and integral to every aspect of his life and work. It was about equality, on and off the pitch, and working for the people and the supporters of Liverpool. It was about communal work for communal success. And I do admire this and lament its absence.” But this is no tiresome jumpers-for-goalposts pining for the muddy pitches, questionable tackling and even more questionable haircuts of a purer, irrecoverable past. As one reviewer has pointed out: “This isn’t a book about the way things were or the way things are. This is a book about the way things should be.”
The irony is Peace may have inadvertently conveyed the worst of socialism. Through its repetition, ideological lack of imagination or pragmatism, and complete contempt for what the reader wants Red or Dead is the least communal book imaginable. Iain Macintosh concludes his review of the novel:
And so Iain sighed. Iain closed the book. Iain lifted the book above his head. Iain brought the book down on his head with as much force as he could muster. Iain slipped into the sweet, sweet embrace of unconsciousness.
Peace is a great writer, but it seems like he deserves a critical drubbing for Red or Dead. You never know, maybe he’ll receive a phone call from a fellow writer from across the pond who’ll tell him, “Don’t worry pal, I’ve been there.”
Euroscepticism in British Literature
One of the First Eurosceptic Novels
I’ve written an article for the British Politics Review about a new trend developing in British genre fiction – Euroscepticism. Over the past forty years, politicians have debated endlessly about the pros and cons of the United Kingdom’s membership of the Common Market, latterly the EEC and now the European Union. Given the intensity of this debate, it is surprising that ‘Europe’– the EU as a political entity– has not featured more prominently in British novels. However, a few novelists have approached the issue head-on, Andrew Roberts’ The Aachen Memorandum (1995), Michael Dobbs’ A Sentimental Traitor (2012) and Alan Judd’s Uncommon Enemy (2012), take a distinctly Eurosceptic slant and cover a wide range of genres: political, spy, crime and science fiction. The examples I give are all broadly conservative in their views, but I also argue there are historical grounds for writers on the left to make an impact in this genre. Just as the Great Depression contributed to the birth of hardboiled pulp fiction in the US, the current Eurozone crisis could lead to a literary flowering on this side of the pond. The prospect of an In/Out referendum on Britain’s EU membership is likely to be top of the agenda come the next general election. Consequently, British novelists are becoming much less reticent to explore the matter in their books.
You can read my article and the entire issue online here.
I’d like to thank Mike Ripley and Bob Cornwell for sharing their encyclopedic knowledge of the genre with me, which was very helpful when I was writing the piece.
This is the second time I’ve written for the British Politics Review. It is edited by a great bunch of people, and I’m thrilled to be published alongside such distinguished writers. Here’s the link to a previous article I wrote for the BPR, on Tony Blair and Robert Harris’ The Ghost.
James Ellroy – Tory Mystic?
In his autobiographical essay ‘The Great Right Place’ James Ellroy describes himself as a Tory Mystic:
L.A. had overdosed me. Extreme stimulation had fried my brain pan. I had raped a beautiful place. I had usurped its essence to tell myself sick stories. My mind was infused with an L.A. virus. Wrong L.A. thoughts and undue L.A. stimuli could unravel me.
I believed it then. I don’t disbelieve it now. I was a tory mystic then, and I remain one.
Ellroy uses the term to explain his complex relationship with LA. His love of his home city, a loyalty to an institution or place bordering on Romanticism might loosely parallel Tory attitudes to national history and identity here in the UK. Still, it’s a conspicuous use of a political label which appears to be an oxymoron, and I quizzed Ellroy about it in an interview reprinted in Conversations with James Ellroy:
Interviewer: So did you choose “Tory” because it seems more nuanced? It’s not a particularly American term “Tory,” it’s distinctly British.
Ellroy: Yeah, you’re right, I did it for just that reason. Because right-wing is loaded.
Looking back, I see that I was wrong to say Tory is a distinctly British term. Tory was a common term for a loyalist before and after the American Revolution. Many loyalists fled to Canada where the Conservative Party are still known colloquially as Tories to this day. However it is rare enough in modern American discourse for Ellroy to adopt and adapt it to his literary persona in order to avoid the label right-wing.
To analyse Ellroy’s political views and the extent his politics can be found in his novels is no easy task. For some critics like Mike Davis, Ellroy is ‘a neo-Nazi in American writing’. Other readers may think that his tales of LAPD corruption and political conspiracies are some kind of angry, left-wing indictment of the US. I would argue that both views are wrong and that Ellroy’s Toryism relates to a British literary tradition known as Tory Anarchism. Peter Wilkin has written a book on this phenomenon, The Strange Case of Tory Anarchism (2010):
The idea of a Tory anarchist was first coined by Orwell to describe both Jonathan Swift and himself, and at its broadest it describes someone who is both a radical and a traditionalist. To be a Tory anarchist, then, is to embrace all manner of contradictions. It is a defence of good manners, good grammar, local customs and practices, respect for the individual and for privacy and an overwhelming hostility to the expanding power of the modern state. Tory anarchists celebrate Britain’s class system but at times condemn all classes for their role in Britain’s decline. They believe in both the idiosyncratic qualities of the British and at the same time mock their hypocrisy, stupidity, philistinism and vulgarity. Orwell saw Tory anarchism as a part of Britain’s, mainly England’s, rich social history, manifesting itself in particular figures at different times and places.
James Ellroy by Guillaume Paumier, CC-BY
Daniel McCarthy argues that the term could be applied to many American figures, independent of references to the English Class system or its customs, ‘Tory anarchism isn’t really an idea at all, just a intuition.’ So many of the writers who have been or could be labelled Tory anarchists John Osborne, John le Carre, Christopher Hitchens would be horrified at the term. For many on the left, being a Trot is okay, but to be Tory is unacceptable. In a sense it describes a contrarian, a left-wing figure with conservative tendencies, or in the case of Hitchens, someone who moves further to the right. Hitchens was known for his far-left views early in his career, writing for the Socialist Worker and protesting against the Vietnam War. At the same time he enjoyed dining at right- wing clubs, where he once ate pudding called ‘Bombe Hanoi’. One of my favourite Hitchens anecdotes is the time he claimed Margaret Thatcher showed him, shall we say, the smack of firm government. Ellroy expressed admiration for Hitchens. They shared a hatred of Bill Clinton. Ellroy’s criticisms of Clinton usually refer specifically to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, as to be fair, Clinton’s brand of triangulation, third-way politics seemed just as slippery as Ellroy’s views.
Ellroy the contrarian often delights in offending people, even groups of people who are usually offending each other. In an interview with Keith Phipps, Ellroy describes a book reading of ‘Jungletown Jihad’, a comic novella featuring some hilariously politically incorrect depictions of Muslim terrorists: ‘The walkouts I get from reading this are hilarious. I was just at a book fair in the South. I knew I’d get ten liberals and ten Christians walking out, and I did.’
Ellroy, however, has at times taken offence when people push him for some political statement. He once told Craig McDonald that he felt no obligation to let his views be known:
Interviewer: You’re asked to weigh in a lot on topical matters—everything from politics to the death penalty.
Ellroy: Here’s where we get to a point where I coin a phrase. Actually, my wife coined it: “The specious proximity of media.” Why—this happens all the time, particularly in academic communities—should I comment on George W. Bush? This is like going to England and the little guy with a brogue says, “Hey lad, what do you think of the Troubles in Northern Ireland?” Or, you go to Berkeley and the androgynous human being asks, “What do you think of gay rights?”
Ellroy may not feel the need to evangelise his political views, but we can still imply a degree of politics in his answer to McDonald. On the subject of Berkeley, in his first novel Brown’s Requiem (1981), Ellroy displays a Tory streak in his cynicism towards counter-culture movements. Leading character Fritz Brown describes how a brief visit to Berkeley, ‘gave me the creeps: the people passing by looked aesthetic and angry, driven inward by forces they couldn’t comprehend and rendered sickly by their refusal to eat meat.’ Is Ellroy’s cynicism towards leftist counter-culture relevant? His darkest years were the late sixties and early seventies. It was a time of the Summer of Love and the Hippy movement, but for Ellroy personally it was a period of drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and crime. In one exchange I had with him, he expressed his admiration for the patriotic, conservative values of President Reagan by comparing them to the puerile and pointless nature of Punk Rock:
I have friends, contemporaries, who were big in the punk rock movement. And it’s just silly, puerile noise to me. I asked a magazine editor, a friend of mine, a woman who’s fifty-six, “What was punk rock about?” and she said it was a reaction to Reagan. And I said history has been very, very kind to Ronald Reagan. Very kind to this man who I think even the most reluctant liberal historian would concede as being one of the greatest American leaders of the past two hundred years. He was a massive presence. He took down the Soviet Union and did amazing things, and he was flawed in other ways as well. You know, OR a bunch of spiky-chinned, purple-haired kids jumping up and down. Come on! Just come on!
There is a sense of Tory Anarchism here. The lament of the breakdown in manners and good taste compared with the admiration for a political office which dates back to his country’s independence. On the subject of the Presidency, the 1960 Presidential election is one of Ellroy’s earliest political memories:
I was for Richard Nixon in 1960 when I was twelve, because my father was. […] When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been president forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. The primary election—I was twelve, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy—everything was about him. He handled it with a certain ironic detachment that was appealing. He was amused, he was bemused, and people mistook it for love. Bad miscalculation. Everything was about him for some years, especially after he was elected. I couldn’t believe it, because he looked so young and he had his run and he died. It’s like being with a woman and she leaves you before the sex gets stale. You’re always going to think of her, you’re always going to want more, you didn’t get enough. That’s how America was with Jack.
Ellroy was to take these childhood memories of the aura surrounding President Kennedy and craft them into his greatest novel, American Tabloid (1995). American Tabloid covers five years of US history, beginning in 1958 and ending on the day of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It is taken from the perspective of and even dedicated to the Underworld characters, both in organised crime and law enforcement, who conspire to kill Kennedy. Ellroy’s introduction to the novel reads:
Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It’s time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall.
They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American history would not exist as we know it.
It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.
Here’s to them.
Ellroy strikes a tone which is both irreverent and profound. Although he is demythologising the Kennedy era, he feels a Tory instinct to ‘build a new myth’. American Tabloid was followed by two more novels which make up the Underworld USA trilogy. The trilogy ends with the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, and by its completion, Ellroy had covered one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history: an era of political assassination, mass rioting, the Vietnam War and the dawn of the Watergate scandal. And yet despite all this, Ellroy is ever the patriot and optimist. One of my favourite Ellroy quotes came when I asked him if there was something positive in his depiction of America. He replied:
I love America and my books are all about one thing and one thing only, a man needs a woman. This is the Romantic’s code.
Romanticism and Toryism go hand in hand with Ellroy. It’s a more complex view than being seen simply as a Republican supporter. Ellroy voted for George W. Bush to ‘repudiate Gore and Clintonism and nobody hates Bill Clinton more than me’. However, he told Rolling Stone that he voted for Obama in 2008. He described his views on Obama in more detail to the Daily Telegraph:
What I do know is we’ve just concluded the most duplicitous American presidency in living memory. And the new guy is coming to grips with the facts: America has to rule the world, or someone worse than us will. A capitalist economy has to prevail, because massive social programs tend not to work. Still, I don’t think it’s that much of a shock to him. Obama is much more of a Tory than most people realized.
Ellroy sees the parallels between Obama and Kennedy. To their supporters both men embodied the hope that America was at the dawn of a new Golden Age. In his view though Obama understands the reality of politics better than Kennedy, (or perhaps Kennedy’s defenders), the limitations of his office and the need for change to be slow and in keeping with the traditions of his country. This is what makes Obama a Tory in Ellroy’s eyes.
There are many more examples of Ellroy’s political statements that I could talk about here. Sometimes he is thoughtful and nuanced and at other times he is sly, combative and relishes his ability to shock. Sometimes he can be all of these things at once. I’ll end with another quote from the author which I think sum up his views best. Ellroy is at heart a floating voter (although tribally more on the Right) who holds the Tory anarchist view that all Presidents, Democrat or Republican, do good and bad things in service to their country, and laments the fact that more people don’t see it this way. This is from my fourth interview with Ellroy:
It’s just the reluctance with which people would step back from the precipice of their own belief that shocks and appalls me. And you can’t get people to, on either the right or the left. You can’t tell a liberal, well, “read Edmund Morris’s book, Dutch: a Memoir of Ronald Reagan, and to one degree or another,” you’ll notice I qualified that, “you’ll dig Ronald Reagan.” You can’t tell right-wingers, “read any one of the great biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, step back a bit, you will dig Franklin Roosevelt.” You can’t.
In a Lonely Place
Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) is an archetypal film noir and one of my favourite films. Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a troubled screenwriter with a violent temper who is suspected of murdering a young woman and whose behaviour gradually convinces those around him, including his lover and the police, that he is the killer. Bogart’s performance is full of cynicism and menace. His scenes with Gloria Grahame, playing Laurel Gray, an aspiring movie actress, are tense with sex and fear; their on-screen relationship deteriorates into maelstrom of jealousy, threatened violence, and sleeping pills. Despite admiring the film, I didn’t read the novel from which it was adapted until quite recently, when it was reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. I think it’s wonderful.
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes was published in 1947 and was her eleventh novel. It is a highly accomplished, fast-paced psychological drama in which the reader unwillingly sympathises with Dix Steele even though it is obvious from quite early on that he is a sociopath, and most likely a rapist and murderer. Like Jim Thompson, whose later The Killer Inside Me (1952) is much more graphic in its description than In a Lonely Place Hughes manages to encourage and sustain a lurid desire to know more about disturbed Dix Steele. Later, when things are clearer, you want him to get caught, but not just yet. She does so with observant, more or less elegant prose and smart dialogue, this from when Dix takes Laurel to dinner:
“You think you’ll know me the next time you see me?”
He returned to her actuality. He laughed but his words weren’t made of laughter. “I knew before I ever saw you.”
Her eyes widened.
“And you knew me.”
She let her lashes fall. They curved, long as a child’s, russet against her cheeks. She said, “You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Dix?”
“Never before.”
Her eyes opened full again and laughter echoed through her. “Oh, brother!” she breathed.
The corniness of Dix’s words in this scene are partly what Laurel’s exclamation is about, but it also hints at her cynicism about their possible future relationship, and perhaps also her realisation, even at this early stage, that he is going to be trouble. Dix the psycho-killer lives in the certainty of his feelings at a given moment and attaches himself to Laurel with an emotional force that is both sincerely felt, and utterly artificial. Hughes makes sure her female character shows that she knows they are overblown too, though she doesn’t yet know why.
This relationship, and the one between Dix Steele and Laurel Gray in the film, are mirror images of one another. Here Laurel Gray has already begun to suspect, subconsciously, that Dix is not quite as he should be, and she is right; in the film, the relationship is ruined by false suspicion and misplaced distrust. In the one, a woman is taken in by a dangerous, controlling man; in the other, a damaged, troubled man loses the woman he loves because he is unable to allay her fears about him.
Book and film are radically different from one another, and at a deeper level than plot alone. Where Hughes’s novel can be read as an examination of masculinity through an extreme version in which women are objectified, exploited, killed, and dumped by the roadside, in the film adaptation neither Laurel nor Dix ever really understand or trust each other. This bleak analysis of human relationships, of men betrayed by women, is a trope of classic Film Noir, but both novel and film have interesting things to say about loneliness and isolation. Bogart-Dix’s ‘lonely places’ are his isolation under false accusation and the existential loneliness of a war hero, a writer in decline and a man without a woman. In Hughes’s original, lonely places are where girls are killed, the sad apartments where men and women live isolated and alone, and the corners into which compulsive liars are backed by their delusions. In the novel, Dixon Steele’s loneliest place is his own deranged mind. In the film he is driven to loneliness in a postwar America which suspects outsiders and fears imagination.
The Venetian Vase 