James Ellroy to Write Second LA Quartet
James Ellroy has sold his next four novels to Heinemann for a six-figure sum. The first novel is to be titled Perfidia, and is scheduled for release in 2012. The Bookseller has the story:
The four novels will be set in Los Angeles during the Second World War and will “seamlessly cohere” with the previous quartet and the more recent Underworld USA trilogy, the publisher said, taking major and minor characters from those books and spotlighting them as younger people. Together, the 11 novels will highlight 31 years of American history in “an unprecedented and ambitious manner”.
Mike Davis – James Ellroy’s Harshest Critic
The reviews for James Ellroy’s latest novel Blood’s a Rover have been overwhelming positive. The stature of a novel can change over time, and I suspect that some criticisms of the structure will slowly emerge. However, by and large, readers and reviewers seem to be in agreement that Blood’s a Rover is a thrilling conclusion to Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. One person who will not be giving the novel a good review, I suspect, is the social commentator, urban theorist, historian, political activist and professional James Ellroy-hater, Mike Davis. In his acclaimed work, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990), Davis wrote an engrossing study of the socio-economic and cultural problems in Los Angeles. He also used the book to take a few potshots at the novels of the man he loves to hate, James Ellroy:
His Los Angeles Quartet, depending on one’s viewpoint, is either the culmination of the genre, or its reductio ad absurdum. At times an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore, Quartet attempts to map the history of modern Los Angeles as a secret continuum of sex crimes, satanic conspiracies, and political scandals. For Ellroy, the grisly, unsolved ‘Black Dahlia’ case of 1947 is the crucial symbolic commencement of the postwar era – a local ‘name of the rose’ concealing a larger metaphysical mystery. Yet in building such an all- encompassing noir mythology, Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre’s tensions, and inevitably its power. In his pitch blackness there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagen-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.
I do not agree with Davis’ analysis of the Quartet novels here, for instance where in Ellroy’s work do you find ‘Satanic conspiracies’? His work is dark, but he’s not Stephen King. Nor do I think he is guilty of ‘extinguishing the genre’s tension’. Ellroy deserves credit for reinvigorating the crime fiction genre in his revisionism of Los Angeles history in the Quartet and American history in Underworld U.S.A. On the other hand, Davis’ description of Ellroy’s prose style as an ‘unendurable wordstorm’ is quite prophetic. The clipped, sparse, dialectic prose style which is so thrilling in L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992), is taken to extremes in The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and forced dozens of reviewers to give up reading the novel.
Shortly after this contentious, but still reasonable critique of Ellroy’s work, Davis launched another attack on the author in the Chicago Review of Books. This time Davis seemed to give up even attempting to be analytical in his tirade:
Now let me tell you who I can’t stand, and to top the list I would put that neo-Nazi in American writing who is James Ellroy… And to begin with he’s not a good writer. He’s a kind of methamphetamine caricature of Raymond Chandler… Each of his books is practically a Mein Kampf, it’s anti-communistic, it’s anti-Mexican, and it’s racist.
It would be easy to dismiss these words as an angry rant, but if we were to take them seriously it soon becomes clear they are patently false. Firstly, Ellroy has not written a Chandleresque novel since his debut work, Brown’s Requiem (1981). He frequently argues that Chandler’s contribution to the genre is overrated and does not seek to replicate his work, even through caricature. Ellroy is not a neo-Nazi. The novels feature racist asides through the subjective third person narration of characters who are racist. But, even then, the racism is only a casual attribute of the characters and not a defining characteristic. What Davis does not mention is that Ellroy’s novels feature inter-racial relationships, sympatheitic portrayals of homosexuals and men who pay a very high price for their sins. Ellroy would probably consider himself an anti-communist, but so what? Davis seems to consider Ellroy’s work an affront to his own far-Left beliefs, in doing so his criticisms of the author seem shrill and hysterical.
Roy Hoopes and James M. Cain
Roy Hoopes, whose 1982 biography of James M. Cain remains the definitive work on the hard-boiled writer, died on December 1st aged 87. Though Hoopes was a consummate professional, a prolific writer of newspaper and magazine articles as well as over 30 books, his long, remarkable book on Cain is the one that is remembered. I remember reading it some time in the early 1990s and being impressed with its breadth, as well as the amount of detail Hoopes had managed to wrest from Cain himself. The Washington Post has an obituary of Hoopes, but it’s ‘Post Mortem’ column this week also has a piece on Cain by Matt Schudel:
… Not many people know that Cain was born in Annapolis in 1892 and grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where his father was president of Washington College.
Even fewer people seem to realize that Cain spent a good deal of time in Washington. He studied singing here (his earliest ambition was to be an opera singer), sold records at the old Kann’s department store in 1914 and was sitting in Lafayette Square one day, when he decided he was going to be a writer.
Literary Feuds – Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer
Literary feuds, like pseudonyms or author campaigns are usually devised as a calculated career move. If one writer is in a dispute with another, it can sometimes be beneficial for both of their careers. The warring writers Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had other sources of publicity besides their feud. Gore Vidal wrote mystery novels in the early 50’s under the pseudonym Edgar Box. He would not confess to the pseudonym until 1978 as he felt being associated with the mystery genre would damage his reputation. Norman Mailer received significant publicity for his campaign to secure the release of convicted murderer Jack Abbott. The campaign backfired when Abbott stabbed a man to death only six weeks after being paroled.
Vidal and Mailer were often in feuds with other writers, and there is nothing to suggest this did their profile any harm. It is fitting, then, that for many years there was some genuine animosity between the two novelists. Their relationship reached its nadir on a now legendary episode of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. A drunken Mailer confronted Vidal about an article he had written for the New York Review of Books. Vidal had compared Mailer to Charles Manson in a not so subtle hint concerning the infamous incident in which Mailer stabbed and seriously injured his second wife Adele Morales. Mailer’s obnoxious behaviour on the set of the show turned Vidal, Cavett, fellow guest Janet Flanner and the entire audience against him.
Below is a clip of the most memorable moment of the episode:
Poe’s Tamerlane Sells for $662K
Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter dominated the news about the Christie’s literary auction today, but there were other gems on sale as well. Apart from a first American edition of Moby Dick, a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and other Poems, published in 1827 made $662,000, a record for American literature. Recession? What recession? The Telegraph has the story:
The copy of “Tamerlane and Other Poems”, published by Poe anonymously in 1827 when he was just 13, had been estimated to sell for between $500,000 and $700,000 (£ 302,000 to £442,000).
The previous record was $250,000 for a copy of the same book sold nearly two decades ago. No more than 40 or 50 copies were ever printed – of which only 12 are believed to remain in existence.
[More]
Film Noir Fashion
Claudia Schiffer recently starred in the art exhibition ‘Capturing Claudia’ at the Colnaghi gallery in London. The exhibition features Ms Schiffer posing as a film noir heroine in a pastiche of forties and fifties cinema.
Not only the art world but fashion itself has also shown a recent interest in film noir. A fashion article in The Daily Telegraph features the Russian model Maryna Linchuk, showcasing a new film noir inspired fashion, including a velvet Armani dress which costs as much as £4,000.
Any retrospective look at film noir is to be welcomed. But perhaps there is a danger that by portraying the world of film noir primarily as one of wealth and sophistication, it will encourage reductive perceptions (or indeed misleading ones) as to what these films were truly like. I may be making too much of this, art exhibitions and fashion shoots do not have the same narrative depth as films. But if we just remember film noir for its glamour we might risk what Mike Davis might describe as a ‘supersaturation of the genre’.
Over at FashionatFilm, Rosa Burger has posted an excellent and wideranging study of the influence of fashion in the film noir genre, ‘Film Costume – Women in Film Noir’.
James Ellroy, the Playboy Channel and an Internet Controversy
James Ellroy recently took part in a controversial publicity video for the Playboy channel, which has achieved a minor level of notoriety. In a split second scene, Ellroy mimes masturbation when he is describing his past history of voyeurism and burglaries. The entire episode is just the sort of thing which gets overblown by angry responses on chat forums and internet threads.
Although Playboy is regarded as a soft-porn magazine, it has also achieved distinction through its long history of publishing interviews with prominent literary figures. Ellroy is one of the most prominent novelists in the US today, and Playboy is currently serialising his forthcoming memoir The Hilliker Curse. Ellroy also likes to shock and entertain through his Demon Dog persona, and the masturbation mime is a part of that persona.
The video itself is brilliant: it is the first in Playboy’s new writers series ‘Walkabout’. Ellroy explores all of his old haunts, including the houses he use to break into and then do things such as sniff women’s underwear and make himself sandwiches. Ellroy also visits nearby El Monte and stands at the spot where his mother’s strangled corpse was found outside Arroyo High School.
The masturbation mime is only one brief part of a seven minute video. You can watch the video here.
Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who
I recently finished reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third installment of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Trilogy’. While I don’t think the third book is quite as compelling as the previous two–a decline that may be explained by the state of the three manuscripts when their author Stieg Larsson died suddenly aged 50, in 2004–taken together these books represent a great achievement in crime fiction. The writing is not always as sharp as it could be, but the scope of the story is enormous. Christopher Hitchens, writing in Vanity Fair, agrees:
In life, Stieg Larsson described himself as, among other things, “a feminist,” and his character surrogate, Mikael Blomkvist, takes an ostentatiously severe line against the male domination of society and indeed of his own profession. (The original grim and Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women, while the trilogy’s third book bore the more fairy-tale-like name The Castle in the Air That Blew Up: the clever rebranding of the series with the word “girl” on every cover was obviously critical.) Blomkvist’s moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels, because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval. Sweden used to be notorious, in the late 1960s, as the homeland of the film I Am Curious (Yellow), which went all the way to the Supreme Court when distributed in the United States and gave Sweden a world reputation as a place of smiling nudity and guilt-free sex. What a world of nursery innocence that was, compared with the child slavery and exploitation that are evoked with perhaps slightly too much relish by the crusading Blomkvist. [More]
Orson Welles and Film Noir
Orson Welles is usually overlooked as one of the great directors of film noir. There may be good reasons for this. Welles was accomplished in so many fields–as an actor, director, radio star, magician and bullfighter– it would be too reductive to classify him as merely a film noir director. However, Welles directed two of the greatest film noir movies, The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958), and his contribution to the genre should not be forgotten.
Welles divided the critics and was frequently dismissed as an overrated has-been. His contribution to film noir is also divisive, as neither The Lady from Shanghai or Touch or Evil bears any resemblance to the novels they were adapted from. Both movies were also subject to significant studio interference, and Welles was unhappy with their final cuts.
Then, there is Wells’ unfinished projects. Welles started filming adaptations of Don Quixote and The Deep amongst others, but funding and legal problems left his projects unfinished. Welles did finish shooting The Other Side of the Wind, the story of an aging, cantankerous film director (played by John Huston and modelled on Ernest Hemingway), who is trying to shoot one last picture which he intends to fill with scenes of sex and violence. Filming for The Other Side of the Wind was completed but the editing process was not. The project was never finished because of complex legal problems which included Welles’ daughter Beatrice, his partner Oja Kodar and the brother of the Shah of Iran! Welles.net has an excellent breakdown of the history of the project, and the recent efforts of the director, actor and friend of Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, who acts in the film, to finish and release the film on Welles’ behalf.
Two scenes of The Other Side of the Wind have been released, and are now widely available on the internet. The scene below features the actors Oja Kodar and Bob Random having sex in a car (viewer discretion is advised). Again, I will not try to categorise this film as noir, but the scene certainly has noirish undertones:
Jack Webb on the Tonight Show
Jack Webb was the creator, producer and star of the radio and television series Dragnet. Webb is acknowledged as the man who first brought realism to television portrayals of police procedural drama. Webb also wrote The Badge (1958), a spin-off to Dragnet which featured ‘True and Terrifying Crime Stories That Could Not Be Presented on TV’. James Ellroy was given a copy of The Badge for his eleventh birthday and has named the book as being a major influence on his literary career.
Webb was a complex character who had a reputation for being utterly businesslike in his behaviour on set. Married four times, a chain-smoker and heavy drinker, Webb worked eighteen- hour days. An episode of Dragnet was usually shot and completed in a single day, and most scenes were completed in a single take. Given his reputation for strict, somewhat humourless professionalism, Webb’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1968 is now a part of comedy legend. In the ‘Copper Clappers’ sketch, Webb plays Sergeant Joe Friday of the LAPD to whom Carson is reporting a robbery. Many comedians had performed skits of Dragnet, but this was the first time Webb had taken part in one himself. The sketch lampoons the deadpan expressions and monotone verbal rhythms which had become idiosyncratically a part of Dragnet.
Webb’s biographer, Michael Hayde has made a transcript of another Dragnet parody in which Webb appeared on Jack Benny’s Second Farewell Special in 1974. You can read it at Badge714.com.
The Venetian Vase 