James Ellroy UK Tour
I’ve just returned home after seeing James Ellroy give a talk and book reading at the Dancehouse theatre, Manchester as part of the UK publicity tour for his new novel Blood’ a Rover. Few novelists today have the stage presence of Ellroy: he begins with quickfire quotes from TS Eliot and Anne Sexton, then moves on to more quotes from WH Auden and AE Houseman, the latter of whom he labels as ‘British poofters’. There were plenty of politically incorrect and very funny jokes. When asked if he has ever been sued by the families of the many prominent figures he has scandalously portrayed in his novels, Ellroy responded that if the Kennedy family ever tried to sue him they would have to spend so much time in the courtroom: ‘They’d have no time to get drunk, rape and kill women.’ But behind the Demon Dog persona there was a generous, courteous side to Ellroy as he gave in-depth and revealing answers to any question from the audience. It was very clear from his performance that Ellroy is a man who loves people and loves to perform for his readers.
If you want to see Ellroy on tour you will have to move quickly as there are only two more UK dates. Ellroy is in Glasgow tomorrow, and Belfast on Saturday.
George Pelecanos in The Rumpus on Hard Rain Falling
Washington, D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos has an excellent consideration of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling in the increasingly marvellous The Rumpus:
While many debut novels boil and sometimes overboil with a voice edging towards manifesto, few hit their mark with such assuredness, maturity, and authority as Hard Rain Falling. It is not, as it has been often described, a crime novel, though it does concern itself peripherally with criminals and their milieu. I hesitate to call it either a literary or genre work because I’m not sure Mr. Carpenter would have cared about the distinction. By his own admission he aimed to write cleanly, with his intended audience the general public rather than the gatekeepers of academia. Hard Rain Falling is populist fiction at its best. It is not just a good novel. It might be the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s.
Joseph Wambaugh Roasts Truman Capote
Recently, I’ve been enjoying watching the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. The concept of the television series is simple, a prominent celebrity is subjected to a ‘roast’, a tribute in the form of good natured ribbing and comical insults, from a panel of fellow celebrities and friends. Whole episodes of the original series have been uploaded onto Youtube.
In this episode from 1974, an inebriated Truman Capote is roasted by a group of celebrity friends, one of whom is Joseph Wambaugh, then at the beginning of his literary career and still a Detective Sergeant in the LAPD. Wambaugh’s first truly great work, The Onion Field (1973) is hugely influenced by Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), which is arguably the first non-fiction novel. Wambaugh had written two previous novels to moderate success but it was The Onion Field, a factual account of the kidnapping of two plain-clothes LAPD Officers and the subsequent murder of Officer Ian Campbell, which established Wambaugh as one of the most important crime writers of his generation.
In the clip below, Wambaugh gives a funny and touching tribute to Capote. There is also something rather sad amidst the laughter, as Capote’s alcoholism and mental deterioration are already becoming self-evident.
Dean Martin introduces Wambaugh four minutes into the clip:
Not So Great Adaptations
Channel 4’s recent Great Adaptations series sought to promote classic films that had the distinction of being as critically well-received and as successful as the book they were adapted from. I have my doubts about the list they came up with, and I am inclined to think that it is more interesting to explore why so many film and television adaptations frequently go so very wrong.
There are many great novels that Hollywood and the BBC have bungled and botched in their transition to the screen. The BBC’s 1987 adaptation of John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy has always struck me as a good example of how to ruin a great novel. Spread over seven episodes, A Perfect Spy takes its time in bringing Le Carré’s complex narrative to life. But unlike the novel, the story never becomes riveting on screen. The adaptation is faithful to Le Carré’s work, but there is some narrative reordering which gets things off to a bad start. The mini-series tells the life story of the double agent Magnus Pym sequentially from childhood to death. Whereas the novel begins with Pym’s disappearance, and then is told through a series of confessional letters Pym writes to his loved ones, thus enabling the action to jump back to significant moments in his life. Also another narrative strain follows, Pym’s superior in British Intelligence, Jack Brotherhood, who has started his own manhunt for the missing spy. Aspects of Pym’s life are revealed through Brotherhood’s interviews with people who have known and worked with Pym over the years. The mystery of Pym’s identity begins to unravel as Brotherhood’s investigation progresses, and Pym’s own episalatory accounts fill in the details.
All this sense of mystery and character development is lost in the BBC adaptation, as it slowly shows Pym’s life year by year. When the narrative finally gets to Brotherhood’s desperate search for Pym, the suspense is diminished as he is obtaining information which the viewer already knows.
No adaptation is without merit. Alan Howard is superb as Brotherhood (if only he’d been given more time on screen!) as is Ray McAnally as Pym’s father, a professional con man. Peter Egan becomes more convincing as Magnus Pym as the series goes on but at times he seems rather wooden. The series was nominated for two Emmy’s and four Bafta’s, but it will never make a great adaptations list!
James Ellroy and ‘Dog Humour’
James Ellroy is coming to the UK in November on a book tour to promote his latest novel Blood’s a Rover. Whenever he is on tour Ellroy is a wildly entertaining figure who destroys the cliche that book tours are dull and stuffy affairs. Ellroy is essentially a performer who shocks and offends and sometimes delights audiences with his unique schtick he dubs ‘Dog Humour’, an offshoot of his ‘Demon Dog of American Literature’ persona. Ellroy first developed Dog Humour with Randy Rice, his best friend in Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a form of brash, crass and vile verbal monologues expressed through the form of frequently improvised onomatapoeic and alliterative sentences. I find Dog Humour to be hysterical, although it is very hit and miss. Once you get beyond the initial shock you see there is a level of outrageousness in Ellroy’s performance which stops you from being offended or taking things too seriously. On the other hand, by being deliberately shocking Ellroy is lampooning political correctness and the stifling of free speech.
Below is a clip of Dog Humour at its best. This is taken from an interview with Ellroy in 1999 on Late Night with Conan O’ Brien. O’Brien is a big fan of Ellroy, but he has some trouble persuading him to respect the censors!
Bazaar Bizarre and the Demon Dogs
Probably the worst project James Ellroy has ever been involved in would be the documentary on Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella, Bazaar Bizarre (2004). It is not often that documentaries achieve notoriety, but Bazaar Bizarre really is a nasty piece of work. The film contains graphic reenactments of Berdella’s torture-murders, which are horrible to watch and completely disrespectful to the memory of the victims. Why did Ellroy do it? He certainly hates the film and has blamed his near nervous-breakdown and the self-medicating that followed the exhausting The Cold Six Thousand (2001) publicity tour for his involvement.
Ellroy has addressed the subject of serial killers with more distinction in his excellent novel Killer on the Road (1986) also published as Silent Terror, the introduction to Murder and Mayhem (1992) and the DVD commentary to David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007).
One of many tasteless moments of the film is the intermittent musical narration of the rock band The Demon Dogs who sing songs about Berdella. The Demon Dogs formed specifically for Bazaar Bizarre and named themselves in Ellroy’s honour. This makes Ellroy the only crime fiction writer to my knowledge who has ever had a rock band named after him. Ironically, Ellroy has always hated rock music. Listening to The Demon Dogs it is not difficult to see why.
Double Indemnity House
Underthehollywoodsign has a nice piece about the house used in the film Double Indemnity as the home of Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck. James M. Cain (author of the novel), Raymond Chandler (the co-scriptwriter) and Billy Wilder (co-scriptwriter and director) all describe the Spanish Colonial style house in sniffy tones, but it’s also interesting to note that time and shrubbery have ‘softened’ the exterior making it less noir-ish:
Few houses in the movies are better known than Barbara Stanwyck’s Spanish Colonial in “Double Indemnity.” The director Billy Wilder first shows it in an establishing shot that highlights not only its architectural features but its distinctive site–a hilly corner lot on a sparsely-built suburban street.
Though the script states the house is in Los Feliz, it is actually located in the Hollywood Dell. I’ve always thought the house beautiful and well-suited to its penninsula-shaped lot, but Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who co-wrote the screenplay, could not have agreed less.
Book Trailers
Book trailers are becoming an increasingly popular method of advertising since the L.A. premiere in 2003 of the book trailer for the novel Dark Symphony by Christine Feehan. The concept is simple: a book trailer is similar to a movie trailer in that it is a short video which may feature action, animation or photographs to advertise the product.
The video below is a fine example of the medium. The trailer for John Le Carré’s most recent novel A Most Wanted Man (2008) features a short commentary by the author. The video is a well-paced, tense and atmospheric evocation of Le Carré’s world of spying and deceit:
Lawrence Block on Donald Westlake
Lawrence Block is one of the most successful crime fiction writers of his generation. He was a college dropout who began his writing career in the late 1950s churning out pornographic novels. He has managed to write roughly a novel a year for the past fifty years, creating series detectives such as Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, protagonist of the innovative ‘Burglar Who …’ novels. Block’s early books were often written, pseudonymously, in collaboration with Donald Westlake, who died on the last day of 2008. Here is a short video from a talk at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York in which Block talks about his friend and his novel Memory, due for release in 2010.
Ellroy in LA
I visited Los Angeles recently to interview James Ellroy, the subject of my PhD. While I was there I took some photographs of places around the city that have played an important role in Ellroy’s life. Here are a couple of them:
LA County Jail
During his years of alcoholism and substance abuse, Ellroy was arrested a total of fourteen times for offences such as shoplifting, burglary and drink driving. He served a few short sentences of ‘soft time’ in Los Angeles County Jail. At that time, the processing of new prisoners took up to ten hours and included skin-searching, delousing and blood testing.
The Bel-Air Country Club
Ellroy nearly died of a lung abscess in the late 70s, and the near-death experience made him turn his life around. Ellroy got a job as a caddy at the exclusive Bel-Air Country Club. He wrote his first novel Brown’s Requiem (1981) on a bench outside the caddyshack at the club and in his small apartment after work. He wrote the novel in a little over ten months. Two of the leading characters of the novel are to varying degrees based on Ellroy: Fritz Brown is a German-American repo man and P.I. who (like Ellroy) is obsessed with classical music; Freddy ‘Fat Dog’ Baker is an unhinged anti-semitic golf caddy, who is very loosely based on Ellroy as a younger man.
The Venetian Vase 