< James Ellroy >

doggy heaven
By Wendy Cavenett

James Ellroy usually likes to be called Dog, or Demon Dog. Even the Doberman. At readings he barks and howls and professes his love for his pit bull terrier Barko; he even declares the mutt’s ability to dictate novel-length crime fiction that Ellroy dutifully transcribes and then publishes under his own name. But that’s show business.

Today Ellroy is serious. Talking from Kansas City where he lives with his second wife, feminist author and critic Helen Konde, Ellroy is on the publicity trail for his latest book, Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A.

His sombre voice is nothing akin to doggy-heaven. Like being plunged into one of Ellroy’s dense, obsessive novels, the conversation is shot-gun staccato and the hidden agenda is almost visible. He is both intimidating and sincere, a mean mixture of gentleness and intensity. He is a Dog who harbours an imagination of utilitarian proportions.

His back catalogue is a hoard of psycho-sexual tales that explore the nature of the male psyche. His bad-ass cops hunt for their own damaged souls as much as they seek the annihilation of the felons that drive them. In a career that has spanned some 20 years, Ellroy has not only broken ranks in the lexicon of crime but has exposed himself in every page he has written,

“Y’know, I’m 50 years old now,” he says. “I’m calmer. More disciplined. Just as passionate. I know what I’m doing. I work hard. I’ve reaped the rewards and not at the expense of passion. I’ll continue to write better and better books but that is every desire I have.

“To my critics all I can say is, these are the books I write, if you don’t like them you can kiss my ass.”

Crime Wave, like its author, is a bizarre and troubling incarnation. Bringing together Ellroy’s true crime writing (including My Mother’s Killer, Body Dumps, Out of the Past, The Tooth of the Crime, The Seduction of O.J., and Bad Boy of Tinseltown) for the American edition of GQ Magazine (circa 1993-1999), it also contains three pieces of short fiction that follow on from where L.A. Confidential ended: Hush Hush, the sleazy psycho novella, Hollywood Shakedown and Tijuana, Mon Amour. It is a feverishly-engrossing collection, and like everything Ellroy, has enough “crazy shit” between its covers to bewitch the most desperate voyeur.

“I love the book because I love the pieces that are in the book,” says Ellroy. “It’s a wild mix and I’m pleased as punch that it has been published. Of course, I prefer writing fiction because you have to adhere to the facts with true crime; you can’t make it up but I enjoy immensely sticking my snout into old crimes that are mine and mine alone.

“The idea of tackling present-day, celebrated crime that numerous other writers have attached themselves to doesn’t appeal to me in the least. I want something that is definitely mine. And so GQ Magazine, where the [true crime] pieces were published originally in America, very graciously allowed me to look into several unsolved homicides.”

For GQ’s Editor-In-Chief, Art Cooper, it was “love at first sight” when he met Ellroy in the fall of 1993 at the swanky Four Seasons restaurant in midtown Manhattan. “The first word James uttered was ‘Woof!’,” he writes in Crime Wave’s introduction, “and thus did the Demon Dog of American Literature enter my life and GQ’s.”

It was Cooper who initially asked Ellroy to write about the obsession that has driven his career—the unsolved murder of his mother in 1958. The result was My Mother’s Killer which appeared in the August 1994 issue of GQ Magazine. “The woman refused to grant me a reprieve,” Ellroy writes of his mother. “Her grounds were simple: My death gave you a voice, and I need you to recognise me past your exploration of it.”

A finalist for the National Magazine Award in America, Ellroy subsequently used My Mother’s Killer as the basis for his memoir, My Dark Places. Printed for the first time outside America in Crime Wave, My Mother’s Killer finds its perfect counterpart in Body Dumps, an unnerving investigation into the murder of Betty Jane Scales in 1973. It is yet another unresolved homicide from Ellroy’s hometown of El Monte, California.

The wrap on Ellroy has been circulating since his 1981 debut novel, Brown’s Requiem (the third—and most recent—Ellroy book to be adapted to film). Born March 4, 1948, Ellroy’s parents split in 1954; he was 10 when his mother Jean (Geneva) Ellroy Hilliker was murdered. The case remains unresolved. “My father was pleased that she was dead,” says Ellroy. “He wanted to get custody of me and her death afforded him that.”

Lee Ellroy was hardly the doting father; James bought porn, read crime fiction and roamed the LA streets for comfort. “I had a furious mental life then,” admits Ellroy. “I lived in my own world and made things up as I went along and fantasised compulsively. That was the defining aspect of my adolescence.” His father had convinced him that his mother was a drunk and a whore. Lee died when Ellroy was 17.

Broke and homeless, Ellroy sank into the seedy LA netherworld. For 11 years he was a desperate soul; a speed freak, alcoholic and petty criminal. He caught pneumonia and was told that he had an abscess on his lung. He began hearing things. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and cleaned up his act. By 1977, Ellroy was caddying at Hillcrest Golf Course and in 1979 began writing.

After Brown’s Requiem, he released a swag of Lloyd Hopkins private eye novels but it was 1987’s The Black Dahlia that saw Ellroy cross-over big time. Consciously paralleling the particularly gruesome unsolved murder of would-be actress Elizabeth Short with that of his mother’s, it was The Black Dahlia that kicked-off the critically-acclaimed, L.A. Quartet.

“After I had established some sort of relationship with my first six novels, I wrote the novel of the Black Dahlia case,” said Ellroy in a 1997 interview. “It tapped into the deepest aspects of my unconscious. It was a book I had been waiting 30 years to write.” Midway through writing it, Ellroy realised that he wanted to create a quartet about Los Angeles (“My own smogbound fatherland”) from 1947 to 1959.

American Tabloid followed in 1995, a magnificent sprawling tome about the men who orchestrated the Kennedy era. Essentially it is a novel of political corruption. Running from 1958 to 1963, it is the first book of the Underworld USA trilogy; it also marked Ellroy’s departure from his trademark psycho-sexual plot-driven crime stories. It was the book that exploded his neo-noir milieu, recreating America’s history with devastating results.

Ellroy is currently writing the second volume to the trilogy. “It will cover ’63 to ’68,” he says. “Howard Hughes’s Las Vegas, Vietnam War heroin deals, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald. The last volume will be Nixon and Watergate, ’69 to ’73. That will be 15 years of American history with one pervading theme: politics as crime.”

Ellroy doesn’t plan to write a crime novel again. Nor is he incredibly interested in writing true crime. He has also decided to bury his past like a well-gnawed bone.

“I don’t discuss my marriage and I never will,” he concludes. “And at the end of the Crime Wave tour, I will never answer another personal question again. I think I have enough of a body of work and have revealed enough about myself for future interviewers to draw my personal information from all the published interviews. I want to concentrate and answer questions only about my novels.

“Onward!”

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This article originally appeared in Australian Style, May 1999. Since that time, Ellroy has published several books including The Cold Six Thousand, (2001) Destination: Morgue! LA Tales, (2004), Blood's a Rover (2009) and The Hiliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2010).

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