James Ellroy,
Interviewed by Nathaniel
Rich
The Art of Fiction No. 201
Reading James Ellroy’s novels, it’s tempting to
imagine the sixty-one-year-old author as a hyperactive, shotgun-toting,
trash-talking connoisseur of crime, women, and American history, the kind of
guy who pals around with homicide detectives and wears fedoras and bespoke
suits. This portrait, as it turns out, is entirely accurate—except for the
attire. These days he favors ivy caps and Hawaiian shirts.
The interview was conducted over the
course of a week last spring at his Los Angeles apartment, in a thirties
art-deco building where Mae West and Ava Gardner once lived. (“You’ve reached
Ellroy’s pad,” he says on his answering machine, in the groovy voice of a
late-night-radio DJ. When he rented an apartment in Carroll Gardens last
winter, the message was: “This is Ellroy’s swinging Brooklyn pad.”) His
apartment could double as a film-noir set: dark red walls, heavy shades, dim
yellow lights, plush leather furniture. There are posters for the movie
adaptations of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia.
Two massive dark mahogany bookshelves frame the entrance to his living room.
The bookshelves are full. Every single book is by James Ellroy.
Ellroy is a hulking presence. He is six
foot three, with strong eyes and a tall, gruff face that reflexively composes
itself into a frown. He does not walk so much as stomp. During rare pauses in
conversation he makes deep guttural noises to fill the silence. His tone is
relentlessly jocular, conspiratorial, wisecracking. He screams with laughter.
Often he sounds like one of the characters from his novels about fifties-era
LA: he has a gas or a blast, he vibes women, he digs it. Someone who doesn’t know
the score is a dipshit or, worse, a geek. There is always a grin hidden behind
his most brazen performances.
We spoke for several hours each afternoon,
the sunlight disrupting the darkness of the living room in thin horizontal
bars. Ellroy usually nursed his trademark drink, a quadruple espresso on the
rocks, and when he got particularly animated he would pitch his torso forward,
as if he were about to jump across the table; at other times he’d stand up to
full height, blocking out the sun.
When we weren’t in the apartment, we drove
around the city. He showed me the houses where the attractive girls in his high
school had lived. As a teenager he would peep through their windows, and if the
girls weren’t home, he’d break in and look for drugs, alcohol, panties. He
still remembers each house’s weak spot, the back door left ajar or the window
with the faulty latch.
Ellroy is a charismatic public speaker and
rarely turns down an invitation. That week he had two engagements. He exhorted
a class of aspiring screenwriters to quit smoking, get rid of their tattoos and
piercings, and always address their elders as Mr. or Mrs. “Do this, and people
will say to themselves, This kid knows his shit and understands that there is a
social contract.” At the LA Police Academy in Griffith Park, he emceed a
ceremony in which academic scholarships were awarded to children of police
officers. On the way out he tried to buy a Depression-era shotgun from a
display case in the LAPD weapons supply store, but was politely informed by a
clerk that it was not for sale.
There were also less formal engagements.
He talked to women—on the phone, in restaurants, in his apartment. Late one
night he drove to the house of his girlfriend. The lights were on: the woman,
her husband, and their children were inside. Ellroy opened the window of the
car and proceeded to bay like a dog. He drove around the block and howled
again. Then he did it a third time. The girlfriend called him the next day,
laughing. Apparently he bayed at her several times a month. They had a unique
arrangement.
He is now at work on a memoir that links
his obsessive skirt-chasing to the main biographical fact about his life, the
murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, when he was ten years old. The killer was
never found. The crime, and Ellroy’s reinvestigation of it some forty years
later, inspired his first memoir, My Dark Places,
which was praised as much for its formal innovation as for its shocking subject
matter. But his mother is present, to a varying degree, in most of his novels.
This is especially true of The Black Dahlia,
his fictional retelling of the investigation into the rape and murder of
Elizabeth Short, a young woman whose gruesome death in 1947 transfixed the
public and became the stuff of local myth. Like Jean Hilliker, Short was a
beautiful, hard-living woman who had moved to LA to escape a difficult past.
And like Hilliker’s, her case was never solved—though in his fictional version
of events, Ellroy finds the killer.
The
Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A.
Confidential, and White Jazz make up the LA Quartet—a series
of novels that won Ellroy a massive readership and critical praise for his
manipulation of genre conventions, his unsympathetic depiction of Los Angeles
in the fifties, and his manic, staccato, hard-nosed prose, about which Elmore
Leonard said, “reading it aloud could shatter your wine glasses.” Ellroy next
began work on an even more ambitious project, the Underworld USA Trilogy. American
Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand,
and Blood’s a Rover map a secret history of America
from the JFK assassination to Watergate through the intersecting stories of
government agents, snitches, mobsters, ideological zealots, movie stars, and
national politicians. In these books Ellroy refined a style that is all his
own, incorporating elements of street slang, FBI officialese, and Hollywood
gossip-rag shorthand. The Ellroy sentence is jumpy, overcaffeinated,
spring-loaded—always ready to pounce.
Before I could ask my first question,
Ellroy cut me off with two of his own: “I’m the greatest crime writer ever,
right? Is there anyone better than me?” But as the week went on, and we pressed
past the shtick and the riffs, he grew more reflective. He leaned back in his
chair, and spoke more slowly. One afternoon he even went to his bedroom, shut
the blinds, and took a nap.
INTERVIEWER
You were away from Los Angeles for
twenty-five years. Why’d you come back?
JAMES ELLROY
One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased
women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San
Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back
here.
INTERVIEWER
Did you miss the city?
ELLROY
While I was away, the Los Angeles of my
past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I
believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But
when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.
INTERVIEWER
What’s wrong with LA now?
ELLROY
I fear the sloth, the disorder, and the
moral depravity. It makes me want to hole up in my pad for days on end.
INTERVIEWER
And what about the LA of the fifties has a
hold on you?
ELLROY
A lot of it is simple biography. I lived
here, so I was obsessed with my immediate environment. I am from Los Angeles
truly, immutably. It’s the first thing you get in any author’s note: James
Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. I was hatched in the film-noir
epicenter, at the height of the film-noir era. My parents and I lived near
Hollywood. My father and mother had a tenuous connection to the film business.
They were both uncommonly good-looking, which may be a hallmark of LA
arrivistes, and they were of that generation of migrants who came because they
were very poor and LA was a beautiful place.
I grew up in a different world, a
different America. You didn’t have to make a lot of dough to keep a roof over
your head. There was a calmness that I recall too. I learned to amuse myself. I
liked to read. I liked to look out the window.
It’s rare for me to speak about LA
epigrammatically. I don’t view it as a strange place, I don’t view it as a
hot-pot of multiculturalism or weird sexuality. I have never studied it
formally. There are big swathes of LA that I don’t even know my way around
today. I’m not quite sure how you get to Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach. I
don’t know LA on a valid historical level at all. But I have assimilated it in
a deeper way. I had lived here for so long that when it became time to exploit
my memory of the distant past, it was easy.
Whatever power my books have derives from
the fact that they are utterly steeped in the eras that I describe. LA of that
period is mine and nobody else’s. If you wrote about this period before me, I
have taken it away from you.
INTERVIEWER
What did your parents do?
ELLROY
My mother was a registered nurse. She
worked a lot. At one point she had a job at a Jewish nursing home where movie
stars brought their aging parents. She was fluent in German, and when the
patients spoke about her in Yiddish, behind her back, she could understand
them. She was a big reader of historical novels, and she was always listening
to one specific Brahms piano concerto—I remember a blue RCA Victor record.
I have more memories of my dad. He was a
dipshit studio gofer, a big handsome guy, a scratch golfer. He worked for a
schlock producer named Sam Stiefel.
He was always snoozing on the couch, like
Dagwood Bumstead. He was a lazy motherfucker. God bless him. He was always
working on some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. This is what my dad was like: I’d
say, Hey, Dad, we studied penguins today in school. He’d say, Yeah? I’m a
penguin fucker from way back. Dad, I saw a giraffe at the zoo today. Yeah? I’m
a giraffe fucker from way back. That’s my dad. My dad was a giraffe fucker.
He said to me once, I fucked Rita
Hayworth. He said that he once introduced me to Hayworth at the Tail O’ the
Pup, circa 1950. I would have been two years old at the time, but I don’t
recall it. He said I spilled grape juice all over her. I never believed that he
had worked for Hayworth, but after his death I saw his name in a Hayworth
biography. Sure enough, for a period of time, he was her business manager.
INTERVIEWER
You have said you dislike profanity, but
you use it a lot.
ELLROY
I learned it from my father. He was
raucous, profane, and freewheeling. I say fuck routinely—my generation is the
first generation to say the word routinely, across gender lines. I love slang.
I love hipster patois, racial invective, alliteration, argot of all kinds.
INTERVIEWER
What was your childhood like before your
mother’s death?
ELLROY
I don’t remember a single amicable moment
between my parents other than this: my mother passing steaks out the kitchen
window to my father so that he could put them on a barbecue.
I had my mother’s number. I understood
that she was maudlin, effusive, and enraged—the degree depending on how much
booze she had in her system. I also understood that she had my father’s
number—that he was lazy and cowardly.
There was always something incongruous
about them. Early on, I was aware of the seventeen-year age gap. When I knew
her, my mother was a very good-looking redhead in her early forties. My father
was a sun-ravaged, hard-smoking, hard-living guy. He looked significantly older
at sixty than I do now. Everybody thought he was my granddad. He wore clothes
that were thirty years out of style. I remember that he had a gold Omega
wristwatch that he loved. We were broke, and then all of a sudden, one day, the
watch wasn’t there. That broke my heart.
INTERVIEWER
In My Dark Places you describe a sense of
foreboding not long before your mother’s murder. Where did that come from?
ELLROY
Near the end of January 1958, my mother
sits me down on the couch. She’s half blitzed, and I can tell. She says, Honey,
you’ve never lived in a house before, so we’re going to move to a nice little
town called El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley. I sensed that there was some
other, more sinister reason we were moving to El Monte, but I still haven’t
figured it out. I think she was running away from something, or someone.
We go out there, and it was very
upsetting. It was a dirty little stone house with a single bathroom. It was
half the size of the apartment that we had in Santa Monica.
Five months later, I come back from a
weekend with my father. He put me in a cab at the El Monte bus depot. The cab
pulls up to my street, our little stone house is on the left, and there are men
in brown uniforms and gray suits standing around. And right then, I knew it: my
mother was dead. I knew it in that moment.
Someone said, There’s the kid. A cop got
down on my level and said, Son, your mother’s been killed.
I swooned. My field of vision veered off
in one direction. But I didn’t cry. I started calculating. I began performing
almost immediately. I loved being the center of attention. The cops took me to
our neighbor’s garage, and they took a photograph—often reproduced—of me
standing in front of a workbench. I was goofing, mugging and making faces. The
El Monte police chief was dispatched to pick up my dad. Of course, he was the
first suspect. At the police station, they sequestered my dad and me in
separate rooms. They gave me a candy bar. When they finally let my dad out, I
ran to him and put my arms around him. We went back to his pad on the freeway
bus. I recall a stream of cars going by with their lights on in the opposite
direction, and I forced myself to cry for just a few minutes. I remember
thinking that I should. I was already at a great emotional distance from my
mother’s death.
When I got back to my dad’s crib, I
immediately fell asleep. I woke up on Monday morning, June 23, 1958, and I
swear to you, the whole world seemed light powder blue, like a ’56 Chevy Bel
Air.
INTERVIEWER
It sounds like you were in a state of
shock.
ELLROY
It technically could have been a state of
shock. I had a nervous breakdown much later in life, and I’m still subject to
panic attacks: big swells of emotion and anxiety, an aging person’s
unsuppressable fear of catastrophe and death. All I can tell you is what went
through my mind at the time. I couldn’t express my thoughts about my mother,
because my relationship with her was too compromised. I thought, I got what I
wanted. My mother is dead. Now what do I do?
I felt death all around me. For a period
of some weeks, my dad was very permissive. I began to wonder how much time he
had left. I’d stay up late watching TV, waiting for him to come back from
sporadic all-night accounting jobs—if indeed he wasn’t out fucking every woman
who’d let him.
I began to read mystery books: the Hardy Boys,
Ken Holt. My father would buy me two of these things a week. I could read the
damn books in four or five hours. I started stealing them when I was ten years
old.
At the time I had no creative outlet, no
indication of genius or a literary gift. I was fearful and occasionally
violent, physically outsized, and out of my mind. But I knew right then that I
had discovered a secret world.
INTERVIEWER
Were you lonely in those years?
ELLROY
Yes, but I enjoyed junior high. That’s
where I began to perform for the first time. I was a provocateur. I gave oral
reports on books that I had invented in my head. I’m a huge kid, I don’t do
well in school, I’m girl crazed, and I’m already peeping in windows. Here we
are in this cheap apartment, no air-conditioning, and an unhousebroken dog. One
block away: a bunch of Tudor mansions. They’re there, and I’m here. I want the
girls, I want the family life, I want something that isn’t malodorous and
fucked-up.
INTERVIEWER
Is your voyeuristic impulse related to
your need to write and tell stories—to go into the lives of fictional
characters?
ELLROY
Those impulses are one and the same. I
already had the massive creative will. Now the performer in me is starting to
act up. How do you stand out as a kid with no gifts at all? How do you enact
your estrangement, your alienation, your self-loathing, your feelings of
oddness and being unloved? The status quo at John Burroughs Junior High School
was Jewish, so I shouted, Heil Hitler. I’d say, Bomb Russia, I hate JFK, fuck
the liberal hegemony. Of course, I never hated anyone, and most of my friends
were Jewish.
I got significantly crazier. I joined the
American Nazi Party while I was at Fairfax High School. I painted swastikas on
the dog’s water dish. I always had a flash roll. My dad would give me a
twenty-dollar bill to go to the store. I’d steal the food and I’d bring him
change for a ten. I watched The Fugitive religiously on TV. If you’ve seen the
original run of the series, it is all about sex and dislocated men and women.
They drink highballs, smoke cigarettes, and sizzle for each other every Tuesday
night at ten. It was everything that I wanted.
INTERVIEWER
You claim to be ignorant of contemporary
pop culture, but it seems that you were completely immersed in it as a boy.
ELLROY
I was, but back then I didn’t know what it
meant. I just felt compelled to read, go to crime movies, and watch crime
television shows.
INTERVIEWER
What does it mean to you now? Why is crime
an important subject in American fiction?
ELLROY
We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A
great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into
trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set
crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual
obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these
matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the
shit out of the reader.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said film noir hasn’t influenced
your writing, but you watched a lot of it in your formative years—and you say
you were born and raised in the heart of film-noir culture.
ELLROY
I dig film noir. The great theme of film
noir is, You’re fucked. There are a few very fine films: Double
Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard,
and, of course, Out of the Past.
Robert Mitchum sees Jane Greer in Acapulco, and he
knows. She sees him, and she knows. He’s passive, inert, but very resourceful.
She’s murderous and altogether monstrous. He just wants to forfeit to a woman,
to give up his masculinity. She wants to be enveloped in her masculine side.
They each want the other. When film noir is deeply about that, it can be very
powerful. But noir is overexposed now. I’m over it.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve called Dashiell Hammett
“tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?
ELLROY
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he
wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was.
Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about
the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the
knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett
was tremendously important
to me.
Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important,
too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my
minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the
assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just
met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas
chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.
INTERVIEWER
How did you do in high school?
ELLROY
I did poorly, and I had an unimaginably
dim social sense. I was horrified when the civil rights workers were killed in
Mississippi in ’64, but I made light of it in school. I knew it was wrong, but
I had to be superior to the events themselves. You can see this in my books.
There’s the reactionary side of me as well as the critique of authority, the
critique of racism and oppression. Back then, though, I possessed no social
awareness.
INTERVIEWER
Did you graduate?
ELLROY
No. I flunked the eleventh grade and got
expelled. I decided I wanted to join the marine corps, because I wanted to be a
shit kicker, which I certainly was not. I did not want to go to Vietnam, I
never thought about Vietnam. I had a vague desire to shoot guns. My father’s
health was deteriorating ever more rapidly—he started having strokes and heart
attacks—and he let me enlist in the army.
INTERVIEWER
How long did you last?
ELLROY
If you think I’m skinny now, at a hundred
and seventy pounds, picture me at a hundred and forty. I got shipped out to
Fort Polk, Louisiana. Flying bugs all over the place. Right away, I went from
being a big egotistical bully to a craven scaredy-cat dipshit. My dad had
another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my
uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown
back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to
pick up every waitress who serves you.
INTERVIEWER
Is that when you started writing—after
your father died?
ELLROY
The first thing I did after he died was
snag his last three Social Security checks, forge his signature, and cash them
at a liquor store. From ’65 to ’75, I drank and used drugs. I fantasized. I
swallowed amphetamine inhalers. I masturbated compulsively. I got into fights.
I boxed—though I was terrible at it—and I broke into houses. I’d steal girls’
panties, I’d jack off, grab cash out of wallets and purses. The method was
easy: you call a house and if nobody answers, that means nobody’s home. I’d
stick my long, skinny arms in a pet access door and flip the latch, or find a
window that was loose and raise it open. Everybody has pills and alcohol. I’d
pop a Seconal, drink four fingers of Scotch, eat some cheese out of the fridge,
steal a ten-dollar bill, then leave a window ajar and skedaddle. I did time in
county jail for useless misdemeanors. I was arrested once for burglary, but it
got popped down to misdemeanor trespassing.
The press thinks that I’m a
larger-than-life guy. Yes, that’s true. But a lot of the shit written about me
discusses this part of my life disproportionately.
INTERVIEWER
Aren’t you responsible for this? You’ve
written a lot about this period, and you frequently talk about it in
interviews.
ELLROY
I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done
time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I
also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and
peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother,
her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed
up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.
INTERVIEWER
Still, writing couldn’t have been exactly
in the forefront of your mind at the time.
ELLROY
But it was. I was always thinking about
how I would become a great novelist.
I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I
thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe
the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than
anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. I had a
fantasy of what it meant to be a writer: the sports cars, the clothes, the
women.
But I think what appealed to me most about
it was that I could assume the identity of what I really loved to do, which was
to read. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a novel. I didn’t live in the world of
graduate writing schools. I wasn’t part of any scene or creative community. I
happened to love crime novels more than anything, so I wrote a crime novel first.
I didn’t buy the old canard that you had to start by writing short stories, and
only later write a novel. I never liked reading short stories, so why the fuck
should I want to write one? I only wanted to write novels.
INTERVIEWER
Did you feel that your period of
homelessness and delinquency was giving you experience that you could turn into
a novel?
ELLROY
If I did, it was false. The real education
I had was from the books I read and TV shows and movies I saw. When I watched a
film or read a book, I was engrossed. I learned in an unmediated way. I didn’t
know what I was taking in—I wasn’t thinking about theme, content, or style—but
I took it all in.
INTERVIEWER
You started caddying at golf courses near
the end of that period. Did you think you needed the stability of a paying job
in order to write?
ELLROY
What happened was that I quit drinking. I
knew I couldn’t write a novel as long as I drank or used drugs. And I was on
fire with a sense of urgency. A buddy took me to an AA meeting, and I quit
drinking in June of 1975. I continued taking uppers and smoking weed up until
August 1, 1977. That’s when I really got sober. I started writing a year and
five months later, in late January of 1979. I was not quite thirty-one.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have an idea for a novel? Or just
the general notion that you wanted to write one?
ELLROY
I concocted a story idea. A friend of mine
at the country club had taken a job as a process server. He asked me to come
work for him. He said it was fun. So I went out as a process server and looked
for a couple of witnesses that we never found. It was like being a private eye.
I was a big guy in a suit.
I started to plan a novel about a guy who
gets involved with a bunch of country-club golf caddies, who does some process
serving, who grew up at Beverly and Western, who was a tall, skinny,
dark-haired guy with glasses, all of which is me. But he was an ex-cop, which I
am not. I invented a nice arsonist—a psychotic, anti-Semitic firebug named Fat
Dog Baker. I knew a caddy who was called Fat Dog who slept on golf courses.
That’s Brown’s Requiem.
It’s wish fulfillment, it’s crime, it’s autobiography. But it’s mostly a work
of imagination.
INTERVIEWER
How, after fourteen years of telling
yourself that you were a writer, did you actually begin to write?
ELLROY
I was on the eighth hole at Bel-Air
Country Club and I said, Please, God, let me start this novel tonight. And I
did. Standing up at the Westwood Hotel, where I had a room. Using the dresser
as a desk, I wrote:
“Business was good. It was the same thing
every summer. The smog and heat rolled in, blanketing the basin; people
succumbed to torpor and malaise; old resolves died; old commitments went
unheeded. And I profited . . .”
Native talent—who knows? I sat down and
did it—and I had it. The beast was loose. I felt like I had created myself
entirely out of sheer will, egotism, and an overwhelming desire to be somebody.
All of a sudden I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I
haven’t stopped since.
INTERVIEWER
What did you learn from your early novels?
ELLROY
When to use first person versus third
person. How to set a scene. Where to put a line break or a new paragraph. How
to write an ending. How to develop a tragic sense of the world. Where to put a
love scene. When to stress autobiography. When to realize you’re actually not
that important.
INTERVIEWER
What inspired you to write Killer
on the Road, a novel told from the perspective of a homosexual
serial killer?
ELLROY
Killer on the Road is the only book I ever wrote for the money, because I needed some
dough. It was my first large advance, ten grand. In part, I was influenced by
Thomas Harris’s brilliant Red Dragon—to me the best pure thriller I’ve ever
read. With Killer on the Road,
I deliberately set out to shock. I wrote it in four months. It’s the only one
of my books that I regret.
INTERVIEWER
Why is that?
ELLROY
It’s a good book, but I had a hot date
with Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia victim—and I wanted to get to her fast.
The Black Dahlia had been building inside of me for a long time. I became
obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case shortly after my mother’s death. I
didn’t openly mourn my mother, but I could mourn Betty Short.
INTERVIEWER
Why did it take so long for you to turn to
the Black Dahlia case in your writing? It’s your seventh novel, after all.
ELLROY
Because I thought for a long time that the
success of John Gregory Dunne’s novel about the Black Dahlia, True
Confessions, would preclude a successful publication. That’s a
wonderful novel, but it doesn’t truly adhere to the facts of the Black Dahlia
murder case. Mr. Dunne calls the Black Dahlia “the Virgin Tramp.” Elizabeth
Short becomes “Lois Fazenda.” When I took on the murder for my novel, ten years
later, I adhered to the facts of the case more than Mr. Dunne did. His book is
phantasmagoria. My book is a much more literal rendering of the truth.
INTERVIEWER
How did that book change your career?
ELLROY
It liberated me. It was a best seller, I
was earning a living as a writer for the first time, and I was exponentially
more committed to creative maturity. I’m the most serious guy on earth, but I
can bullshit with the best of them, and I play to my audience. There’s a
concept in boxing that you fight to the level of your competition. You’re in
with a big guy, you bring the fight. You’re in with a bum, you do just enough
to win. But if you get lazy, then you put yourself at risk. I’ve always come to
fight, from the very first page.
INTERVIEWER
You do certain conventions of crime
fiction particularly well. How do you go about writing a great interrogation
scene?
ELLROY
You have a good deal of information that
needs to be conveyed to the reader. There has to be reluctance on the part of
the suspect to give up that information. There has to be a level of coercion
and guile in the interrogator. It has to be physically interesting. You have to
be on the side of the interrogator, but at the same time you have to identify
with the victim, and experience his horror at encountering official brutality.
I’m thinking of a scene in White Jazz when Lieutenant Dave Klein is beating
on some black guy who’s handcuffed to a chair. Klein says, I’m not enjoying
this, but you’re not getting out of here unless you talk. But, of course, Klein
is enjoying it.
Most importantly, the scene can’t go on
too long. It has to be fast.
INTERVIEWER
Why do your interrogators always beat
their suspects with phonebooks?
ELLROY
Two reasons: they don’t leave marks and
they don’t hurt your hands.
INTERVIEWER
Some authors say that their characters are
flesh and blood. Other authors say that they are puppets that the author moves
around on the page.
ELLROY
It’s disingenuous when writers say that
they have no control over their characters, that they have a life of their own.
Here’s what happens: you create the characters rigorously, and make clear
choices about their behavior. You reach junctures in your stories and are
confronted with dramatic options. You choose one or the other.
INTERVIEWER
You take great pleasure in making your
characters commit heinous acts, yet at the same time you rail against
immorality. Is there a contradiction here?
ELLROY
I can describe depravity without being
depraved. I wrote My Dark Places, a
memoir about my own slimiest actions, but I’ve refrained from such actions for
many years. Breaking into houses was a thrill, peeping was a thrill. But these
practices need to be curbed and regulated in order to ensure a safe society.
There has been a great deal of chaos in my life, and there remains chaos in my
creative life, so I crave order. This is what the superstructure of the novel
allows me—ultimate authority in the creation of an ultimate order, even as I
describe flagrant disorder in wondrous detail.
INTERVIEWER
Are you religious?
ELLROY
I’m a Christian. I’m a proponent of Judaism,
and I see Judaism and Christianity as the through-lines of the rule of law in
world history. I love the Reformation. I am of the Reformation—that moment when
you stand alone with God. More than anything else, I am an enormous believer in
God, the God who saved my wretched, tormented ass so many times.
I feel that I have a responsibility to
portray the spiritual, religious aspect of life. I hate squalor. I’m always
astonished when people come up with the nutty idea that my books are
nihilistic. I try to show the result of immoral actions: the karmic
comeuppance, the horrible self-destructiveness. I explicate the dire
consequences of historical and individual misdeeds. What happens to you when
you do not know that virtue is its own reward.
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin writing a novel?
ELLROY
I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to
sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place
I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed,
so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly.
INTERVIEWER
What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark
phase?
ELLROY
I take notes: ideas, historical
perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative
coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories,
the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I
can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s
a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus,
that I write the outline.
The first part of the outline is a
descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book
in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire
novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four
hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present
tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like
stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in
front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method
for every book.
INTERVIEWER
Your outlines resemble first drafts. Is
that how you think of them?
ELLROY
I think of the outline as a diagram, a
superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because
inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a
given scene.
INTERVIEWER
Do you force yourself to write a certain
number of words each day?
ELLROY
I set a goal of outlined pages that I want
to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s
important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five
pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel. The outline for Blood’s
a Rover, which is three hundred and ninety-seven pages, is
exponentially more detailed than the three-hundred-and-forty-five-page outline
for The Cold Six Thousand. So the ratio of book pages to outline pages varies,
depending on the density of the outline.
INTERVIEWER
Is it important for you to have a steady
writing routine?
ELLROY
I need to work just as rigorously on the
outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of
the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible,
because the outline is there. Take today: I woke up early, at five-thirty. I
worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a
moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky.
Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write at night?
ELLROY
I write some nights, and I edit at night.
I write by hand. I correct in red ink. When I’m close to finishing a book, I
will write more and more, because I’ve got finishing fever.
INTERVIEWER
Does it matter where you write?
ELLROY
No, but this pad is perfectly outfitted.
Some people find my place appalling. It’s too neat and clean. Nothing’s out of
place. If you look in my clothes closet, you’ll see that everything is arrayed
by fabric, style, and color. I’ll do anything I can to simplify my life.
INTERVIEWER
Where does this obsession with order come
from?
ELLROY
Chaos in my early life, fear of incapacity
and death, an attempt to control my overweaning emotionalism, my Beethovenian
drives and lusts. I’ve become more single-minded as I’ve gotten older. My
subsidiary obsessions have fallen by the wayside, with one big exception.
INTERVIEWER
Women?
ELLROY
Of course.
INTERVIEWER
What happens after you finish writing a
book?
ELLROY
I go over it, editing fifty pages a day. I
send it to a typist, who enters the changes. Then I proofread it once, make
some more additions and subtractions. At that point, there are two sets of
corrections. In copyediting, I continue to make small changes. Every
opportunity that I have to reach perfection, I take.
INTERVIEWER
What do you do once you have a draft that
you’re happy with?
ELLROY
I show it to my agent, Nat Sobel, who is a
stickler for the logic of the dramatic scenes. He makes certain that each
character’s motivations and actions are sensible. I’m a perfectionist. I go to
great lengths to get it all right. It’s the biggest challenge I face when I’m
writing. If you’re confused about something in one of my books, you’ve just got
to realize, Ellroy’s a master, and if I’m not following it, it’s my problem.
You just have to submit to me.
INTERVIEWER
How do you conduct research for your
novels?
ELLROY
There was no research required for my
first six novels. I made the stories up from scratch.
INTERVIEWER
What about The
Black Dahlia?
ELLROY
The LAPD will not let civilians see the
file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started
working on the novel, I was still caddying. I was living in Westchester County
and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los
Angeles Times and
the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was
four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four
hundred bucks in quarters—that’s a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced
pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It
took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the
process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then
I extrapolated a fictional story.
The greatest source, however, was
autobiography. Who’s Bucky Bleichert? He’s a tall, pale, and thin guy, with
beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women,
with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a woman’s death. It wasn’t much
of a stretch.
INTERVIEWER
Did you conceive of all four books in the
LA Quartet at once?
ELLROY
No, it was only when I decided to write
The Big Nowhere that it became a quartet. Thus, the last three novels—The Big Nowhere, L.A.
Confidential, and White Jazz—were
linked more closely with one another than with The
Black Dahlia.
My intention was to recreate the world
that my mother lived and died in, as an homage to her, a conscious address to
her, and a sensuous capitulation to her. I wanted to tell big love stories, big
crime stories, and big political stories. I wanted to honor Elizabeth Short as
the transmogrification of Jean Hilliker Ellroy. Whenever someone asks me what
the LA Quartet books are about, I say, Bad men in love with strong women.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of research did you do for the
extended sections on the homosexual underworld in The
Big Nowhere?
ELLROY
I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin
movie from 1980, Cruising. It has
a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village
and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and
is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The
Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a
homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.
INTERVIEWER
After the LA Quartet, you said you wanted
to go in a more “mainstream” direction. I wonder what that word means to
you.
ELLROY
I realized that I had taken the police
historical novel as far as it could go. I had written a series of masterworks
about LA, so I decided to do the same thing with full-scale America. Hence, the
Underworld USA Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold
Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover.
Most of all I credit Don DeLillo. Mr.
DeLillo’s novel Libra was published in ’88. I was astounded
by it. The book detailed the JFK snuff, largely through the eyes of that
horribly persistent loser Lee Harvey Oswald. I said to myself, You can’t write
this book—DeLillo got there first. He had created the entire metaphysical
worldview of the Kennedy assassination. Jack Kennedy was responsible for his
own death. His death was no more than the world’s most overglorified
business-dispute killing, on a huge geopolitical scale.
I was kicking myself that I didn’t come up
with this idea first. And then, very slowly, I started to see that I could
write a trio of novels, placing JFK’s death in an off-page context, with a
giant social history of the United States to follow.
When Knopf was slated to publish American
Tabloid, I sent Mr. DeLillo a copy in advance to thank him for the
influence. I included a thank-you note, telling him that I would attribute his
contribution in all my big interviews. I got a very nice note back from Mr.
DeLillo. He sent it on March 4, which is my birthday. It was 1995, but he
incorrectly dated his note 1955, which seemed appropriate. He praised the book,
and that was that.
INTERVIEWER
Why, after American
Tabloid, did you interrupt the trilogy and turn to a new form—the
memoir?
ELLROY
I was forty-five and very happily married.
I was living in New Canaan, Connecticut. Life was good. For Christmas one year,
my wife got me a photograph taken of me by the Los
Angeles Times at
the time of my mother’s death. She had it framed. She said, Do you remember
this? And all of a sudden—boom. It was like a little knife to my heart. I
thought I had locked my mother away after The Black Dahlia.
A month later, a reporter for the Pasadena
Star-News told
me he would be seeing my mother’s file, as part of a piece he was doing on
unsolved San Gabriel Valley homicides. Immediately the opportunist in me said,
I have to see my mother’s file and write a piece about it. GQ gave me the assignment.
I visited the unsolved-homicide unit at
the LA County sheriff’s office, and I met Sergeant Bill Stoner. We joked around
a little bit and talked about other murder cases. I realized that I was
avoiding looking at the file. Finally, he showed it to me. I looked at the
pictures first. They weren’t terribly shocking, perhaps because I’d lived with
the event mentally for so many years.
Then I read the police reports and saw
immediately how I would write the book. I knew that it would be my
autobiography, my mother’s biography, and Bill Stoner’s biography. I knew I’d
get a significant advance. I knew each of the book’s sections would begin with
italicized addresses to my mother. I knew that we would try to find the killer.
I knew that we wouldn’t find the killer. I knew we were going to get a lot of
publicity, and that it wouldn’t help the case. The book would be about my
journey to reconcile with my mother. And all of this came about just as I had
thought it would.
INTERVIEWER
How did Stoner become so central to the book?
ELLROY
Because, like me, he was driven by a
chivalrous notion of saving women in jeopardy. I identified with his emotional
maturity, his intelligence, his resignation. He’s worldly, in the sense that he
has a great knowledge of people, but he’s not in the least sophisticated. He
says “excape” rather than “escape” and “eyetalian” rather than “Italian.” He
has horrible taste in books and movies. But, God, does he know people. You
don’t see that often.
INTERVIEWER
For a novelist’s memoir, there is remarkably
little about your own experience as a writer.
ELLROY
That would be irrelevant to the main
narrative, which was my mother and me. I did not want the book to be a
discursive autobiography. I fear self-absorption as a writer. The book had to
be about something more than me.
INTERVIEWER
Has anything new happened in the case
since the publication of the book?
ELLROY
No. Bill Stoner and I continue to get
phone calls, but nothing of real merit.
INTERVIEWER
Is your mother as present in your life now
as she was when you were writing the memoir?
ELLROY
There is a quotation from Dylan Thomas
that I think of often, “After the first death, there is no other.” He was
writing about the firebombing of London, but for me the first death will always
be my mother’s. She’s with me still, but no amount of effort will allow me to
touch her concretely. I have fulfilled my moral debt to her to the best extent
that I could. I have granted her a mythic status through my work. The price for
that is public exposure. I am a gloryhound, I’ve always wanted to be famous.
She never sought these things. I have a need to refract myself through her, and
I owe her a deep spiritual debt.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a line at the end of My
Dark Places where
you write, “She was no less than my salvation.” Salvation from what?
ELLROY
From the horrifying, lustful,
self-destructive aspects of my masculinity. She’s always there in the wings
going, Ha-ha, you dipshit, you exploited my death, and now you’re doomed to
have women kick the shit out of you the rest of your life.
She also represents a powerful negative
example. She’s an alcoholic, I’m an alcoholic. She never got sober, I did. She
was a woman of the American fifties with appetites, and was harshly judged for
indulging them. I would daresay that she indulged her appetites with a great
deal more dignity than I have. I was a man in the sixties and seventies, and I
got to drink and fuck with an abandon that she never dreamed of.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve called yourself “the greatest crime
novelist who ever lived,” and it’s difficult to think of another living writer
who presents himself as aggressively as you do. How important is it for a
writer to have swagger?
ELLROY
You want swagger, look at Norman Mailer. I
don’t go around beating people up. I’m just James Ellroy, the self-promoting
demon dog. It comes naturally to me. You call it swagger, I call it joie de
vivre.
INTERVIEWER
You did say about Blood’s
a Rover, “This book is going to be better than War
and Peace.”
ELLROY
Tongue-in-cheek. Wink, wink. The highest
compliment ever paid to me was by Joyce Carol Oates. You know what she called
me? The American Dostoyevsky. Stop right there, I’ll take it.
Ultimately, I’m impervious to criticism.
The ass kicking I got by a lot of critics for the style of The
Cold Six Thousand was
a real motherfucker, but I stopped reading the reviews. You can’t start
thinking that critical consensus is a guarantor of quality. This is something I
feel very strongly about. I remember that when L.A.
Confidential went to
the Cannes Film Festival, a critic from The Hollywood Reporter wrote a negative review. He just
didn’t think the movie cohered. But by then all the other critics had loved the
film, and this guy at The Hollywood Reporter had to join the club, so he
included L.A. Confidential on his list of that year’s best films. The irony is
that I think much of what he wrote in his original piece was actually dead-on.
INTERVIEWER
L.A. Confidential marked a significant change in your writing. You adopted a “telegraphic
style”—extremely short, clipped sentences. How did you come to this?
ELLROY
When I handed in the novel, my editor told
me I had to cut more than a hundred pages, without altering the thematic
emphasis or shifting any of the specific scenes. Because the story was violent,
and full of action, I saw the value of writing in a fast, clipped style. So I
cut every unnecessary word from every sentence.
I wrote White Jazz, the direct sequel to L.A. Confidential and the last book in the Quartet, in
the first-person style, and in a normal, discursive voice. But it didn’t seem
to fit the main character, Dave Klein—a fucked-up, racist cop bombing around
black LA in ’58, who inexplicably gets hooked on bebop. I saw that if I
eliminated words from his speech, I would develop a more convincing cadence for
him: paranoid, jagged, enervated. I reverted to a more normal, albeit still
terse style in American Tabloid and My Dark Places, but then I went back and
did an extreme telegraphic style with The Cold Six Thousand.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the extreme style of The
Cold Six Thousand was
a success?
ELLROY
Helen Knode, my second ex-wife, is my best
friend and the greatest Ellroy scholar on earth. Helen said to me, Big Dog,
it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult. As a reader, you want less style and
more emotion.
INTERVIEWER
Did she tell you that before it was
published?
ELLROY
Yes. I ignored her.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if most sentences in that book
are four words or fewer. It’s been called minimalistic.
ELLROY
Minimalism implies small events, small
people, a small story. Man, that’s the antithesis of me. Telegraphic means
straight sentences—subject, verb, repetitions with slight modifications.
The book has flaws. It’s too long, and the
style is too rigorous for such a complicated story—the JFK assassination and
its aftermath, the plotting of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
assassinations, Howard Hughes’s takeover of Las Vegas, all told through the
overlapping stories of three morally compromised and traumatized men
desperately in love with strong women. It’s a big picaresque mess, and too
demanding a read. But the stamina of it is sui generis. If you get it, you get
it. It might not be your favorite of my books, but you can appreciate its
scope, its audacity. I try to write books that no one else would have the balls
to write. They require the reader’s intense concentration. Most writers, as
they age, write shorter and tidier. My books are getting bigger and more
stylistically ambitious. And my style will continue to evolve.
INTERVIEWER
In Blood’s a Rover,
as in many of your novels, several of your main characters undergo extreme
shifts of allegiance—from fascistic reactionary, say, to Castroite leftist, and
sometimes back again. Why?
ELLROY
I wanted to dramatize the seismic shifts
that took place during the sixties and seventies. I wanted to show the positive
effects of ideological transformation. So I have two right-wing-toady assassins
who can’t live with the horror of their misdeeds, chiefly the assassination of
Martin Luther King. They are two men who embrace revolution, driven by a hope
for redemption and by the women in their lives. It’s a more hopeful book than
the others in the trilogy. As a character says at one point, Your options are
do everything or do nothing.
This novel also displays my greatest
diversity of characterization. Karen Silfakis is a mother and a revolutionary.
Marshell Bowen is a homosexual black man who goes undercover for the FBI. These
characters think about their actions and analyze what they mean. They’re not afraid
to write down their thoughts. There are a lot of diary entries and
correspondence that give us different perspectives on American history between
1968 and 1972. It’s all about conveying the complex, ideological nature of that
era.
INTERVIEWER
When you’re writing about vast political
events, do you have a particular political agenda in mind?
ELLROY
No. I do have a complex relationship with
authoritarianism. I’d rather live in a society that errs on the side of
authoritarianism than a society that errs on the side of permissiveness. Try
telling that to a woman and see if you get laid.
But in my fiction, the two major
arch-villains are authoritarian, reactionary conservatives: Dudley Smith, a
corrupt LA policeman in the LA Quartet, and J. Edgar Hoover in the Underworld
USA Trilogy. And the overarching moral voices of the trilogy are Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you get the idea to introduce
document inserts—FBI transcripts, tabloid copy, police reports—between
chapters?
ELLROY
Sometimes I need to get outside of the
perspectives of the characters in order to convey information that they don’t
know, and offer occasional
editorial comments and historical facts in a
compressed, direct way. That’s where the document inserts come in. It’s also a
great excuse for me to write copy for Hollywood gossip
rags.
INTERVIEWER
As far as literary influences go, Confidential magazine seems a big one for you.
ELLROY
I loved Confidential.
Along with the Lutheran Church, it’s probably the biggest cultural influence of
my life. Who’s a homo? Who’s a nympho? Who’s got a big one? Who’s got a small
one? Who fucks people of color? Who’s getting head at the Griffith Park john?
Who’s a muff diver? That shit was important to me then, and it’s important to
me now.
INTERVIEWER
You like to read your work before an
audience. How do you prepare for the performance?
ELLROY
I semimemorize the passage so that I can
stand at the podium and share eye contact with the audience. I read shorter
sections with as few differentiations in dialogue as possible. Never go long.
Never try the audience’s patience. Never put in something too plot deep. Never
hem, haw, pause, or do anything that isn’t dramatically effective. How many
times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the
page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short
of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening.
I walk in and situate myself. I hunker
down and read something outrageous. Something with race, class, dope, sex,
insane language. I read a section about rug burns—that’s when you’re fucking on
a rug and you scrape your knees. Do you want to hear some candy-ass artiste
saying, Oooooh, I’m an artist, my characters do things that I didn’t intend? Or
do you want to hear about rug burns and get some yucks?
I don’t read for more than fourteen
minutes, tops. Then I answer questions for twenty minutes. Afterward, you don’t
short-shrift anyone—you talk to everybody. You scope out the women. You have a
gas. You’re happy, you’re grateful, you’re God’s guy.
INTERVIEWER
You claim not to read books anymore, yet
you seem extremely well-read. How do you account for that?
ELLROY
There are big gaps in my literary
knowledge. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I haven’t read anything by
William Gaddis or James Baldwin. I tried to read True
History of the Kelly Gang by
Peter Carey, because I met him, but I didn’t buy his style. I tried to read a
Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation
marks? I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book and saw that there were six or
seven consecutive pages in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant. My name isn’t
Juan Ellroy, OK?
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been criticized at times for being
racially insensitive. Why do you think that is?
ELLROY
Critics want racism, and secondarily
homophobia, to be portrayed as a defining characteristic, rather than a casual
attribute. Racist language uttered by sympathetic characters confuses hidebound
liberals. Who gives a shit?
INTERVIEWER
Are your books received differently
abroad?
ELLROY
I’m a god in Europe—the dominant American
writer of our time. And that’s no shit. America is the cultural top of the
world, and my books are viewed in Europe as realistic critiques of America—at
least by those Europeans who worship and loathe America equally and wish they
were Americans and wonder why they’re not the height of culture for the entire world.
I sell more books in France than in America.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve talked about your competitive
instinct. Who do you feel you’re competing against?
ELLROY
No one. I’m only fighting myself. I have a
duty to God and to the people who love my books, and that is to get better and
better. At this stage of the game, I’m entirely self-referential.
INTERVIEWER
Is posterity important to you?
ELLROY
It is. I don’t want to die. And I’m not
going to.
