Of the many novelists who have made Los Angeles an essential character in their work, perhaps none in contemporary times has embodied the city more fully — nor had such a lasting impact in creating the lens through which L.A. is viewed — than James Ellroy.
“Geography is destiny,” Ellroy tells me.
Born in Los Angeles in 1948, Ellroy had a troubled early life that could’ve been the basis for one of the era’s film noirs; his mother was murdered when he was 10 (the case remains unsolved). In response, he found solace in true-crime stories — including one by Jack Webb about the infamous 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, dubbed the Black Dahlia killing.
“I’m just really a dipshit kid who loved to read with a God-given talent,” he tells me. “My mother’s death didn’t make me the novelist that I am; it mandated my reading curriculum. I was already a big reader, but from that point on, all I read were crime books.”
After being expelled from high school and briefly joining the Army (before being dishonorably discharged), Ellroy worked odd jobs — he was a golf caddy for years — and even experienced homelessness. Then, in 1981, at 30, he sold his first novel, Brown’s Requiem. What followed was a string of pulp classics, including his first L.A. quartet (including The Black Dahlia, about Short’s murder, and L.A. Confidential, later turned into the Oscar-winning movie that Ellroy has trashed in the past). This week, Ellroy debuted Red Sheet, the fourth book in what was a second quartet of L.A. novels (that will now become a quintet, thanks to another forthcoming novel).
Ellroy estimates he’s read “thousands” of crime novels in his life. “I’ve assimilated the style,” he says. “I’ve assimilated police work, and I have a logical, methodical mind… There are people that God elects to do certain things. Mine was to revolutionize the crime novel.”
Red Sheet is set just after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and focuses on frequent Ellroy character Freddie Otash, an LAPD investigator looking into communism, crime, murder — typical James Ellroy stuff that blends fact and fiction.
“There’s only one question I never answer, and I shouldn’t: What’s real and what’s not in my books?” Ellroy tells me. “My métier is reckless verisimilitude. At the beginning of my most honored novel, American Tabloid (1995), about the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination, I write, ‘America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances.’ I go on to say that our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth in hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. In other words, if it doesn’t fit my storyteller’s instinct and agenda, I make it up.”
It’s a fitting way to think, because if Los Angeles didn’t exist, a strong case could be made that Ellroy himself would have had to invent it. But despite his deep ties to the city’s past, Ellroy no longer lives here. He’s since moved to Denver.
“I only come out here for book tours, when women divorce me and when I need to shag my ass into rehab,” he says. “Other than that, I’m never here. I can’t believe how it’s changed. So I have an L.A. in my mind, and now I’m living in L.A. from my early cognizance because when Red Sheet takes place, I was a 14-year-old kid entering Fairfax High School over at Melrose and Fairfax.”
The Los Angeles of now, he says, “feels desaturated. It feels un-glamorized, and I can’t wait to conclude my work here.” The rest of Ellroy’s week includes a Saturday screening of L.A. Confidential at the Los Angeles Theatre.
“Then it’s back home to Denver.”
