Word: ellroy
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...successful," says co-author Bui, visiting London last week for the U.K. launch. (An unusual media tour: no television appearances or photographs. Avoiding the corrupting power of fame is a Blissett principle.) "We're fans of pulp novels," he adds. "We love Elmore Leonard. Also Dashiell Hammett. And James Ellroy, especially American Tabloid, his 1995 novel about John F. Kennedy. We wanted to write a book like that set in Europe." Over five years they sketched out a plot ("except for the ending, which would have been no fun") and divided the novel's many scenes among themselves, with each...
...know is about three imaginary psychopaths involved in everything from the Bay of Pigs to the assassination of John F. Kennedy--is a hard book to follow. Having gone way over the top in his first portrait of recent U.S. history as gutter journalism and a paranoid drug trip, Ellroy can't replicate the first-time shock effects of Tabloid and must settle instead for offering more of the same. He does so brilliantly, but the thrills seem familiar...
...Ellroy places these three at the secret center of five years of convulsive events. Littell is a lawyer who represents both Howard Hughes and the Mob bosses who own the Las Vegas casinos Hughes wants to buy. A former Jesuit seminarian and FBI agent, Littell also gets regular phone calls from J. Edgar Hoover with instructions to infiltrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. For his part, Bondurant sets up a CIA plan to process poppies into heroin in Vietnam and use the profits to finance an insurrection against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Tedrow observes--"His standard...
Double crosses are taken for granted in the world Ellroy creates. Suspense develops over the convoluted ways in which triple or quadruple crosses emerge. When he isn't offering taped phone conversations or top-secret memos, the author employs prose totally devoid of subordinate clauses. Here is the reclusive Hughes, dismissively labeled after his odd habits: "Drac stuck to his coffin. Mormons tended him. Drac sucked blood. Drac ate Demerol. Drac shot codeine...
...time the names Jimmy Ray and Sirhan Sirhan start popping up, old Ellroy hands will know exactly where, in the year 1968, the headlong plot is aimed. No getting around it: The Cold Six Thousand is an exceedingly nasty piece of work. Yet it is often funny--particularly when the fictional Hoover and Hughes appear-- and traces an unexpectedly moral arc through all its mayhem. Pick it up if you dare; put it down...