Word: tabloid
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...serial killer (as fictional as John Cree) is stalking the Limehouse district of London's East End: two prostitutes, an elderly Jewish scholar and the entire family of a secondhand clothes dealer have been found murdered and grotesquely mutilated. The carnage, screamingly reported in the tabloid press, inspires fear among the citizens and perhaps something else: "It was almost as if they had been waiting impatiently for these murders to happen -- as if the new conditions of the metropolis required some vivid identification, some flagrant confirmation of its status as the largest and darkest city of the world...
...famous won a round against Britain's notoriously nosy tabloid newspapers last week. It all started when Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, told a friend he was leaving his wife and taking his children to America. The story was credible: Spencer's wife Victoria Lockwood is undergoing treatment for eating disorders, and their marriage has been strained. But it was false: Spencer made the whole thing up to see whether his friend was leaking stories to the News of the World. Sure enough, the next day's front page carried the story, and Spencer came forward to reveal...
...bring in the stenographer for a full confession. At a time when storytelling has largely been ceded to film-makers--when Pulp Fiction causes more chatter than pulp fiction--American Tabloid is a big, boisterous, rude and shameless reminder of why reading can be so engrossing and so much fun. The secret, of course, is language. When it is used well-which in Ellroy's case means being pared down to taut, telegraphic sentences, subject-verb-blooey!-one word is worth a thousand pictures...
Hence, American Tabloid (Knopf; 576 pages; $25). One month after publication, the novel is in its fourth printing and is creeping up the best-seller lists. It has attracted favorable, though sometimes nervous, reviews, understandably so. Recommending a book like American Tabloid--and there is no other book quite like American Tabloid-is most safely done to close friends, whose tastes and tolerances are familiar. Where do they stand on wall-to-wall violence? What is their position on over-the-top sleaze and the reduction of nearly all human conduct to the narrow, insistent lust of self-interest? Pushing...
...American Tabloid is history as Hellzapoppin, a long slapstick routine careering around a manic premise: What if the fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon...