Word: thousands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that King was the one guy he couldn't break--that's what interested me," says Ellroy. In high school Ellroy deliberately shocked others with pro-Hitler views, but he now professes great admiration for King, and argues that underneath it all, both American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are "deeply moral books. If you show there was a nexus of racism in America which led to the death of arguably the greatest American of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, you are expositing racism on the page. And literature is the explanation of reality through incident...
Ellroy likes to shock. If you like him that way, fine. If not, he couldn't care less. His new novel, The Cold Six Thousand, uses one of America's most toxic racial epithets right up front. "There's a reason I used that word in the first sentence. I'm warning people: You want a nice book about the '60s, stop right here. You want to know what really happened--read...
...with these great events roiling around me. I never partook, but I always felt there were private stories underneath the public events." In 1995 he published American Tabloid, his inimitable take on what led up to the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Its sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, takes the sordid tale of gangsters, pols, G-men, Cuban racketeers and hired killers up to Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968 "and down to new depths...
...years old, an event that has appeared in several of his books. In 1996 Ellroy took time off from his fiction to write My Dark Places, a factual account of his attempt to find his mother's killer 38 years after the fact. He hired a detective and reinvestigated thousands of old leads. They did not find the killer, but Ellroy is not disappointed. "I suspect part of the whole dynamic of Jean Hilliker Ellroy and me is that I'm not going to know and I'm not meant to know... Closure is bulls___--it's not worth anything...
Readers of James Ellroy's groundbreaking, best-selling American Tabloid (1995) know pretty much what to expect from The Cold Six Thousand (Knopf; 672 pages; $25.95), which seamlessly picks up the story at the moment the earlier novel ended. Neophytes, though, deserve some advice and counseling. Think twice before you begin the first page. Are you sure you want to witness nearly every lurid conspiracy theory concerning public events during the mid-1960s fleshed out in brutal, nightmarish and totally unsentimental fiction? No? We hardened veterans thought not. Goodbye...