The American Nightmare: An interview with James Ellroy

“Complete bullshit. People say the stupidest things.” Ellroy’s response to The Independent’s recent comparison of his latest book to Finnegans Wake is, in some ways, a surprise. After all, there aren’t many authors who’d reject a comparison to James Joyce. The reaction of this legend of American crime fiction, however, is apt: the book in question, Perfidia, is far removed from Joyce’s seminal masterpiece. The language in the 700-page crime noir is certainly avant-garde, but there is a wide dichotomy between the books. “The Finnegans Wake comparison is just a way of saying it’s hard to read. It [Perfidia] is the most explicated in style of any book of mine. Okay, it’s not brutally concise, but it’s much more opened up and people need to come to it with this in mind,” he says.

This is the first in the much-anticipated second L.A. Quartet, the prequels to the original quartet which spawned Hollywood blockbuster adaptions L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia. Tossing aside the Finnegans Wake comparison, Ellroy has different ideas about what lies at the centre of the genre-spanning book. “I merged the crime novel with the historical. Perfidia is a historical romance – it’s about big ideas, big betrayal, big politics and big romance.” 

Alongside these grand themes, the novel depicts an alternative history of World War II America, one in which the bitter taint of racism enveloped the country. A wave of anti-Japanese sentiment swept the US in the wake of Pearl Harbour and over 80,000 Japanese-Americans were interned, without trial, in primitive conditions at Camp Manzanar. Against this backdrop, a Japanese family are savagely disembowelled in L.A., and it is left to the corrupt and the forlorn to solve the case. This is the anti-American novel. It is less American dream, more American nightmare. For Ellroy, it was a story that needed telling – the inescapable shadow of WWII has hung over him since childhood. “As a kid, I believed it was all still going on,” he says. “I lived through the Korean War, and the adults were always talking about ‘the war.’ My mother had to take me aside and tell me it ended three years before I was born.”

"Who am I kidding...I wanna be the big cheese, I wanna be the grand fromage" – James Ellroy

Ellroy’s self-possession does not waver as the conversation turns to his mother. Her overarching influence on his work is irrefutable; he has spent years exorcising the demons left behind by her brutal murder, committed when he was just 10 years old. The body of Jean Ellroy was discovered dumped in a lane, her stockings tied tight around her neck. As an adult he wrote a searing memoir about his search for her murderer, but the crime has never been solved. Few could reproach Ellroy for the years of drug addiction, petty crime and homelessness that followed her death.

Comparisons have been drawn between his early life and the disturbing criminal world of which he writes, yet, at the age of 66, he has found a form of absolution. “The murder of my mother doesn’t drive me anymore. Her death is what precipitated it all, but now it’s more a striving love of history that pushes me forward,” he says. And the years of alcohol abuse and sleeping rough? “They forged me and gave me a tremendous will to survive,” he says, but knows too well that the struggle is never entirely over for the erstwhile addict: “I'm a sober alcoholic. I know the thirst very, very well,” he says

The author has also sought solace in religion – an unusual place, perhaps, for a writer who inhabits such dark terrain. Yet beneath the insalubrious underworld of crime and immorality in his novels, there lies a bigger message of redemption and salvation. Ellroy believes this is his most religious book, and at its core it’s all about “belief and allegiance.” “I’m not a nihilist. My books have a religious basis and morality to them. Some people find it hard to comprehend that I have these beliefs or that I actually despise squalor,” he says. 

As Ellroy points out, his novels are peppered with heroes and villains of biblical proportions. Yet it is never clear cut: cops are often corrupt, criminals are sometimes saviors. Faith is woven deep into the narrative, as the author creates inexplicable links between characters. As in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the theme of interconnectivity permeates Perfidia. “Everything is connected. This is the obvious truth: we are all connected as one soul. Throughout my work, characters glimpse one another but do not meet. They pass each other by, but they’re all connected, somehow,” he says.

This complex relatedness of characters spawned a process in which Ellroy penned a 700 page plan for the novel: he painstakingly reread the preceding seven books, creating detailed fact files for each character, scrupulously noting dates and filling in all the principal plot blackouts. “I’m trying to create a seamless verisimilitude and unify the previous novels as a coherent set. What I’m actually doing is writing a history of L.A. that spans 31 years,” he says.

Ellroy still lives in L.A., but nowadays it is a quiet life. He has no television, computer or mobile phone. He shuns mainstream culture, and has even given up reading fiction. His novels are written out on yellow legal pads as he blasts out his beloved Beethoven (whom he refers to as “the key to all my work”). Yet he places little importance on his unorthodox, low technology lifestyle. “I live in my imagination – for me it's WWII at the moment. Right now, it’s New Year’s Eve 1942 because I’ve got to start my next book so that’s where I’ve got to be – I live in it. It’s all in the imagination, people are capable of anything.” Living within this mental terrain has its perks for the author – ideas come suddenly and acutely in what he calls “synaptic flashes.” 

“The idea for the new L.A. Quartet came to me when I was gazing out of the window at my backyard. I had a sudden flash of forlorn Japanese-Americans in the back of a truck, driving past snow-capped mountains on the way to Camp Manzanar. Within a heartbeat I had a sudden vision of the bulk of plot and overall historical setting and the basis for the whole of the L.A. Quartet.” The original quartet changed the face of crime fiction: his terse, telegrammatic prose breathed life into a genre that is too often riddled with the clichéd and formulaic. After an eloquent rebuttal of the praise, he backtracks somewhat. “Actually, who am I kidding: I’m happy for it! I wanna be the big cheese, I wanna be the grand fromage. And if I’ve helped out other writers along the way, I’m happy,” he says.

In fact, Ellroy's writing has 'helped out' Scottish writers rather a lot; he is widely credited with coining the term Tartan Noir. According to the author, however, he was merely repeating a phrase Ian Rankin had used earlier. “I do have a kilt though. And I love my British fans!” he says. And that rumour that James Franco is adapting American Tabloid for the big screen? “I’ve never even met Franco. You know what? I wouldn’t even know Franco if he walked through the door right now.”