'Demon dog' slips the leash

02 September 2014 - 02:06 By Chris Harvey
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There has never been a writer like James Ellroy. Since the 1980s, in novels such as LA Confidential and The Cold Six Thousand, he has been making real a secret world behind the official history of America, where bad women mingle with very bad men, and the designs of murderers, cops, mobsters, movie stars and politicians can be equally callous, equally deadly.

He melds racial invective, street slang, hepcat jazz talk, junkie jive and scandal-rag rants into prose of controlled intensity, and to enter it is to experience a vivid eyeball rush of recognition.

Beside the work is the man, known as the "demon dog" of American literature, whose life of petty crime, homelessness and drug use before he became a novelist in his late 20s is inextricably linked to the one detail that most people know about him.

His mother, Jean Hilliker Ellroy, was murdered when he was 10 years old and her body was dumped by the side of a road.

"Yeah, she got whacked, snuffed out. The killer was never found," Ellroy used to tell audiences.

These days, aged 66, he lives quietly, alone, in Los Angeles, without a television or computer.

"I don't drink or eat drugs. I sustain crushes [on women] and I live largely within my head. I bought a house almost two years ago. It's peaceful, quiet. I feel like I've done a lot of growing up since my marriage to Helen ended."

Ellroy separated from journalist and novelist Helen Knode, after 14 years of marriage, in 2005.

His earlier self, however, is the doorway to his fiction.

"The way I lived," he says. "I have a penchant for the extreme."

That's an understatement. There can be few works more disturbing than the crime novels that make up the LA Quartet, set in Los Angeles between 1946 and 1958, and the Underworld USA trilogy, which traces wider events from 1958 to 1972, taking in the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Bodies pile up. Race divides. Brutality and cold calculation rule.

It is a more truthful account of US history, Ellroy claims, than the "official version and the Marxist revisionist version", both of which, he says, "should be judged as equally fallacious".

His new novel, Perfidia, is the first book in a planned new LA Quartet, which returns to the lives of some of his best-known characters, such as Kay Lake from The Black Dahlia, and Sergeant Dudley Smith, in the years between Pearl Harbour and V-J Day.

It opens with detectives called to the blood-soaked Los Angeles home of a Japanese family, who have apparently killed themselves in an act of hara-kiri. Among the cops is a gifted Japanese chemist, Hideo Ashida. The deaths are the prelude to an ever-darkening tale of a fear-driven city in the grip of a reckless wartime energy.

"Frankly, it was a hell of a place to be," says Ellroy.

He comes clean about one of the book's main protagonists.

"William H Parker is the darkest, the truest, the most redemptive self-portrait I've ever written. He's got my proletarianism, my Christian fervour, my piety, my profligacy, my restlessness, my need to control my environment, my extreme ambition, my fear, my alcoholism, all of it."

Parker also has an obsession with a red-haired woman he barely knows. I ask Ellroy if she bears any relationship to his own mother.

"Yes she does," he says sadly. "My mother's the quintessential tall redhead to me."

Parker's alcoholism belongs to Ellroy's past. He no longer drinks.

For the record, it should be stated that Parker is also a real-life figure. He was chief of police in Los Angeles from 1950 to 1966. In Perfidia, Parker is making his way through the ranks.

It is pure Ellroy: the writer who tells me that in his late teens and early 20s he was "breaking into houses to sniff girls' and women's undergarments, steal money out of wallets and purses, and pop pills out of medicine cabinets", grafting a self on to the man he regards as "the greatest American policeman of the 20th century". In Ellroy, fact combines with fiction in startling ways.

His street-level existence stretched over 12 years, and included periods of "going through the LA county jail system", before he turned his life around, got a job as a golf caddie and wrote his first detective novel, Brown's Requiem (1981).

I ask him how, at 66, he will be able to sustain the intensity of an entire new quartet (Perfidia arrives a full five years on from his previous novel, Blood's a Rover).

He responds not with doubt but an expression of his desire to get back to writing the next volume as soon as his international publicity tour is complete. - ©The Daily Telegraph

  • Order James Ellroy's 'Perfidia' (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) from Exclusive Books (R358). Available next week
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