Why James Ellroy Rocks

Book Review: The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy (2001)

I fell in love with James Ellroy's classic noir plots, slick '50s street slang and mercilessly modern cynicism in his L.A. Quartet, but his take on the political mythology of the 1960s still managed to give me the shiver of pleasure you get from an amazing new discovery. The novel opens on November 22nd 1963, the day JFK was assassinated, and ends in June 1968, just after Bobby Kennedy followed his brother into the azure, with the killing of Martin Luther King in between, very real events around which Ellroy builds his fictional depiction of the dark and dangerous underside of that most mythologised of American decades.

It's Ellroy's writing which first catches the attention. There's hardly a paragraph in my copy of The Cold Six Thousand which runs over three lines. In fact, over half the paragraphs in the novel are one or two lines long, and those which run over invariably contain dialogue. The stripped-down prose represents a leap which few writers would have the balls to make. An excellent example of this subtractive method is Ellroy's vivid introduction of Saigon, where some of his characters are refining heroin on behalf of “the Cause” – four paragraphs, a total of 29 words:

"Dig it:

Rickshaw bikes and sandbags. Gun nests in frangipani trees. Grenade nets and gooks.

Saigon at high noon – Brave New Fucking World.

It's big. It's tricultural. It stinks."

From there the picture of Saigon is built through the characters and their actions, adding details here and there in every terse paragraph until the look, sound and physical feel of the place is more solid than a passage of purple prose could create. The sparseness of the writing is an obvious asset when it comes to action – whether it's a murder or a detailed investigation, the point-by-point presentation of events or facts is clear, concise and compelling – but Ellroy's command of the technique is such that it doesn't detract from the emotional impact of his story.
Where a more conventional approach to inner turmoil is to write an interior monologue or to work through a strand of a character's thoughts from start to finish, Ellroy deploys his staccato paragraphs to incrementally build an emotional state, usually negative. Paragraph by paragraph he will give us a thought or idea, an action or reaction from the character, an image, a fact, a recalled phrase, some telling physical description, they are allowed to pile up as individual ideas or moments until we're seeing the characters physical posture and expression as well as their train of thought, without an ounce of unnecessary explanation but always clear and intensely detailed.

Added to this, Ellroy has used document inserts – briefing documents, Police reports, FBI phone transcripts, newspaper headlines – both to round out the story by providing information (for example, a very handy briefing on the situation in Saigon) and to quicken the already hectic pace. Although both transcripts and documents are common devices in crime fiction, Ellroy has an ear for hard, fast dialogue and a sense of style which saves the inserts from stilted speeches, dullness and cheese (all faults endemic to the “Police procedural” school of crime novels, which lean heavily on such devices). He also has a deft touch in how he uses the device – I was particularly interested in his use of a string of newspaper headlines to show an event significant to the plot disappearing from public view, until only the characters and the reader know how it pans out in the end.

Ellroy's cast of characters play out the behind-the-scenes portions of the actual public events alongside real-world cameos from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes, Sonny Liston and Sal Mineo, but while this is a novel about conspiracies it is nonetheless overtly fictional. The plot, like the characters themselves, is designed to illuminate the political concerns, financial motives and American psychological aberrations which caused the assassinations to take place – and, indeed, the Vietnam war and the CIA's drugs trading and anti-Castro activities (the futility of which was recently underlined by his retirement, long after the fall of McCarthy and Hoover), pointedly written in a new dark age of American overseas intervention.
Each character is intimately tied to the key events of the era, involved with one or more of the groups which benefited politically from the war and the assassinations – the FBI, the CIA, the KKK, right-wing Cuban militias, the mafia and grey-area corporate concerns – and their combined life-stories between the end of '63 and the Summer of '68 combine to form the novel. Plot and character are as skillfully combined as history and fiction, and each of the central characters can be seen to somehow embody the era or play out its dramas in microcosm. From the introduction of Wayne Tedrow Junior at the opening of the novel, Ellroy starts as he means to go on:

"They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn't sure he could do it.

The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush-fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold."

Wayne Junior is the novel's protagonist, and his character arc is probably the best example of how skilfully Ellroy has entwined plot and character. At the beginning of the book he's a fairly straight arrow, not above a bit of strongarm work, but unwilling to play ball with the corrupt Vegas cops and opposed to the extremist views held by his father, a wealthy Mormon businessman who also deals in mail-order tracts on white supremacy, Jewish conspiracies and the allied evils of Communism and Martin Luther King.

Then the aforementioned Wendell Durfee rapes and murders Wayne Junior's wife, and his transformation begins. His investigation in Darktown leads him into an ever more violent world where his gun earns more respect than his badge, and his reputation gets him in with entirely the wrong people. Slowly, over the course of the novel's six-hundred-plus pages, he is suborned into increasingly dubious situations. His father helps him track down Durfee, in return for a little consideration, and when Wayne Junior kills his man it's Wayne Senior and his shady connections who make sure he gets away with it. In return, he helps them out with their interests in Saigon, all the time being drawn deeper into the twilight world of the American far-right which he once hated, until at the end of the novel he's driving the car which takes Dr King's killer away to safety.

There's much more to the novel – plot summaries of Ellroy's work are almost impossible and utterly pointless – but what lingers is its singular intensity and the author's obsessive probing into the dark spot at the heart of American public life.