comparative american studies, Vol. 10 No.

4, December 2012, 362–75

INTERVIEW

Interview with James Ellroy

Rodney Taveira
rodney.taveira@sydney.edu.au
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

James Ellroy’s oeuvre extends over eighteen books, comprising collections of short
stories and reportage (Crime Wave; Hollywood Nocturnes; Destination: Morgue!),
trilogies (L.A. Noir; Underworld USA), his celebrated L.A. Quartet, self-contained
novels (Brown’s Requiem; Clandestine; Killer on the Road), and memoir (My Dark
Places; The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women). He has also written screenplays
(Street Kings; Rampart) and teleplays. His novels have been adapted into film. The
most successful adaptation is Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, which won an
Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1997.
The L.A. Quartet initiated Ellroy’s popular success, each of its novels international
bestsellers. This was followed with Time magazine naming American Tabloid Best
Book of 1995. My Dark Places was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York
Times Notable Book for 1996; the latter citation was also given to Ellroy’s following
novel, The Cold Six Thousand (2001). Widely described as ‘hardboiled’, ‘neo-Noir’,
‘lurid’, and ‘outsized’, Ellroy’s writing almost always takes violent sex murders
and institutional corruption as its subject and almost always follows the travails of
tortured white men working for various arms of the American justice system. Just
as the line between his criminals and law-enforcers is invariably blurred into non-
existence, so too does the writing span fiction and non-fiction, without neat formal
separation — what Ellroy calls ‘rewriting history to my own specifications’.
Born in Los Angeles on 4 March 1948, Ellroy’s work is suffused with the central event
of his life: the murder of his mother, Jean Ellroy née Geneva Hilliker, when Ellroy
was ten years old. Jean’s last was a Saturday night spent out drinking in the
company of ‘the Swarthy Man’, an adjectival phrase that becomes the unknown name
it attempts to specify in My Dark Places. She was raped, then strangled. Her corpse
was dumped on a road beside a high school. During these fatal hours, Lee Ellroy
(‘James’ is a prénom de plume) was at home with his father Armand, an indifferent
parent whose infrequent income derived from managing Hollywood entertainers and
off-the-books accounts work when tax time raised demand.
My Dark Places details Ellroy’s education and graduation into crime. Beginning with
The Hardy Boys, the young Ellroy read mystery and crime books voraciously (My
Dark Places, 120). He grew up in Hollywood, the film noir capital during its peak:
‘Kiddie noir was my métier. I lived in the film noir epicenter during the film noir era.

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012 DOI 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000026

 INTERVIEW 363

I developed my own strain of weird shit. It was pure L.A. It was bravura L.A. for
one reason: I denied the existence of non-L.A. shit’ (Destination: Morgue!, 29). Ellroy
was situated in and by a paraphilic relation to Hollywood, loosely connected by
gossip coming from the tabloids and his father, who claimed to have ‘poured
the pork’ to Rita Hayworth and was prone to recite lists of closet Hollywood
homosexuals (DM!, 30; MDP, 129).
A schoolgirl and her mother found the heavily mutilated body of Elizabeth Short on
15 January 1947 in the Crenshaw area of LA. Ellroy first encountered this infamous
murder when his father gave him a copy of Jack Webb’s The Badge just one year
after his mother’s murder. Webb ‘steeped his 12-page summary in the ethos of the
time: femme fatales die hard and are complicitous in attracting death by vivisection’
(MDP, 124). The young Ellroy immediately superimposed what the newspapers called
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

‘The Black Dahlia’ murder onto his mother’s: ‘my symbiotic stand-in for Geneva
Hilliker Ellroy . . . Betty was running and hiding. My mother ran to El Monte and
forged a secret weekend life there. Betty and my mother were body-dump victims.
Jack Webb said Betty was a loose girl. My father said my mother was a drunk and
a whore’ (MDP, 125).
Living with his father in a rundown house with few disciplinary restrictions, Ellroy
took to stealing books, followed by stealing voyeuristic visions through the picture
windows of upscale Hancock Park. ‘I was still preadolescent. I was a thief and a
voyeur. I was headed for a hot date with the desecrated woman’ (MDP, 124). As he
finished his teenage years this proudly Protestant peeping tom moved into breaking
and entering the homes of rich Jewish girls with whom he went to school. Once inside
he sniffed panties, lay on beds, and raided refrigerators, liquor cabinets, and finally
bathrooms for pharmaceuticals. His breaking and entering, his forcing his way in,
while a gesture toward bridging the real and the fantasmatic, makes him aestheti-
cally complicit in the sexualized murders he was hooked on — all, of course, repeti-
tions of his mother’s sexual assault and murder. He spent time in the LA County jail
system and was homeless in the late 1960s to early 1970s.
In the late 1970s, Ellroy quit using drugs and alcohol and got off the streets. He began
caddying at Bel Air Country Club. The cash job afforded Ellroy the time and financial
stability to begin writing. An autodidact, Ellroy had never stopped reading crime
novels and rates Dashiell Hammett as the best crime writer — besides himself, that
is. Ellroy had addled conversations about LA crime lore with friends, especially about
who killed the Black Dahlia. This material provided much of the milieu for his first
novel, Brown’s Requiem (1980), written and published while Ellroy was still working
at the golf course, and the breakout The Black Dahlia, in which he metaphorically
solved his mother’s murder (1987).
The geography and history of Ellroy’s work has increasingly enlarged since his early
fiction, moving from crime novels set in 1940s Los Angeles to the metahistorical
fiction of the Underworld USA trilogy, the scope of which is national and regional,
rewriting the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King, the revolutionary history
of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and the activities of the FBI, CIA, and
COINTELPRO. In his later career he has written for the big and small screen, and
 364 RODNEY TAVEIRA

journalism for Vanity Fair. He completed the Underworld USA trilogy after fifteen
years with Blood’s A Rover (2009). He is currently working on a trilogy of novels set
in Los Angeles in the 1930s.
This interview was conducted with Ellroy in his home in West Hollywood, Los
Angeles and via various phone calls between 2008 and 2011. I spent two weeks
researching in Ellroy’s archive at the University of South Carolina in late 2007; the
interview begins there.
Q: What is the point of having an archive? How did it actually happen in the first
place?
A: I have a friend named Richard Layman. Rick wanted my papers for the Univer-
sity.
Q: Was it purely the Rick Layman connection or does the archive itself have any
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

allure, given who is in it: Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald —

A: Are they there at the University of South Carolina?
Q: Yes.
A: I like that. They gave me a letter jacket; they threw a lunch for me at the
Pacific Dining Cart.
Q: Do you have much of a sense of what is in the archive?
A: I need to go through it. A lot of it — My ex-wife [crime novelist Helen Knode]
and I were living in Kansas City. A lot of it was just stacks of paper that would
only make sense to me, and only then with some effort.
Q: I arrived in Hollywood last night after going out to Manhattan Beach from LAX
to get here —
A: You took a wrong turn.
Q: I took a wrong turn. I’m driving on the wrong side of the road compared with
Australia; I don’t know where I’m going, then I see all these names: Echo Park,
Silverlake. These names all mean something to me but I realized I don’t know
what they mean locally, before they’ve been mediated by yourself. For people
reading your books, how do they negotiate this mediation?
A: You accept the context. You go with the authority. For example, I’ve got two
editors: Nat Sobel and Sonny Mehta. Nat’s a nitpicker; Sonny is not. Sonny
works in broad strokes. Sonny understands something that Nat understands,
but Sonny has greater faith. When you read a densely-plotted book — John Le
Carré — at some point you just realize this guy knows what he’s doing. He’s
real, it’s real, the people are real. Here’s something you might not know about
crime fiction: in the worldwide annals of crime, there has never been a single
murder case of multiple shootouts, great looking women, systemic corruption
that brings the city down. It’s a construction. If the stories are socially, socio-
logically, and humanly real . . . find the new Everyman’s edition of these
Hammett novels: The Glass Key, The Dain Curse. I wrote the introduction. It’s
me talking about Hammett and the falsehoods. The only cops who continually
get in shootouts are robbery detectives because they go after armed robbers.
Homicide detectives — the person is dead. But that’s the guiding principle of the
story.
Q: It’s all about the body. And that’s why the Black Dahlia is such a ‘lodestone’, as
I think you’ve called her.
 INTERVIEW 365

A: Lodestone is exactly right. Magnetic field. Here’s the investigation: they asked a
bunch of people a bunch of questions. They beat up a bunch of pervs with a
rubber hose to get a confession. Nobody gave in.
Q: I notice you own many books on film noir; you’ve written about what you call
the ‘Laura Syndrome’ in reference to Otto Preminger’s 1944 film Laura. . .
A: Yes, if I could get any script job it would be Laura. I don’t need to go back and
read any existing script, or see the movie again — I don’t like the movie. It’s the
idea that a lone and horny homicide detective investigating the murder of a
beautiful woman, sees a portrait of the woman, and falls in love with her. She
turns up all right. That’s all you need. I’d set it on the North shore of Chicago
and he’d fall in love with the picture of a young victim, and she’d turn up
middle-aged. I’d love to write a romantic drama. It’s the ultimate Ellroy:
Laura.
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

Q: There’s a character that you don’t mention —

A: Waldo Lydecker?
Q: Yes.
A: He’s a fag, man. C’mon, he doesn’t date women.
Q: Yes, absolutely, he’s queer. But you never mention that character at all when
you’ve written about, separately, twice, the Laura Syndrome, in your piece on
teenage murder victim Stephanie Gorman and your memoir, My Dark Places.
A: It’s just the basic construction of the dead woman. So the actual critique of the
movie is immaterial. Cops are just suckers for women. Promiscuous as a breed.
They’re all very tender.
Q: It feels weird to me that you and what I surmise are your cop buddies hang out
reading sex murder files. You say that’s motivated by tenderness, that it’s love?
A: Yes, Stephanie Gorman, she’s just a heartbreakingly good child. I mean, she’s a
contemporary of mine; she’s just a year younger than me. She died not far from
here.
Q: Did you really remember that newspaper picture of Stephanie straddling the fold
in the newspaper stand that you write in the Vanity Fair essay?
A: Yes. [Clicks fingers.] Blip.
Q: Blip?
A: Blip.
Q: You like ‘blip’.
A: Blip. [Clicks fingers.] Yes, things come to me like that.
Q: Memory, then. The word ‘blip’ pops up throughout your writing. Blip, ‘bip’
sometimes. It’s to do with a flash of illumination?
A: Yes, it’s how my mind works. In the essay I talk about jacking off on uppers and
shit like that —
Q: And you can’t come. . .
A: Yes, yes, you don’t want to, you want your hand on your dick and the pictures
in your mind. I would always pass out because I’d drink myself off the
amphetamines grasping for some woman’s face. You’re right; it often starts with
visual imagery. I have to tell the story. Stephanie, you’re dead. We’re never going
to the prom. We’re never going to make out in your dad’s car. We’re never going
to spend the night together and make love. You’re dead. If the 17-year-old James
Ellroy and the 16-year-old Stephanie Gorman, who matriculated one high school
 366 RODNEY TAVEIRA

apart, got together, a Christian and a Jew, an upper middle class girl and a poor
boy who’s a dipshit, it never would have happened. That’s that. What can I do
for you now? I can write a piece about you and honour you and give your
spirit to the world.
Q: When I was reading through your outlines in the archive I felt as if you weave
the canvas and set the frame, but it’s the colour and line on the top that gets me
personally, the characterization, what characters say, more than the plotting. My
favourite novel of yours is The Big Nowhere, mainly because the character of
Danny Upshaw sits very differently from all the queers that are in your books.
A: I don’t hate gay people. Lenny Sands, in American Tabloid, is a strong man. He’s
gay. So, no, you know, Danny Upshaw. . . . He comes from the movie Cruising,
which is a bad movie. Al Pacino is a young cop who discovers he’s gay in the
course of the investigation.
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

Q: Is it just more dramatic having Danny slit his own throat rather than shoot
himself in the head?
A: Well, we’ve seen it a lot. It’s a shocking moment. What are we, three-quarters
of the way through the book?
Q: Yes. And though we’ve been going chapter by chapter, he gets longer chapters
than the other two focalising characters.
A: Yes. He’s putting together the ‘Wolverine’ serial killer. But he sees how it will
look, like he’s sucking a dick, so he cuts down to the windpipe.
Q: I’m very interested in the ‘Man Camera’ idea, the technique of detection Danny
uses where the mind becomes a camera, roving over and replaying a crime scene.
It’s not anywhere in the preliminary material or outlines that you’ve called
‘JAM’, ‘What I Know About The Big Nowhere’, ‘Pre-Jam Knock-up Notes’,
‘Ultra Jam’, no Man Camera in there whatsoever. Then boom — it’s there in
the draft.
A: What the outline, the superstructure, allows me to do is improvisation. The idea
of the Man Camera, and the protégé relationship with Doctor Layman — Rick
Layman, you see I borrowed his name — came to me extemporaneously. It just
came to me.
Q: So does it matter?
A: It’s a key detail. It’s a densification. By establishing a fictional character, by
putting him in the same room as Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis,
you blur the lines between the public and the private. That’s what I did with
the Kennedys in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand and the civil
rights leaders and the gangsters. You don’t see them in a previously established
historical context. You see them having sex; you see them personally.
Q: The Man Camera bleeds into Danny’s normal mode of perception, not just his
investigatory perception. You labour the points in the drafts that he’s obsessed
with detection, with scientific perception —
A: Right.
Q: Is that just to sublimate his burgeoning homosexuality?
A: That’s a brilliant perception, you’re absolutely right. Here’s the genesis of
Danny Upshaw: my buddy Randy Rice and I went to see the William Friedkin
movie Cruising. So he’s a young cop, presumably heterosexual, played by Al
Pacino, and there’s gay killings in Greenwich Village circa 1980, pre-AIDS and
all that. When was it? Yes, 1980, ’81.
 INTERVIEW 367

Q: But it’s post-Dog Day Afternoon, so there’s already a gayness attached to Pacino,
a potential gayness —
A: Right, because he’s getting his boyfriend a sex change in Dog Day. The movie
is bad, it’s elliptical, it’s just full of shit. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a story.
What a potential story.’ Young cop, homo killings. That was it. And I got fan
letters from women who just loved Danny Upshaw. He’s a prick; he’s a weedy,
little shitkicking guy. He treats people like shit. He’s semi-brutal. He’s abrupt
with people. He’s in way over his head. I know a guy, an old boxing aficionado;
I’ve seen him around. I’ve never seen him with a woman, he’s never been
married, he’s just a lonely, remote older guy now. He loves to go to fights. Big
guys with their shirts off? C’mon, he’s a homo. You know, you can tell.
Q: Talking off the record, men hating women came up. Why is that?
A: Because they want to fuck women. Because they want to recapture the horrify-
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

ing, needy vulnerability in the relationship. Because the cost of true love is
staggering.
Q: And they’re afraid of that cost?
A: Yes. There’s masochism. There’s sexual sadism, not violent sexual sadism, but
role playing. Women scare us. Anything that you want obsessively costs you.
Q: You’ve said that Josh Friedman who wrote the screenplay for The Black Dahlia
‘understood that love was a self-referential obsession’. You also mentioned an
unresolved relationship with the mother as being a reason for men having a fear
of women. In The Black Dahlia, Kay and Bucky have an argument where she
uses the education ‘that Lee bought her, turning it against [Bucky and] Lee’.
She’s talking about ‘missing thirds’, their triangular relationship. This is through
all your novels as well, this tripartite focalising structure. One way of reading
L.A. Confidential is that it’s a love story between Bud and Ed, a homosocial love
story mediated by Lynn.
A: That’s very astute. Did you call it ‘homosocial’?
Q: Yes.
A: Is that a term now, ‘homosocial’? What is this? I’m very curious about it.
Q: The ‘homosocial romance’ idea comes from the literary scholar Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick. She talks about these homosocial structures where desire between men
becomes legible when circulated through a woman.
A: Homosocial: that’s very, very interesting.
Q: The photograph is also a vital part of your writing and so is film. There are all
these snuff films and stag films and they’re often the keys to solving the murder.
In The Black Dahlia the hieroglyphs clue Bucky in to the scene of Elizabeth
Short’s murder, it’s the Man Camera itself that’s permanently running film —
A: It’s in Killer on the Road too, the projectionist. I spend a lot of time alone.
Q: You have photographs everywhere all over your walls.
A: I spent a lot of time going to the movies. I’m a very good screenwriter. I love a
good movie. Have you seen Zodiac? It’s one of the greatest crime movies ever
made. I had a talk to David Fincher about this. It’s the formality of it, the com-
position of it; it’s the fact that we spend the entire movie about an unknown
killer. You will have a very good 2 hour and 40 minute time watching Zodiac.
It’s amazingly composed. So I went through a shitload of movies; I’m not being
 368 RODNEY TAVEIRA

disingenuous when I say the key to understanding the work that I do is my

autobiography. James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles —
Q: ‘Kiddie noir was your metier’; ‘The film noir epicentre during the film noir
era.’
A: Right.
Q: That’s another hard thing for people who want to write about you — you’ve
already written about you. You cut them off at the pass.
A: Yes, but so much written about me is distorted. I was out early on with my
girlfriend Kathy and she was talking about me as a perv, which was technically
true. But, you know, sweetheart, between fall of ’66 and the summer of ’69,
I cravenly and circumspectly broke into houses twenty times. I stole pills, and
bras and panties, and made sandwiches, five and ten dollar bills. During that
time that I’m allegedly a badass criminal, I break into Kay Amistad’s house and
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

I read thirty-five books. I break into Julie Smith’s house and I read forty books.
You understand when you read My Dark Places that it’s brutally candid and it’s
brutally candid because I’m describing myself as a wimp and a pervert and guy
who never got laid when the whole world was getting laid. And so all over
Europe and Australia they talk about me going to prison. I didn’t go to prison;
I couldn’t have survived prison. I was in the LA County jail system.
Q: You ate some meals and put on some weight.
A: Right. I failed as a boxer as a kid. So when I talk about this shit from the
podium, people impute. You can tell an interviewer who’s never been in jail,
who’s never broken into a house to sniff panties, that back in the 60s it was easy
to get away with it. Back in the 60s and 70s it was easy to go through the
county jail system. There wasn’t the drugs, there wasn’t the race cliques, you
weren’t a target just because you were white. It was easy and it wasn’t prison.
They would rather be impressed with you, even if you tell them the truth. That’s
what biographers come up against and so do the critics.
Q: It’s not like they’re going to find out more about your life because it’s already
on the record. It’s also, I think, if you want an academic engagement, it’s just
the writing that’s left for people to look at, to be critical about. For me, the big
brutally honest moment in My Dark Places in terms of your childhood is sessions
of mutual masturbation —
A: Absolutely right. The toughest thing to write. 89% of males in 1948 admit to
some homosexuality, but it didn’t mean they were a homo. I knew that when I
was doing it with my buddy that I wasn’t a homo. But I was afraid people would
think I was a homo. I’m an American man who’s straight so that kind of shit
scares me. But you want to know why there’s all this gay shit in my books? It’s
because in ‘62 this neighbourhood kid and I pulled each other off. It ain’t hard
to figure that one out.
Q: There is a particular image of women in your work. That’s one of the things
people get stuck on, about how you wear your Oedipus Complex on your sleeve.
You use a very sexualized image of your mother; she appears in your books in
different guises. How do people get over it? Do you care?
A: No, I don’t give a shit. I had a date. She asked a couple of leading questions. She
wasn’t flirting with me. It was a going nowhere relationship. She loved to travel,
 INTERVIEW 369

and go SCUBA diving and go to parties and go to the movies and she was a
nationally ranked volleyball player. She said, this wasn’t a come on, ‘What do
you like to do with women?’ I said, ‘All I want to do is fuck them, after that
I don’t give a shit. I talk to my ex-wife. I don’t sleep well. Brood a lot. Get a lot
of exercise. I think; I lie in the dark a lot. And I don’t read, I don’t go to the
movies, I don’t have a TV set, I don’t have a computer or a cell phone. I have
an active mental life.’ I just realized, I don’t give a shit, I mean, what am I going
to do? Go to the theatre? Go see a musical? Fuck you.
Q: There is a strong sense of repetition in your writing; for instance, with
‘Stephanie’ you call her ‘movie-mad’, and Elizabeth Short, she’s also movie-mad.
What does that mean to you, to be movie-mad?
A: That they’re in love with narrative.
Q: Narrative?
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited

A: Yes. That they’re in love with the romance of the movies itself, the outsized
nature of the movies, the physical experience of sitting in a theatre and not
moving, the encapsulated, uninteractive experience; ‘uninteractive’ is probably
the word for it because you don’t have to do anything. All you have to possess
is vision and hearing, and you get a story in an hour.
Q: So it’s the compressed time frame, that’s what they’re latching onto as opposed
to the image?
A: It’s such an accessible form for everybody.
Q: Back to your enormous outlines. They obviously provide a framework. But
they’re also directed at your agent and your publisher?
A: Yes. There’s an outline payment that’s due. And so I turn in the outlines. Nat
Sobel goes over them, I think he had twenty pages of notes on Blood’s a Rover.
Nobody has the stamina to do this. You know, that’s eight months of my life.
Q: Is it written with them in mind to get you into a position that you can do
exactly what you want?
A: It’s a classic case of forewarned is forearmed. Do you want to write a big, dense,
complexly-structured, motherfucking book where every sentence furthers the
plot, deepens character, establishes and re-establishes itself? I can tell you how.
I’ve a writer woman, a PhD, Megan Abbott [Die A Little; The End of Every-
thing], who writes small books and lives in New York with her husband. She’d
like to write better books and this is the price. This is how you write a 700 page,
long-ass book. I was writing The Black Dahlia, in ’85, in Edith Eisler’s basement
apartment in Eastchester, New York, and L.A. Confidential came to me in a
fucking heartbeat. In 45 seconds I knew this: it was a cold, winter’s night, into
’85–’86. January or February. I was 37 years old. And in ’81, I believe there was
a massacre, where some black street punks murdered some people in a coffee
shop. I knew that the sequel to The Big Nowhere and the centrepiece of the
Quartet would be called L.A. Confidential, would have a similar story as the
centrepiece, would cover the longest chronological period, scandal rag journal-
ism, a troika of cops, one of whom was named Ed Exley, and the Jack Vincennes
character where he worked for a scandal rag. I knew the LA freeway system
would be in there and there would be a doppelganger for Walt Disney and would
use Walt Disney but he has to commit suicide. [Clicks fingers.] Very cold night
 370 RODNEY TAVEIRA

and I’m sitting at this desk, writing by hand, in a cold basement apartment. I
had a nervous tic then. I had this habit of cleaning the wax out of my ear with
a paperclip and putting it on my lamp. I had so much steam to walk off. I walked
two miles to a diner and had a double cheeseburger and just sat there. When I
described the moment to Helen, she said, ‘That may have been when you reached
greatness.’
Q: Is that the process of ‘brainscreening’ you’ve described in your books? You see
it, or is it such a big picture that you can’t see it all at once?
A: Let me go parenthetical here. Ronald Reagan was a visionary president. He was
a great president. He was all over the map in many, many, many ways but he
was a pure ideologue. He did some harm and he did a great deal of good. And
he trumped much brighter people, routinely, as Mikhail Gorbachev has con-
ceded. One of his most avid, critical biographers, Lou Cannon, was flummoxed
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by the fact that half the people thought he was brilliant and half the people
thought he was fatuous. So he turned to a book called The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences by Gardner. Reagan has a very strong narrative intelligence. I think
that my narrative intelligence is impeccable. Or close to it. I have an epic vision
and the stamina and the ability to sustain concentration.
Q: Almost at great cost. You had a breakdown in 2002–2003.
A: Oh yes, I worked too hard. I got to watch it now.
Q: You have written about a kind of megalomania of novelists. If you follow the
psychoanalytic path, mania is closely twinned to melancholia. And melancholia
comes about when you can’t finish the work of mourning. That’s because the
object that you’re mourning can never be known, can never be symbolized. Or
it can be symbolized but cannot be accessed. Maybe an example of that would
be at the end of ‘Stephanie’ where you say I can see you, but I can’t touch you,
I can’t smell you.
A: Well, there’s a doppelganger there, at the end of My Dark Places. I can’t hear
your voice, I can brush against you. You’re gone and I want more of you. You
know when Bruce [Wagner], Dana [Delaney], and I did a reading two weeks ago
it ended with the coda of ‘Stephanie’: ‘Baby, who were you? How would you
grow? Who would you love?’ Yes, a doppelganger. ‘Colour us devoted. Colour
you gone.’ Gorgeous.
Q: Could this be linked to the repetition, then? Because you’ve done this a few
times. There’s this kind of synaesthetic disconnect between different senses,
between smell, touch, and vision.
A: She’s there and I’m here. And the last time I saw her was the morning of June
27. She was 43 years and 2 months old. I can write her, I can taste. I can’t get
to her. I suspect I never will. But she’s there and I’m here and I am scrambling
at her. I sate my curiosity about her by writing about LA and by writing books
in general.
Q: Is this an imposing of order?
A: It is an imposing of order and it’s an homage.
Q: It’s the chasing, right? The chasing but never grasping: the Freudian drive.
A: Yes, I think the sex drive in me is very, very strong and that the sex drive is about
the alleviation of trauma. I can tell you this, it’s a cliché, the maternal urge and
 INTERVIEW 371

the desire to fuck women, we all know this. But when you express it, when you
have guys that are this brittle and hard-edged and masculine as my guys who
will take it up to that level, oh my God, that’s drama, that’s drama, that’s
drama.
Q: However, there’s always going to be a disjuncture. It’s never going to come
together, the gap between the present and the past, life and death. But this is
what you say you can do with your work: ‘Data blips cohere.’
A: I try for coherence. I find it. I affirm it in the solidity, in the material weight, of
novels, of anything that I write. I find it in my belief in God, my enormous belief
in God and my somewhat sceptical belief in Jesus Christ. I’m a very loyal friend.
I feel ripped apart by profligate urges. I know how to make it all come together
in fiction. I haven’t seen too many souls I didn’t want to save. When I was
younger, if there was a bottle of booze, I’d drink it. You got some dope, I’m
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gonna smoke it. You got some pills, I’m gonna pop ’em. All of which, the point
I want to make, you find out just how much of your attraction is based in
trauma. This restaurant where we are going to in half an hour; I was eating there
by myself and I just started sobbing. That’s where I am a lot, these days. That’s
what will give Blood’s a Rover its power. Helen’s favourite novel is The Black
Dahlia because, she said, ‘That’s the last book where you had your heart on your
sleeve.’ The subsequent books are brainier, they’re colder. She’s always con-
tended if you can take your knowledge of form, distillation of language, stylistic
rigour, big, big, big themes, bring back the heart of the Dahlia, in this novel,
you’ll write a stratospherically great book. I think I am.
Q: This love of women is based in trauma. You were saying this drive for the lost
object, and never being able to grasp it and not really knowing it, that you’re
creating bigger and bigger images that women carry now. Getting closer and
closer, but it’s necessarily asymptotic.
A: Absolutely right. The stakes, the moral stakes are higher, the political stakes are
higher, and these two women, Kathy and Joan in this book now, in this novel,
are political. They believe in something other than a man and a woman. One
woman wants to be a mother, one woman doesn’t. One woman is a violent
leftist, one is a Quaker pacifist.
Q: How do you want, or expect, or even care about, people outside your general
readership taking your books. You’ve got the people who read your books, they
lay down their money: a general readership. Then there’s, I suppose, the critical
response to your work and then not higher, but at a different level, an
academic response to your work, those who adduce your work for their own
projects.
A: I crave academic credibility. My last two girlfriends were professors. I’m not
going to make a career out of it, but don’t get me going on it, and the two
women are central to Blood’s a Rover. But critical reception is important to me.
I want to attract a readership of intelligent, analytically-minded people. What
one of the earliest and most astute critics of me said that I was right on the
juncture, that I was always immediately in my writing and immediately removed
from it. You know what we’re going to come back to again and again? It’s
outline, outline, outline, outline. And I love putting on a show. You know my
actress friend Dana Delaney and my buddy, [writer] Bruce Wagner, do a yearly
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reading at the Hammer Museum. I read Bruce, Bruce reads me, Dana reads both
of us, we read each other. We act. It’s an hour and ten minutes and we’re great.
There’s an 18-minute monologue from one of Bruce’s books that I read. I walk
into the audience. I impress men and I impress women.
Q: And the women are impressed that you impress men?
A: I think so. I know how to control my body in front of an audience. It’s an act.
I can just imagine a world and make you believe it. I just understand when
language is proper, or anachronistic.
Q: Does that come from seeing anachronism and improperness in other books that
you’ve read? Because you’ve read lots and lots of books. As you say in ‘Where
I Get My Weird Shit’, I read, I read —
A: Yes, I did. I read, I read, I read. I love language. I love Yiddish. I love black street
slang. I love hipster patois. I love race shit. I love that shit. Racism, for example,
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and I take so much shit for this; I’m a Tory but I don’t hate people. I think only
heterosexuals should get married and have kids but I don’t hate gays. People
can’t quite figure this out. And when you have a character — Bud White, Jack
Vincennes, Mal Considine, Buzz Meeks — they’re men of the times. It’s not that
they go out and lynch black people or beat up homosexuals; it’s just that they
have a low opinion of them and they express it verbally. PC people want their
racists and their homophobes in defined, closed terms. They see homophobia
and racism as a defining character flaw rather than a casual attribute. So you
love Big Pete. Why do you love Big Pete? He loves his cat. He loves women. He
doesn’t want to kill women. He’s full of grief. He’s an idealist. He killed six guys
in the middle of a heart attack. He’s a bad motherfucker and you love him. But
he’s a racist. He also has a gay buddy, Lenny Sands.
Q: On a physical, getting-the-job-done level, and a moral level, and the political
level is not important in comparison —
A: You plain dig him because he’s an uber-masculine figure of the times. Because
of his odd disjuncture in life — he’s a French Protestant émigré. He’s a World
War II hero. He’s a shitkicker. He’s good with children. You know, you dig
somebody like that. So, he’s talking about the niggers and the faggots all day.
Q: Other people don’t.
A: So they don’t have to buy the books and they can fucking kiss my ass.
Q: So, who’s your reader? Who reads James Ellroy’s novels?
A: About 62% men, 38% women, I would guess, to pull some figures out of a hat.
Educated. All over the place. There are people who have only read The Black
Dahlia. There are women, women academics, who have only read My Dark
Places. Women love that book, women truly get that book.
Q: Why do they get it?
A: It’s a man writing about his mother.
Q: So out of all the books you’ve written to get women to love you, that’s the one
where you really hit it?
A: Absolutely, absolutely.
Q: Do your characters get described much in terms of their physical appearance?
A: Subjectively. Generally, it’s a man looking at a woman. People will think about
somebody. Let me ask you: Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe are about 5’9. They’re
 INTERVIEW 373

both dark-haired. They both have blue eyes. Pearce has that dark, dark hair, you
know, he’s an Anglo, but it’s black. And Kevin Spacey is a short man [Spacey,
Pearce, and Crowe played the leads in the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential].
In the book, what I worked off of was Ed Exley is my size, he’s 6’3 and he weighs
about 175. So he’s tall and slim. Fair-haired, he wears wire-rimmed glasses.
Who’s the actor to have ideally played him? A thirty-year-old William Hurt. He
excelled at projecting cognition. Good-looking man. Bud White is not as tall as
Exley, has medium-brown hair, flat-top haircut. Limps from a football injury.
6’1, 6’2, he’s a big man, so strong he can pick you up and throw you across the
room. The closest thing to Bud White, I told Curtis Hanson this, is Sterling
Hayden. He has a full head of hair, is about 6’5, 230 pounds. He’s just huge guy.
But he’s got a blunt, flat, Anglo-Saxon face. You find that Pete Bondurant is
variously described as huge. He’s French. Here’s what you impute: he has dark
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hair and brown eyes. Not all French people are that way. So Pete is described in
The Cold Six Thousand as 6’5, 230.
Q: Do all these details matter for a novel?
A: I hate breaking action to describe what somebody looks like. There’s a scene
where Wayne Tedrow, in the new book, is in a shootout in a little squat pad in
the summer in Las Vegas. The guy he’s shooting at, they’re between fan blades
and the soft-point bullets are getting cut up and shrapnel tears through the guy.
[Clicks fingers.] It’s done in two sentences.
Q: Yes, when Mal Considine is killed, I didn’t pick it up the first time. He’s dead.
But things can also be so brutal. In L.A. Confidential, Bud White shoves
someone’s hand down a garbage disposal!
A: [Ellroy breaks the action here.] Are you obsessed with women? Are you
sex-crazed, by male standards? Are you nuts for it? You gotta have it. Are you
always thinking about women? Has it ever overtaken your life? So here I am,
I’m ten, there’s this big, good-looking redhead. Oh shit. [Pants like a dog.] I’m
perved out, she’s naked in the bathtub. My old man’s got what has to be the
world’s biggest dick, which I did not inherit; it had to be 18 inches long. I’m
fucked up. I’m an only child. It’s LA. My mother sends me to church. I’m still
fucked up. I’m a Christian. I mean I go to church. I pray. I have a Marxist social
sense. I’m always cracking fag jokes, nigger jokes, but I don’t hate anybody. I’m
always getting my heart broken. I had the opportunity to get involved with a
Jewish, bisexual woman. I’m fucked up in a horrible, neurotic way. I get to
impose order on my life by writing astonishing books that no one else can write.
I am to crime fiction what Beethoven is to music.
Q: ‘You are what Tolstoy is to the novel in general.’ This is what you said in an
interview with the New York Times. Where you lay in the dark —
A: There never has been anybody else like me, there never will be, nobody is
this single-minded, this monomaniacal, this detail-oriented, sex-crazed, this
fucked-up on American history, ever. Nobody will ever do that. For the same
pay cheque, when you turn in that they give you the same amount of fucking
money? I get to have adventures and talk in front of audiences.
Q: So do you think for people approaching any writing, you’ve got to have a
sense of biography? Or is it something particular to you because it’s particularly
powerful in your case? Or is it generally powerful for writers?
 374 RODNEY TAVEIRA

A: It’s a powerful story; it’s a powerful life that I’ve led. I’m glad that I didn’t
write a straight autobiography. My Dark Places is about my mother. You know,
people ask me, ‘Where’s the part about your rise as a writer? You only
paraphrase it very briefly.’ It’s not about me, it’s about her.
Q: Morality’s a big part, you write moral books.
A: They’re so moral. I believe that he was the guy, Christ. It’s the best explanation
I’ve ever heard. Some wild-ass shit went down in his lifetime. I choose to believe
it. I don’t believe God made the world in seven days. I don’t believe gays or Jews
go to hell. But I buy a lot of it. Life seems like a dream state to me. I understand
synchronicity.
Q: You understand it?
A: I think that part of my role with women is to bring them to God. I fear God
continually.
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Q: Your role is to bring women to God?

A: Yes. Doesn’t have to be Christ. I’m quite partial to Judaism. But I’m also on a
spiritual path and I despise bad behaviour. I see a lot of it. I think America is
taking a lot of unnecessary shit. And —
Q: For what?
A: The war in Iraq. The environment. It’s just a sense I have. I don’t believe in
liberalism.
Q: But you said you had a Marxist social sense.
A: Oh yes.
Q: So how do you reconcile that?
A: Personal responsibility. A sense of the necessity of the left to understand
where liberal Marxism sprang from. But in the end it’s a system devoted to the
extinguishing of belief. I hate that.
Q: Don DeLillo has been a strong influence on your later work. It started you on
the Underworld USA trilogy, right?
A: Libra changed my life; it’s the most influential book I’ve read. I credit it as much
as I can.
Q: You originally said you didn’t know how to do it, you couldn’t see how it could
be done, writing about that era from a personal story perspective —
A: How could Don DeLillo have come up with Lee Harvey Oswald as the ultimate
American loser, malcontented dipshit, autodidactical antihero and not me?
I was just astonished when I read that book. He is smarter than me. He is way
smarter than me.
Q: Rewriting history to your own specifications — your later novels. Is it just a
matter of getting the outlines done and then the rest comes quickly?
A: Yes. This book is coming fast. I’ve written 240 pages I turned in a few months
ago. More is due soon. It’s because it’s in a more explicated style.
Q: Is that a concession to your readership?
A: The concession is, you know what? It was Helen. Helen said this book is
too long, it’s too abbreviated, it’s too complex, and she’s right. She’s a gifted
novelist herself. She’s great. You get to be the guy that does it. I’m the guy.
I don’t know where I got the massive ambition.
Q: What about research?
 INTERVIEW 375

A: I have researchers that compile fact sheets and chronologies. There are places
you have to see. I had to see Las Vegas for The Cold Six Thousand. I have to
go to the Dominican Republic — Haiti’s too deadly. You can’t go there. If you’re
white you’re fucked. I’ll hire a Spanish speaker to drive me around. I can get the
descriptions right. Writers can get better and better and better into old age
if they address each preceding novel without taking shortcuts. That’s why in
that aside to Sonny Mehta and Nat Sobel I will now concede that The Cold
Six Thousand was somewhat too long, way too rigorously stylistic, and too
abbreviated in its presentation of events.
Q: In the beginning, do you engage the characters at this level of detail, in human
terms, or in political terms or sexual terms?
A: Sexual terms. This is gender shit. This is handed to me. This is white American
masculinity. You know, American men who are afraid of being homosexuals,
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who are afraid of being cowards, who are afraid that women won’t love us, who
are afraid that somebody fucked our wives better than we did and had a bigger
dick than us. I go right to that shit. I just know this kind of guy so well. But my
women are great — Celeste is great, Audrey is great, Kay Lake is a transcendent
character, Claire De Haven is great, Lynn Bracken is great, Inez Soto is great,
Glenda Bledsloe is great, Laura Hughes is great, and Joan and Kathy top them
all. What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate. Did Helen write
that? Or is it Jung?
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