James Ellroy as Historical Novelist

Author(s): Jonathan Walker

Source: History Workshop Journal , Spring, 2002, No. 53 (Spring, 2002), pp. 181-204
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289779

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist
by Jonathan Walker

INTRODUCTION

Thanks to Agatha Christie . . ., murder tends to be reduced to a kind of

middle-class parlour game. I think that's bollocks. A murder is a little
human apocalypse. It has threads that run up to it and run away from it,
that tie it up to the culture that it happens in, to the art of the time, to
the politics of the time ... It struck me that if I could find an interesting
enough murder, I could follow threads out from it and solve the entire
culture.
Alan Moore, 2000.1

Two days ago I attended a lecture given by a researcher working for the
CIA. He talked about 'producers' and 'consumers' of information. He men-
tioned the phrase 'covert operations' in passing once or twice. References
to the Bay of Pigs and exploding cigars were conspicuous by their absence.
Yesterday I attended a reading by the novelist James Ellroy, whose new
book is set in the mid 1960s. It describes how rogue CIA associates sold
heroin grown in Laos to black neighbourhoods in Las Vegas, with the aim
of financing illegal incursions into Cuba.2
Compare and contrast.
James Ellroy is one of the most significant historical novelists writing
today. His novels, beginning with The Black Dahlia (1987) and culminating
(so far) with The Cold Six Thousand (2001), describe 1950s Los Angeles
and 1960s America through the eyes of 'bad men doing bad things in the
name of authority'.3 If he departs significantly from what academic
historians would consider acceptable practice, it is because he has a
different, though equally rigorous and committed, approach to his mater
It is an approach that historians might learn something from if we are will
to consider it on its own terms rather than dismiss it for failing to confo
to ours.4

HISTORY AS REPRESSION

L.A. is the city of nightmares, mine chiefly, other people's magnified

through my eyes. Back in the '40s and '50s, they were nightmares under-
cover. They were nightmares that were ignored, held surreptitiously,
given other names. Up to this point in my career, my job has been to
make those nightmares ... explicit.
James Ellroy, 1993.5

History Workshop Journal Issue 53 C History Workshop Journal 2002

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182 History Workshop Journal

Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a
reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight....
It's time to ... cast light on a few men who attended [JFK's] ascent and
facilitated his fall.
They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers
and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of
their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we
know it.
It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter
to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly
define their time.
James Ellroy, 1995.6

There must be more; the words must be heard which were never spoken,
which remained deep in their hearts (search your own, they are there);
the silences of history must be made to speak, those terrible pedal points
in which history says nothing more, and which are precisely its most
tragic accents. Then only will the dead be resigned to their sepulcher.
Jules Michelet, 1842.7

The notion of history as repression, which has been explored theoretically

by writers like De Certeau,8 is a key theme for Ellroy. It is at the centre of
his understanding of the relationship between history, fiction and truth. For
Ellroy, working as a novelist, the theme has different implications than for
De Certeau. To understand these implications, we need to note a paradox
that characterizes all historical novels. It can be stated thus. Within the
fictional world of the novel, there is a definite truth. In Ellroy's L.A. Quartet,
as in all crime fiction, there is a central organizing revelation, towards which
the plot is travelling like a bullet fired from a gun. However, the relation-
ship between this self-contained, fictional truth and the truth of history is
quite deliberately blurred.
Ellroy goes far beyond what other historical novelists (never mind
historians) would consider acceptable in this respect. Many of the things he
says about historical figures are frankly libellous. There's one particularly
memorable short story, which has Frank Sinatra out of his mind on LSD
proclaiming that he's Jesus Christ.9 Ellroy says about American Tabloid, his
novel on the Kennedy assassination, 'You have to keep things ambiguous
for the reader. You don't want them to know specifically where the divid-
ing line between fact and fiction ends, or you destroy your verisimilitude'.10
For Alessandro Manzoni, one of the greatest nineteenth-century exponents
of the historical novel, this lack of any distinction between what was
invented and what was documented was the genre's greatest flaw.1' F
Ellroy, it is its greatest strength.
Ellroy's deliberate obfuscation is justified by a conspiracy theory vision
of history. He implies that what you think are the facts may be a deception

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 183

perpetrated upon you by those in power and only a 'reckless' exploration

of extrapolated possibilities can liberate you from the power that these
pseudo-facts have over your imagination. Since the truth has been erased
from the documentary record (although traces of it remain there), by defi-
nition it is only possible to approach or hint at it through invention.
The traditional function of the historical novel has been to juxtapose per-
sonal stories with the 'great' events of history.12 Ideally, these invented
stories were supposed to harmonize with and counterpoint the narrative
reconstructed by historians. By contrast, the result of placing Ellroy's novels
next to 'official' documentation is a screech of feedback. He works in the
spaces between the facts to undermine, contradict, deface and rewrite the
official version.13 His model for historical truth is not the academic essay
but the scandal-sheet magazines that figure prominently in all his novels,
notably L.A. Confidential.
What Ellroy is trying to do is recover history's repressed memories, to
'make the nightmares explicit'. The murders in the L.A. Quartet are always
symptoms, expressive of and intimately connected to the wider culture, not
just isolated causes mechanically driving a plot. In other words, the psy-
chosexual disorders of his murderers are presented as microcosms of wider
social processes. They are often deranged as a result of an attempt to sup-
press unpalatable truths and, to make the Freudian overtones even more
explicit, this repression relates to or is generally initiated by their father.
Hence the theme of incest crops up again and again in Ellroy's books
because it symbolizes a knowledge that cannot be admitted openly but that
infects everything. More generally, all his characters have secrets, whose
repression becomes the driving force and defining element of their charac-
ter. They 'compartmentalize' their memories, with varying degrees of
success. So, in The Cold Six Thousand, the protagonists are all tacitly aware
of developments in each others' lives without ever being able to discuss
them openly. Again, this psychological repression is mirrored at a socio-
logical level. For example, the chief villain of Ellroy's L.A. novels, the rogue
policeman Dudley Smith, is obsessed with the idea of 'containment',
keeping crime and drug-dealing within black neighbourhoods - as indeed
are the drug-dealing CIA men in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thou-
sand.
So, Ellroy diagnoses the sickness of history on the basis of its visible
symptoms, like a psychiatrist interpreting a dream that the patient is not in
a position to understand. I think that this obsession with repression is one
reason why Ellroy gives his 'bad white men' free reign to indulge their
racism and homophobia. I imagine that Ellroy would see political correct-
ness as a form of repression - not a solution to these attitudes but merely a
way of rendering them invisible. Similarly, he regards the current preoccu-
pation of crime-writers with serial killers as a form of what Freud would call
displacement (that is, a way of appearing to confront a problem that doesn't
really face it at all).

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184 History Workshop Journal

It's also worth noting that the false truths that Ellroy is trying to decon-
struct are not only those from newspaper puff pieces and official policy
statements. They also come from popular culture and, in particular, from
the generic conventions of detective fiction. He says that,

The single thing I hate most about crime fiction is the Raymond Chan-
dler sensibility ... Down these mean streets the single man who can
make a difference must go.... It's always the rebel. It's always the
private eye standing up to the system. That doesn't interest me. What
interests me are the toadies of the system.14

If Ellroy blurs the distinction between truth and fiction, this is not to say
that he's a postmodernist. As I said, within the world of the novels, there is
always a definite (and obsessively-detailed) truth. It's instructive how often
his plot resolutions involve the discovery of a secret stash of files, which
allow a character to fill in the gaps but are then subsequently destroyed or
hidden once more (a plot device also beloved of The X-Files). These might
be account books (American Tabloid) or psychiatric files (The Big
Nowhere) or a magazine record morgue (L.A. Confidential) or private
photographic and document archives kept by investigating policemen (The
Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere). His two most recent novels are full of
'Document Inserts', many of them playfully marked 'Destroy Upon
Reading', just to emphasize the narrator's God-like control over the world
he is describing (and therefore implicitly underline its separation from the
world we, the readers, inhabit).15 Ultimately, even though the historical
record is what misleads you in reality, within the novel the possibility of
truth is still associated with documentary proof.16
So, Ellroy deliberately distorts the past. He goes 'one on one with
history'17 in pursuit of a higher (a repressed) truth that he feels a respon
bility to expose. What is this truth? To put it rather crudely, it is the vision
of human nature revealed to him by his mother's death. Hayden White
would say that his mother's murder 'prefigures' Ellroy's historical vision.18
What this means is that he is predisposed to see certain kinds of connection
between events and people as more important or more 'real' than others
(since an understanding of what is real depends on a prior understanding of
what is possible or plausible). He's more likely to accept certain expla-
nations (of motive, say) than others because they chime with deep convic-
tions regarding the way things 'really' are. For example, the idea that male
violence - at a personal rather than a national level - is a dominant historical
force. Also, that history is fundamentally contingent: simultaneously con-
ditioned by the actions of individuals and outside their control. 'Had one
second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist
as we know it' (and note the capitalization here). Or, to put it another way,
had his mother not met the wrong man at the wrong time, she might still be
alive. This, for Ellroy, is part of the 'meaning' of her death.

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 185

Contingency also necessarily implies free will. And if it is impossible to

restore order and integrity at a sociological level, it is possible to find per-
sonal redemption. Moreover, even if there is no moral order to history,
there is a narrative order, and this becomes in some sense a morality. 'Narra-
tive was my moral language', Ellroy says. In My Dark Places, he explains
how, as a teenager, he controlled disturbing and partially involuntary fan-
tasies about the Black Dahlia murder by turning them into stories in which
he rescued the victim.19
Again, Hayden White proves useful here, since he argues that narrative
moralizes reality by the simple expedient of connecting causes to effects.20
Ellroy's intricate, obsessively-detailed plotting requires a supreme disci-
pline (and a formidable work ethic - he writes for ten hours a day and the
outline for American Tabloid was 275 pages long). This discipline shapes the
fictional worlds he creates. He depicts the subjective disorientation of char-
acters on the brink of moral and psychological collapse with total, icy
control, always with one eye on where a scene is going.
For many historians (notably the French Annalistes), an emphasis on
contingency is a characteristic weakness of the novel. They see the focus on
the individual and transient, at the expense of the impersonal, collective and
long-term, as trivial.21 Ellroy, by contrast, embraces and exalts individuals
as being capable, both actually and symbolically, of 'defining their time'.
This does not necessarily mean an emphasis on 'great men' because it is as
true of Elizabeth Short, the victim in the Black Dahlia case,22 as it is of JFK.
This brings us to our second theme.

ELLROY THE ROMANTIC23

The historian's duties are not established in terms of the general concept
of historical truth, but only confronting each dead man of history; ... The
historian is in fact a civil magistrate in charge of administering the estate
of the dead ... This civil magistracy is doubled of course by a priesthood:
it is less a matter of keeping vigil over the memory of the dead than of
completing by a magical action what in their lives may have been absurd
or mutilated. The historian is an Oedipus (he retrospectively solves
human enigmas).
Roland Barthes (writing on Michelet), 1954.24

Old L.A. crimes live in me; tabloid headlines burn in my mind.

James Ellroy, 1993.25

My debt grows. Your final terror is the flame I touch my hand to.
James Ellroy, 1999.26

Live history was groovy. We watched the [1965 Watts] riot ... and saw
strips of Los Angeles sizzling ...

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186 History Workshop Journal

The riot fizzled out. It reconflagrated in my head and ruled my

thoughts for weeks.
I ran stories from diverse perspectives. I became both riot cop and riot
provocateur. I lived lives fucked over by history.
I spread my empathy around. I distributed moral shading equi-
tably.... My public stance was 'Fuck the niggers'. My concurrent na
tive fantasies stressed culpable white cops.
I never questioned the contradiction. I didn't know that storytelling
was my only true voice.
Narrative was my moral language. I didn't know it in the summer of
1965.
James Ellroy, 1996.27

Ellroy is a Romantic in that he shares ideas about what it means to knows

something or what it means to understand the past with the Romantics.
According to Romantic hermeneutics, understanding a text means identi-
fying with its author, re-enacting the creative process by which he or she
came to write it. Hence, to know something means experiencing it your-
self.28 To know the past means reliving it, which immediately puts the
historian in the position of a voyeur and fantasist. 'Your final terror is the
flame I touch my hand to'. Ellroy feels a responsibility to imaginatively
relive and thereby in some sense redeem the past.
It's a cliche of much crime fiction that the detective catches the killer by
learning how to think like them, by getting into their head. As Ellroy puts
it in My Dark Places, 'Why sublimate your lust when you can use it as a tool
of perception?'29 Ellroy's detective novels are more complex than this
because his policemen identify with both killer and victim simultaneously
(and often involuntarily): 'I ran stories from diverse perspectives'. This con-
tradiction leads his characters to the brink of madness.
In contrast to other writers (with the notable exception of Derek
Raymond),30 it is the relationship with the victim that appears more sign
cant. Ellroy's policemen have to struggle not to see the victim through the
killer's eyes, just as he struggled to rescue the memory of his mother from
being consumed by her death. The detective's relationship with murder
victims is one of haunting - what De Certeau would call the 'return of the
repressed'.31 In a 1993 documentary Ellroy claimed that he genuinely loved
Elizabeth Short, the victim in the Black Dahlia case. Fictionalizing her
death was thus an attempt to deepen and explore that love.
This notion is even more explicit in My Dark Places, Ellroy's book about
his mother, although perhaps his last two novels are more ambiguous in
their attitude towards history's victims. In American Tabloid and The Cold
Six Thousand, the toadies of the system move centre stage and their many
victims are dismissed more perfunctorily. It is significant, for example, that
Kennedy's assassination occurs offstage - simply one more death after so
many, it has little iconic significance for Ellroy's protagonists. His killers

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 187

work with the precision and indifference of a camera - and indeed, they
sometimes take Polaroids of their handiwork. But, even so, images of the
dead still have the capacity to develop in their memories into something like
conscience.
No respectable academic historian would ever describe their task in
terms of learning to love the dead (even I wouldn't, and I'm far from
respectable) but Ellroy's approach is strongly reminiscent of Michelet's, at
least at Barthes describes it in the quotation above.32 Like Michelet, Ellroy
completes what is mutilated - and Barthes' metaphor is especially fortuitous
given that many of the dead in Ellroy's novels are literally mutilated. He
tries to put together a dismembered history.

RUNNING ALTERNATIVES

A wager pool sign-list was posted in the locker room. It was in the form
of a crudely drawn crap table felt, featuring betting spaces labelled
'Solved - pay 2 to 1', 'Random sex job - pay 4 to 1', 'Unsolved - even
money', 'Boyfriend(s) pay 1 to 4', and "'Red" - no odds unless suspect
captured'. The 'House $ man' was listed as Sergeant Shiner, and so far
the big action was on 'boyfriend(s)', with a dozen officers signed up, all
plopping down a sawbuck to win two-fifty.
James Ellroy, 1987.33

The subject of a crime novel is simultaneously the crime itself and its investi-
gation. To put it another way, the subject is simultaneously a past event and
the representation of that event in the present. Often, this means that we
get to the crime through the individual sensibility, the subjectivity, of the
investigators, even if they also have recourse to scientific and forensic tech-
niques. Hence an issue that remains extremely controversial for historians
has not only been resolved in crime fiction but is an essential, defining
characteristic of the genre. Historians get worked up trying to establish in
what sense they are present in their representations of the past and in what
sense the subjectivity of a writer contaminates the objectivity of his or her
account. Crime novelists see no problem here.
As usual Ellroy pushes this further than other writers. His characters not
only constantly replay what they know but also project what they don't
know. They run different scenarios and jump between them. 'Ambiguous
data: 3/ 4/ 5/ 6 shots/ 1/ 2/ 3 directions'.34 The image that opens American
Tabloid, of Howard Hughes bathed in flickering television light constantly
switching channels, is symptomatic of the strung-out thinking of Ellroy's
characters. Since they constantly hypothesize, Ellroy ends up squeezing two
or three plots into one novel by constantly 'running book' on possibilities.
Some examples: in L.A. Confidential, Ed Exley, obliged to compose a
report on a controversial situation, comes up with three entirely distinct
versions and decides which would be most politically expedient to submit.

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188 History Workshop Journal

In The Big Nowhere, Buzz Meeks, who is an inveterate gambler, calculates

odds when faced with every new plot development. In American Tabloid,
the teamsters have two alternative and radically-different sets of accounts:
the ones prepared for public consumption and the real ones.

POP ART COLLAGE

Real and false were fused here so perfectly that they became a new sub-
stance, just as copper and zinc become brass that looks like gold.
Erich Maria Remarque.35

The first time it happened accidentally. We were making love, ... My

hand slipped off the bed rail and hit the light switch on the wall, illumi-
nating Betty Short [the victim in the Black Dahlia case] below me. For
just a few seconds I believed it was her ... When my lover was Madeleine
again, I reached for the switch, only to have her grab my wrist.... I made
Madeleine Betty made her eyes blue instead of hazel, made her body
Betty's body from the stag film, made her silently mouth, 'No, please'.
James Ellroy, 1987.36

This constant modelling of possibilities suggests a motif of superimposition,

which becomes more explicit when photographs and tape recordings are
deliberately tampered with, or when images burned into people's memories
appear superimposed on present situations (as in the second quotation
above). Thinking back to the idea of prefiguration, one might also say that
Ellroy's fiction superimposes the knowledge of his mother's death (a revel-
ation of what life is really like) on the last four decades of American history.
The most disturbing examples occur in the associations Ellroy draws
between pornography and autopsy photographs, between sex and death -
the two poles of his moral universe. Both are ways of objectifying female
bodies and they have a tendency to bleed into each other. Once again, we
have the theme of the investigator being forced to identify with the mur-
derer, implying that the autopsy re-enacts the violence committed on the
victim (or conversely, that the murder prefigures the violence of the
autopsy).
The idea of superimposition leads us to the related theme of collage.
Ellroy refers to all kinds of different media, juxtaposing references to car-
toons, tabloid gossip, police reports and political hate-tracts with subversive
effect. His interest in Pop culture is another opportunity for him to blur dis-
tinctions. He sees novels and television shows as responsible for construct-
ing a vision of the world, which (although they may repress unpleasant
truths) becomes part of a broad, encompassing notion of the real - one that
includes images. Like Pop artists, Ellroy sees reality as composed of texts as
well as people and events: advertising signs, newspaper headlines, television
screens, police radio signals, bebop jazz rhythms (the last two have a
particularly clear influence on White Jazz). So, like many cultural historians

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 189

and their literary counterparts, the New Historicists, Ellroy sees the dis-
tinction between text and context as a false one. Like Robert Rauschen-
burg's paintings, his novels operate in the gap between art and life.37
One figure who powerfully evokes the world that Ellroy attempts to
recreate but who is rarely mentioned in this context is the photographer
Weegee.38 He was active just before the period in which Ellroy's L.A.
Quartet is set (and in New York rather than L.A.) but his 'visual sensibility
is very close to Ellroy's literary sensibility. He explores the same themes
(crime, celebrity, behaviour under extreme duress), with the same combi-
nation of romanticism and cynicism, the same tabloid sensibility (he was
literally working for tabloid newspapers) and the same uneasy relation
between voyeurism and sympathetic identification. Finally, he has the same

Weegee, 'I Cried When I Took This Picture', 1939.

commitment to showing what is brutal and degraded in the name of

integrity. Weegee's vision, like Ellroy's, is also very strongly prefigured - in
his case by preset focus and the use of flash, which isolates and highlights
the foreground in his pictures. The photograph above is emblematic of these
connections between the two men's sensibilities. It has two alternative titles
(the doubling in itself could be an Ellroy motif). The first is simply descrip-
tive and informs us that these two women are standing outside a burning

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190 History Workshop Journal

building, inside which the children of one are trapped. The alternative title
is 'I Cried When I Took This Picture'.

TEXTS AND MEMORY

[He] sat on his patio and replayed the ride start to finish.
Shadows turned the hills dark green. His replay kept expanding in slow
motion.
James Ellroy, 1995.39

That close, he got distortion blur, Man Camera malfunctions. He pulled

back so that his eyes could capture a larger frame, saw tuxedos entwined
in movement, cheek-to-cheek tangos, all male. The faces were up against
each other so that they couldn't be distinguished individually; Danny
zoomed out, in, out, in, until he was pressed into the window glass . ..
his eyes honing for mid-shots, close-ups, faces.
James Ellroy, 1988.40

Collage and superimposition allow Ellroy to explore the relationship

between memory and truth as well as that between fiction and history. In
Ellroy's books, memory is often compared to a tape or photograph and sub-
jective reveries are also intercut with all the texts that make up Ellroy's
collage. In other words, memory is a collage just as much as history is. Often
the records his characters use are messed-up, incomplete, deliberately muti-
lated or encoded. The motif of manipulation can also be seen in the
recurrence of plastic surgery and disfigurement as a plot device. Altering a
face (with a scalpel, with a pair of fists or a baseball bat) is like manipulating
a photograph or document. Identity is malleable because memory and
history are.
The first quotation above is emblematic of these themes. Just before the
assassination of JFK, Kemper Boyd (who has helped to bring it about)
thinks about the events of the past few years, spooling and rewinding time.
At the point this 'replay' occurs in the novel, it is obviously meant to suggest
the Zapruder footage of Kennedy's death. Kemper's 'ride' into the past runs
parallel to Kennedy's ride into history along the route of a motorcade in
Dallas, as replayed over and over again on Zapruder's home movie. The
film footage, like Kemper's memory, 'keeps expanding in slow motion'. The
course of Kemper's reverie and (by extension) Kennedy's motorcade are
both equivalent to the mythical moment when one's life flashes before one's
eyes, since both men are about to die. If some people are capable of defin-
ing their time, then some moments are capable of symbolizing a life.
There are plenty of other examples of this intercutting. In White Jazz, the
killer is a cameraman whose work on a cheap horror movie mimics his real
killings. Moreover, the 'hero' of the book is at one point drugged and filmed
in a snuff movie that replays his wartime experiences. In L.A. Confidential,

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 191

the killer doctors pornographic photographs in exactly the same way that
he mutilates corpses. In The Big Nowhere, as the second quotation above
suggests, the policeman Danny Upshaw attempts to gain an objective,
forensic view of events by thinking of himself as a 'Man Camera', framing
and snapping like a pathologist's lens. This objectification is also an attempt
to keep his homosexuality (which he cannot admit to himself) separate and
under control: a classic example of 'compartmentalization'.
So texts get pasted into our memories, as with the Zapruder footage, which
deeply conditions our 'memory' of the assassination. As Ellroy says, 'Tabloid
headlines burn in my mind' (in neon letters?). In many cases memories can
be manipulated, just as photographs can. The point here once again is that
the story of the crime and the story of the investigation are connected. You
only reach the truth through the distortions of memory and lies. There is no
objective truth that does not include ?ubjective distortion and vice versa.

In conclusion, I'd like to clarify why I think historians should be interested

in what Ellroy is doing.41 I've already mentioned that he allows us to dra-
matize the process of investigation rather than focusing exclusively on the
end product. His investigations 'happen' within the altered consciousness of
detectives strung out on booze or pills. Of course, historical investigations
similarly happen within the heads of historians rather than in the docu-
ments. They also involve an altered state of consciousness, a simultaneous
expansion of the imagination and an obsessively-reductive concentration on
sources. Historians subvert and manipulate the experience of time in the
attempt to understand time. But, unlike Ellroy, they try to eliminate all con-
tradictions, or relegate them to the footnotes, the formal equivalent of
repressing them. Digressions and bifurcations are pruned and lopped off in
the name of argumentative rigour, sacrificed to a central argument. Ellroy
reminds us that sometimes such tidied up narratives have the sanitized gloss
of the newspaper puff pieces that he juxtaposes with the real 'secret shit'.
Underneath the surface of our narratives, suppressed possibilities seethe.
Ellroy attempts to liberate them through invention.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 28/4/01

Edited body-wire transcript. Live Tape Destroyed/ Read &

Burn.
Location: Heffer's Book Store, Cambridge, UK.
Present: James Ellroy/ Jonathan Walker/ Cassie Chadder-
ton.

Ninety seconds of non-applicable conversation precedes the

following.
[Ambient sounds of cutlery, plates and eating.]
JW: Can I ask if you're surprised that someone from Cam-
bridge University is lecturing on your work?

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192 History Workshop Journal

JE: No. Er ...

CC: [ Partially inaudible - sounds like] Just peppermint.
JE: I think the books are great and
CC: [Partially inaudible --sounds like] Ran out.
JE: I have a huge following among people in academia and
people in academia are quite often the most articu-
late and obsessive readers of the books.
JW: Why do you think that is?
JE: Because [pause] the books are complex. The books are
dense. This is history wholly revised, and history
liberally messed with. And there is the aspect of
shared history as well, in that many of the people in
academia who have told me that they present my books
to their students have lived through it and I think
I know what's at the bottom of it even though I never
reveal [discreet belch] what specifically and
literally is real and what' s not. The human infra-
structure of these great public events is so
plausible. The fictional characters are presented
[pause] seamlessly with the real-life ones. The real-
life and fictional events are woven together syn-
chronously. People feel like they're reading history,
or an aspect of history, for the first time. And this
derives from something that I recall as a youth living
through the '60s and I was not quite twelve when the
decade dawned and not quite twenty-two when it ended.
I sensed the human stories attending the great events.
That I should go back thirty years later and write
novels about these satellite characters is not sur-
prising to me.
JW: Leading on from that, can I ask you how you under-
stand the relationship between what you do and what
academic historians do - you know, conventional
history books?
JE: They search for the literal truth. I search for the
psychological truth and the symbolic truth and, more
than anything else, the truth of the characters: their
morality, their lives, their lives in duress and the
way they interact with the great public events. [JW
addendum: this is an entirely conventional conception
of the relation between history and the historical
novel. In fact, many historians are now more inter-
ested in 'symbolic' than in 'literal' truth.]
JW: As is already coming across, you fully exploit, as
you're entitled to do as a novelist, your licence to
invent things but do you feel that you have any
responsibility towards historical characters?
JE: None.
JW: None at all?

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 193

JE: None.
JW: I have the impression that you maybe feel more
responsibility towards somebody like Robert Kennedy
than you do towards Hoover, for example. There seems
to be a sense of greater respect. [JW addendum: I am
not putting this clearly. My idea is more precise than
this: that those who are judged guilty of attempting
to manipulate events are dragged through the mud at
every opportunity. By contrast, those who are judged
to have acted in good faith are treated more circum-
spectly. The principle is one of, 'As you have done
unto others, so shall it be done unto you' .]
JE: I greatly respect Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King. King was probably the greatest twentieth-century
American and Kennedy was certainly the greatest twen-
tieth-century American crime fighter. Hoover, and the
research I did on this bears it out, was wholly vil-
lainous and that's the way he's portrayed. No, you're
right about this.
JW: To try to explain to my students where you're coming
from, I described you as a Romantic.
JE: My wife, without doubt the single most brilliant human
being that I've ever met, says that [pause] what sets
me up as a Romantic is the fact that I believe in free
will and the fact that I judge these characters for
their moral failings. It always gores my ox when
reviewers, usually youngsters, see my books as being
nihilistic or exercises in sordidness when they' re
anything but. I'm always standing outside judging
these characters and, in the end, these are men who
had free will. These are men who were certainly shaped
by their environments and certainly shaped by the flow
of history that they got caught up in but in the end,
each and every one of them is responsible for their
misdeeds. I don't have to tell you that in litera-
ture, morality is largely exposited through portray-
ing the consequences of horrible acts and the karmic
price that people pay for perpetrating them. In that
sense, yes, I'm a Romantic.
JW: Yeah, and that brings me on to another point. [Ambient
noise of eating.] I think it' s one of the most inter-
esting comments I' ve read of yours, where you said
that 'Narrative was my moral language' . A lot of
readers would say that your books are not conven-
tionally moralistic at all, so in what sense do you
understand the word 'moral' there?
JE: It' s always portraying the cost. It' s always the stern
judgement. It doesn' t cost a novelist anything to
write viscerally from one character's perspective and

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194 History Workshop Journal

to concurrently stand apart from the character and

judge him. I've heard a lot of idiot actors say that
you're through as an interpreter or a portrayer once
you start judging your characters. I think that' s non-
sense.
JW: There's a historian who writes about narrative called
Hayden White and his take on the moral function, er,
the way narrative moralizes is that control over the
story substitutes for control over events. Does that
idea chime with you? [JW addendum: I'm unconsciously
distorting White' s argument here to give it a positive
twist. He actually says that the moralizing function
of narrative encourages the individual to identify
with 'bourgeois' ideals of coherence and order and
thereby legitimizes the state as the protector of that
order (or, as Benjamin put it, history empathizes with
the winners and presents their victory as
inevitable) .42 Ellroy's 'leg-breakers' are indeed co-
opted into the state's attempt to construct an exemp-
lary narrative in which it is the guarantor of
morality. However, it is Ellroy' s intent to expose the
hollowness of this claim and to show how alternative
narratives, born out of individual obsessions but able
to exploit 'official' resources (police records, etc.)
and even official protocols (the standard investiga-
tive techniques nominally upheld by the police) are
acts of private resistance. In other words, American
Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are reflexive nar-
ratives about the construction (and attempted,partial
deconstruction or subversion) of narratives. Again, I
should stress that this isn't a postmodern view, with
competing but equally valid versions of reality. In
the novels, the 'official' account is quite clearly
a lie and the narrative recovered by the characters
is unambiguously true.]
JE: Absolutely. And it is, it' s a wild ride. Writing these
novels, you've got a chaotic series of events, most
of which you know the answers to already, they' re pre-
ordained and [pause] that's the subtext that you, the
historian, and you, the reader, bring to this - but
you have no idea where the lives of Bondurant, Littell
and Tedrow [ the major characters of Ellroy' s latest
novel The Cold Six Thousand] are going and working
this into a cohesive whole and understanding going in
that subtextually the reader will bring great
resources to the novel is amazingly enticing and
satisfying. And you' re right. I'm always trying to say
it as precisely as I can and impose order on chaos.
JW: This comes back to what you were saying about reject-

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 195

ing the charge of nihilism but you' 11 be aware of Mike

Davis' remarks about your work from [his book] City
of Quartz.
JE: He's full of shit.
JW: Right. Okay.
JE: I mean he' s also a man with a profound political
agenda. Davis.43
JW: I' 11 just read out a quotation. So Mike Davis said
about your work that 'In his pitch blackness there
is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a
forensic banality. The result ... [ is] a supersatu-
ration of corruption that fails any longer to outrage
or even interest' .4 Which is fairly harsh. I just
wanted to know how you come back to that.
JE: Bullshit. Because attending all these horrible events
there are love affairs surviving, love affairs flour-
ishing, love affairs dying out, people learning the
value of self-sacrifice. [JW addendum: Is love then
the only meaning that can be saved from the flames of
history?] In one of his tirades against me in The
Chicago Review,
JW: I don't know this one.45
JE: he called me a fascist, homophobic, sexist, anti-Com-
munist, anti-Semite, anti-Latin,46 and The Big Nowhere
ends with Buzz Meeks, this horrible toady of a
corrupt, right-wing system burning down the house that
contains all the grand-jury paperwork. This is a grand
jury levied at, really, harmless leftists in the
entertainment business. He burns it down and takes off
for the hinterlands.
JW: I really like that ending by the way. I think it' s
one of your books that is most directly, is, is stating
its commitments quite clearly. [JW addendum: the char-
acter of Danny Upshaw from the same book, one of
Ellroy's most conventionally sympathetic, also
answers the charge of homophobia.]
JE: I'm forced to conclude that either Davis hasn't read
the texts or has misread the texts.
JW: You once described your books as social history [JW
addendum: actually, 'social documents' , which is in
fact a more interesting claim] and there's an inter-
view with Paul Duncan, which you might remember, where
you agreed with him that 'You' re directly linked to
your own history, and ... your own history is directly
linked to the history of America'. 47 Can you expand
on that?
JE: Here's an example of [discreet slurp and sound of cup
being placed down] the human infrastructure of public,
[sound of cup being pushed away] of great public

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196 History Workshop Journal

events. The Cuban Missile Crisis again. I lived

through it. I was fourteen years old. I was in first
semester of high school. I was doing poorly. I was
forced to attend a mandatory study hall, last class
of the day. And, a lot of the kids were afraid the
world was going to blow up. I was afraid that it would-
n't. I, the true nihilist aplomb of a fourteen year
old, understood that if the world blew up, my options
would be severely limited and I wouldn't have to con-
tinue with my teenage angst, you know? No girls wanted
to talk to me. I had acne. Er, I didn' t know if mastur-
bation would ruin my health [JW addendum: apparently
not - Mr Ellroy seems in rude health]. I had to get
up and go to school every day, it was a fuckin pain
in the ass. So we in study hall would toss paper aero-
planes into the air and go, NEEEEOOOWWWW [ makes explo-
sion noise] when the teacher wasn't looking just for
yucks. Now that' s a minor thing but here' s a more
major thing. My old man, at the height of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, sent me to the Safeway market at the
corner of Beverly and Larchmont to get some groceries.
It was my practice at that time [ ambient eating
sounds] to pocket a lot of the money my old man gave
me and shoplift some of our groceries, that which I
could get away with. Now I got to the Safeway, and I
hadn't been there in a while - fuckin store had been
picked clean because people were stocking their bomb
shelters. And so the items that my old man told me to
get - bread, meat, whatever they were, cheese - were
gone, so I just stocked up on kid's shit - ice cream,
candy bars, cookies, doughnuts and that was going to
be our dinner tonight. I got into line and I happened
to see a guy named Big John Kilbride, who was a neigh-
bour of ours, who was a big drunk. And Big John, what
was he stocking up on? He was stocking up on booze,
man. A case of scotch, or whatever it was there. And
I looked at him and he looked at me and we both smiled.
We had our agendas and we didn't give fuck all if the
world blew up. And I sensed during that event, during,
you know, the race riots of the 1960s, the Watts riot
of 1965, there were all these stories going on there.
And that's key psychologically to why I do what I do
today.
[JW addendum: these long anecdotes may appear to be
digressions but actually they' re exemplary of Ellroy' s
'Pop' sensibility. They' re irreverent and willfully
reductive but it' s possible to juxtapose them with
more complex accounts (as telegraphic headlines are
juxtaposed with hugely complex narrative in the

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 197

books). History equals: 'burnt pizza/ spilled blood/

ice cream ..... Acne swabs/ booze empties/ cigarette
butts' .48 History equals: a series of signs and com-
modities that represent the personal agendas of people
who fail utterly to rise to the occasion. However,
the signs that history leaves behind in Ellroy's
novels are not as innocent as in these anecdotes. 'He
got the con-tusions. He got the smashed teeth.... He
got the thumbprint. He got the bloodstains. He got
the meat. He got the pink rugs. He got the knives....
The camera made sounds. The camera cranked wet
prints'. 49
What interests Ellroy is the moment when the flash-
bulb pops and history freezes or decomposes, or coa-
lesces - into images which cannot be erased from
consciousness. This is a depoliticized, Pop version
of Benjamin's idea of the image as 'dialectics at a
standstill' . In Benjamin, the dialectical image arises
at a moment of danger to clarify the meaning of history
in a flash of illumination.50 In Ellroy, the image sym-
bolizes the movement between event, text and memory
and it is itself the moment of danger, the return of
the repressed. Hence, although these traumatic memory
flashes illuminate the meaning of history exactly as
Benjamin intended for the reader - for the charac-
ters, by contrast, they are moments that petrify and
incapacitate, rarely bringing real understanding.51 In
other words, it is only their retrospective meaning
that illuminates (again, control over the story sub-
stitutes for control over events). Through these
images we judge Bondurant, Littell and Tedrow and we
identify with them (which means that we judge our-
selves).
There are other signs too: the look between two
lovers on a crowded dance floor, Ward Littell in a
darkened room replaying his Robert Kennedy tapes with
a peculiarly intense silence - intangible signs, which
can be redeemed only because they are invisible to
the historian. In other words, they are not redeemed
by history; they are redeemed from history (by
fiction).
The anecdotes are not therefore indicative of
Ellroy's incomprehension. They're a deliberate and
calculated affront to any view of history that doesn' t
start with personal agenda.]
JW: Might it not be a greater artistic challenge to
attempt to create a connection with the past rather
than exploiting a connection that already exists? For
example, I work on the seventeenth century, so I have

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198 History Workshop Journal

no necessary connection with that at all. So, my chal-

lenge is very different from the one you've set your-
self. My challenge is to create the connection that
doesn't exist.
JE: You' re right again. And you' re pressing it because I' m
going to go back and write a novel of Warren Harding' s
administration after this trilogy and I was born
twenty five years after Harding died.
JW: So that' s going to be an entirely different way of
writing, is it?
JE: Yeah. An entirely different language.
JW: You can't not be interested in the style if you're
interested in the novels, and in the way form and
content complement each other and interlock. One of
the reference points that everyone always uses is film
noir, of course. One of the references I used to try
and explain to my students was the photographs of
Weegee. Do you see any connection between Weegee' s
sensibility and yours?
JE: In the L.A. Quartet books, I would say certainly. And,
parenthetically, a couple of film noirs that I saw in
the film-noir era, as a very young child, always made
[pause] They made an impression.52 I'm thinking
specifically of two heist-gone-bad movies: The
Killing, the Kubrick film, and, which I saw in 1956,
and a bad film noir called Plunder Road about hijack-
ing some gold booolion and welding it on to the bumper
of a car .53 At the end, the heisters are about to get
away over the border, they get in a fender bender and
the gold booolion on one of their fenders is exposed.
The cops come after 'em and a guy just jumps off a
bridge to his death, hounded by the cops. Fatalistic
world view for little eight or nine-year-old baby
Ellroy, whose mother is about to be murdered in Los
Angeles. I did not start looking at film noir seri-
ously until after I had written The Black Dahlia and
was into The Big Nowhere because I realized this
archive exists and I can see actual physical represen-
tations and real ones of the era I'm writing about
because film noir was all filmed on location in L.A.
for one reason only: the movie business was there and
that was the cheapest place to do it.
[JW addendum: A good illustration here of the maxim
that 'Real and false were fused so perfectly that they
became a new substance' . And at this point I should
have mentioned Orson Welles' s Touch of Evil, 1958,
surely the perfect cinematic analogue of the L.A.
Quartet, both thematically and stylistically, along
with Roman Polanski's Chinatown, 1974.]

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 199

JW: And in fact that brings me on to a reference point

which I think is important but I' ve never heard
anybody mention, which is Pop Art. Obviously the tone
of your work is completely different to the tone of
Pop Art but there are motifs of superimposition and
collage that come back again and again. I notice that
Polaroids and Van Dutch - Von Dutch is it? - make a
cameo appearance in The Cold Six Thousand. 54 Are you,
is Pop Art an important
JE: It' s something I know absolutely nothing about. And
art itself, visual art, paintings, doesn' t move me.
My great creative loves are classical music, chiefly
the Romantic music of the last century or really the
1803 Beethoven to the 1940 Bartok.
JW: Do you see that as helping to structure the rhythm of
the way you write at all?
JE: No. It, s, you read White Jazz?
JW: Yeah.
JE: White Jazz ...
JW: It' s my, I think, in a way I think it' s your best
book, actually.
JE: It' s stylistically the purest and it' s a novel [pause]
I understand. I think that the [ last] two books are
richer and deeper but as an exercise in style it' s
unparalleled. What you've got there is, and I came
about the style haphazardly and instinctively, the
language of a white, racist cop whose life is burning
down in the fall of 1958, who inexplicably gets hooked
on black, bebop jazz. So the syncopations there
JW: That's very clear.
JE: are meant to be musical. As for the direct style, and
the repetitions, and the use of racist invective,
Yiddish, the inclusion of French and Spanish in the
text of The Cold Six Thousand and the plain old ex-
plosion of American slang and profanity, it' s a direct
representation of the era and of the language of these
bad men. I just could not write this in a standard
style. I didn't want to. [JW Addendum: this vision of
the vitality of American demotic, capable of incor-
porating Yiddish, French, and, more controversially,
racist epithets obviously echoes the traditional
notion of American society as melting pot.] Five of
six reviews of this book have been highly laudatory
and even the reviewers that hate the book and say that
the style's completely over the top and doesn't work
praise its audacity. And that' s the risk you always
have to take if the language is everything to you.
Because I believe in complexity and density and that
you do not have to forfeit characterization for style

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200 History Workshop Journal

or plot for characterization or make any of these

trade-offs. I like a style that propels the reader
into the book, that states metaphorically what the
story is every time a word is uttered and, in the case
of the specific style of The Cold Six Thousand, serves
to propel the reader through the text in fewer rather
than many
sittings, which aids them in their comprehension of
a difficult story.
JW: One of the ways I tried to sum up what you' re doing
in the books is to say that in some cases what we
understand to be the 'facts' are a deception perpe-
trated upon us by those in power and your 'reckless',
that' s your word from American Tabloid, exploration
of extrapolated possibilities is supposed to liberate
us from the power these 'pseudo-facts' have over our
imaginations. Is that fair?
JE: Absolutely, absolutely, and a good, I don't know how
far you are into the book, but soon you'll come upon
something called Operation Black Rabbit, which is an
ultra-secret, FBI incursion against the Civil Rights
Movement and specifically Martin Luther King. And
couched within that there are references to an estab-
lished historical operation called Operation Zebra,
which was an anti-civil rights incursion. You'll see
that I have done, without giving anything away for
you, exactly what you've just described.55
JW: Another way of putting that might be to say your inten-
tion is to uncover history' s repressed memories and
repression is obviously a big theme in your novels.
JE: That's exactly right. What you've got here specific-
ally in The Cold Six Thousand and American Tabloid is
that last gasp of pre-public accountability in America
where the anti-Communist agenda, where that mandate
justified everything. You have cabals, constellations
of like-minded individuals acting conspiratorially.
They' re utterly ruthless and they engage in a lan-
guage, where if they plot a death they never state
it. It stands as implication and they act appropri-
ately. 56 I wanted to create, and I got this largely
from my reading of Libra by Don Delillo, 57 his take
on the Kennedy assassination, that I wanted to portray
this mindset plausibly and I wanted to show the
morally-compromised nature of the players and the
seductiveness of having a rationale that justifies
virtually anything.
JW: The impression one gets from reading your books is
that, although people like Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King achieve great things, and they, er, you

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 201

know, try in the best way that they can to effect real
reform in society, in a sense the only order that it' s
possible to achieve is personal order and it' s only
possible to achieve it at great cost. Does that sound
right?
JE: It's, yeah, it does sound right. This is not my maxim
for history in general. This is my maxim for the Ameri-
can 1960s. Two key guys were struck down two months
apart and, here are the chief ironies inherent. Robert
Kennedy would not have been the Democratic nominee.
He didn' t have the votes. It would have been Hubert
Humphrey and Hubert Humphrey would have lost to
Richard Nixon. One. Secondly, Martin Luther King, I
think deranged on some levels from this hor-rible
transitive courage of his from the Montgomery bus
boycott from ' 55 up to his death in ' 68, was dis-
crediting himself at a rapid, rapid clip with the
broadening of his social agenda, which had gone from
equal rights for blacks to a flirtation with outright
socialism and redistribution of wealth. He was pissing
off people and supporters of his, left and right.
Yeah, I revere the man, and I think he' s the great-
est twentieth-century American but he died right on
cue. [Pause] Would you like a sandwich?
JW: Yeah, I will actually.
JE: Have a sandwich, man. They're damn good.
[Five minutes of non-applicable conversation follows.]

NOTES AND REFERENCES

This one's for Deborah Youngs and Robert Rosenstone. I am currently fun
Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Thanks to Cassie Chadderton for arrang
transcribed here.

1 Alan Moore, interviewed in Simon Lewis, 'Ripping Yarns', Uncut 40, September 2000,
pp. 76-8 at p. 77. The reference is to Moore's graphic novel on Jack the Ripper, which has
much in common with Ellroy's work: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell with Pete Mullins,
From Hell: being a Melodrama in 16 Parts (1999), London, 2000.
2 Actually, it gets a lot more complicated than this (conspiracies within conspiracies) but
I shan't give anything away here. I should point out that I am not an expert on twentieth-
century American history (my own field is early modern Italy). I have consulted the following
general works for comparison: R. Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, New
Haven, 1989; Chris Andrew and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (eds), Eternal Vigilance? Fifty Years of
the CIA, London, 1997; CIA Targets Fidel: Secret CIA Inspector's Report on Plots to Assassi-
nate Fidel Castro, New York, 1999; Peter Kornbluh (ed.), Bay of Pigs Declassified: the Secret
CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba, New York, 1998; J. A. Wolske, 'Jack, Judy, Sam, Bobby,
Johnny, Frank .. .: an Investigation into the Alternate History of the CIA-Mafia Collaboration
to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 1960-1997', Intelligence and National Security 15: 4, 2000,
pp. 104-30; Athan Theoharis (ed.), From the Secret Files of J Edgar Hoover, Chicago, 1991.
For a polemical (but sadly entirely plausible) account of CIA covert operations, see the

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202 History Workshop Journal

semi-fictionalized graphic novel by Alan Moore, Bill Sienkiewicz, Joyce Brabner, Thomas
Yeates and Paul Mavrides, Brought to Light, Forestville CA, 1989. This latter echoes many of
Ellroy's denunciations, although from a different political perspective.
3 This discussion focuses on the L.A. Quartet (composed of The Black Dahlia (1987),
Arrow, 1993; The Big Nowhere (1988), Arrow, 1990; L.A. Confidential (1990), Arrow, 1994;
and White Jazz (1992), Arrow, 1993), the first two volumes of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy
(American Tabloid (1995), Arrow, 1995 and The Cold Six Thousand, 2001, and Ellroy's auto-
biographical memoir about his mother's murder, My Dark Places (1996), Arrow, 1997 (for the
above quotation see p. 209). Page references refer to British paperback publication in London
by Arrow (because these are the editions I am quoting from), with the exception of The Cold
Six Thousand, which is currently only available as a Century hardback. All quotations from
these works are used by permission of The Random House Group, except those from Big
Nowhere, which are used by permission of Abner Stein. I also quote from the film documen-
tary directed by Reinhard Jud, 'James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction', Fischer
Film, 1993. There are numerous earlier novels but with the exception of Clandestine, 1982,
none of them are set in the past. Although my discussion labels Ellroy's work as crime fiction
for convenience's sake, it is important to note that his last two novels have moved beyond the
crime genre, whilst remaining thematically consistent with his earlier work.
4 For similar treatments of historical novelists and film-makers, see for example Robert
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to our Idea of History, Cambridge MA
and London, 1995, and David Walter Price, History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary
Literature, Poiesis, and the Past, Urbana and Chicago, 1999.
5 Jud, 'James Ellroy'.
6 American Tabloid, p. 5.
7 Quoted in Roland Barthes, Michelet, transl. R. Howard, New York, 1987, p. 102.
8 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. T. Conley, New York, 1988.
9 'Tijuana, Mon Amour', Crime Wave, New York, 1999, pp. 123-66.
10 This quotation comes from a conversation with Ellroy transcribed in Paul Duncan, The
Third Degree: Crime Writers in Conversation, Harpenden, 1997, pp. 230-54 at p. 246. This is
probably the best interview available. It frequently touches upon Ellroy's approach to history.
11 Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel (1850), transl. S. Bermann, Lincoln NE
and London, 1984.
12 Manzoni, On the Historical Novel.
13 The difference in content between Ellroy's account of the 1960s and that presented by
historians should not, however, be exaggerated, especially in the light of avowed CIA policies
of 'circuit-breaking' and 'plausible deniability'. Theoharis, From the Secret Files, also corrob-
orates his portrait of J. Edgar Hoover. The notion of compartmentalization (a genuine problem
in many CIA covert operations) allows Ellroy to have his cake and eat it, since he can fudge
the extent to which the activities of characters like John Stanton were officially sanctioned
(and, if they were, by whom). Nonetheless, the authors of the works mentioned in note 2 would
probably regard Ellroy's account as sensationalist, exaggerated and highly selective in its
emphases. On specific points, it is in fact highly implausible - in particular, the idea of Castro
being secretly in collusion with the Mafia and rogue CIA men in the mid-1960s. Elsewhere,
Ellroy is misleading in ways that affect the credibility of his overall interpretation. For example,
CIA analysts were consistently opposed to escalation of the war in Vietnam because they
correctly predicted that victory there was unlikely. Moreover, the agency's associates were
certainly less efficient - and perhaps less ruthless - in suppressing information about their
activities than Ellroy implies. Covert operations were frequently in the news throughout the
1960s. Despite all this, I'd rather read Ellroy than the bland, 'objective' accounts of historians
like Jeffreys-Jones who, by analysing CIA activities purely in terms of effectiveness (and
exclusively from a top-down perspective), unwittingly adopt a Machiavellian tone which risks
normalizing the activities they describe. Covert operations may have been strategically less
important than intelligence gathering but their moral significance is far greater and it is
morality that interests Ellroy. The most significant difference between Ellroy and traditional
historiography is ultimately therefore one of tone (and of form) rather than of content. His
attitude towards the past is fundamentally disrespectful in a way that would never be coun-
tenanced by historians. In particular, he constantly (and mercilessly) judges his characters. He
says, 'If you have the stones to say I can rewrite history to my own specifications ... then you
can get away with it' (Duncan, Third Degree, p. 244).
14 Duncan, Third Degree, p. 249.

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 James Ellroy as Historical Novelist 203

15 J. Edgar Hoover did in fact have a 'Do Not File' system to ensure that particularly
sensitive information was never entered in the FBI's central archive. Many of the records kept
in his office were destroyed on his instructions after his death. See Theoharis, From the Secret
Files.
16 Even Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (which could not by any
stretch of the imagination be regarded as postmodern) emphasizes how perceptions of the
Agency's role affected its standing and therefore its actual capabilities, irrespective of whether
such perceptions were correct. Ellroy is having none of this casuistry.
17 Duncan, Third Degree, p. 244.
18 Hayden White, 'The Fictions of Factual Representation', in Tropics of Discourse,
Baltimore and London, 1978, pp. 121-34.
19 Ellroy, My Dark Places, pp. 103-5.
20 Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', in The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore and
London, 1987, pp. 1-25. The interview below contains a more detailed statement of the
possible relevance of White's ideas in reading Ellroy's novels.
21 See Hayden White, 'The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory', in
The Content of the Form, pp. 26-57 at pp. 31-3, which contends that the Annalistes' contempt
for the novel arises from a 'distaste for a genre of literature that puts human agents rather than
impersonal processes at the centre of interest and suggests that such agents have some signifi-
cant control over their own destinies' (p. 33). This is, of course, precisely what attracts me (and,
I am sure, Ellroy) to the novel.
22 Ellroy, My Dark Places, p. 105.
23 Some of the ideas raised in this section are also touched upon in the recent television
documentary 'James Ellroy's Feast of Death', directed by Vikram Jayanti, broadcast on 6 May
2001 in BBC2 Arena.
24 Barthes, Michelet, p. 82.
25 Jud, 'James Ellroy'.
26 From the essay 'My Mother's Killer', Crime Wave, pp. 49-62 at p. 62.
27 My Dark Places, pp. 126-7.
28 For a good summary of Romantic hermeneutics, see Paul Hamilton, Historicism,
London, 1996, pp. 51-81.
29 Ellroy, My Dark Places, p. 323.
30 See (if you have a strong stomach) Derek Raymond, I Was Dora Suarez, London, 1990.
31 See for instance Ellroy, My Dark Places, pp. 157, 323.
32 It should, however, be pointed out that Michelet was quite hostile to the novel and for
much the same reasons as the Annalistes: its emphasis on contingency. He wrote in 1864:

Love is a lottery, Grace is a lottery. There is the essence of the novel. It is the contrary of
history, not only because it subordinates great collective interests to an individual destiny
but because it does not favour the ways of that difficult preparation which in history
produces events. It prefers to show us the lucky casts of the dice.

(Quoted in Barthes, Michelet, pp. 67-8). Ellroy's emphasis on love as a means of transcending
the corruption of history (without ever escaping it - this is an important qualification) might
be seen to confirm Michelet's critique. On the other hand, his insistence that things happen as
a result of a series of complex, 'compartmentalized' and often implicit human interactions
certainly acknowledges the 'difficult preparation which in history produces events'.
33 Black Dahlia, p. 131.
34 Ellroy, Cold Six Thousand, p. 13.
35 Quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London,
1998, p. 50.
36 Black Dahlia, pp. 210-11.
37 Robert Rauschenburg is quoted to this effect in Lucy Lippard with Lawrence Alloway,
Nancy Marmer and Nicolas Calas, Pop Art, London, 1970, p. 6.
38 See M. Barth (ed.), Weegee's World, Boston, 1998; M. Zuckriegl (ed.), Weegee's Story,
Salzburg, exhibition catalogue, 1999.
39 American Tabloid, p. 580.
40 Big Nowhere, p. 166.
41 My forthcoming book, Pistols! Murder! Treason!, includes pastiches of Ellroy's style,

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204 History Workshop Journal

Pop Art comic strips, Polaroids, etc. There is a taster in

Eye: Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Venetian Spy Reports', Urban History, 2001, forth-
coming.
42 See for example White, 'Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science',
in Content of the Form, pp. 101-2.
43 Davis: 'Politically, I'm way out there still, in the extreme left, the revolutionary left....
I'll never like cops', in Marcus Frommer, 'An Interview with Mike Davis', Chicago Review 38:
4, 1993, pp. 21-43 at p. 38. Contrast James Ellroy, 'Body Dumps', reprinted in Crime Wave,
pp. 3-48 at p. 17: 'Cops liked me because ... I loved and hated along their lines of rectitude'.
This latter quotation does not, of course (as Davis would imply) constitute an apologia for
police racism, etc.
44 Davis, City of Quartz, p. 45.
45 I have since tracked it down: see note 43.
46 Davis, in Frommer, 'An Interview', pp. 39-40:

Now let me tell you who I can't stand, and to top the list I would put that neo-Nazi in
American writing who is James Ellroy ... And to begin with he's not a good writer. He's
a kind of methamphetamine caricature of Raymond Chandler ... Each of his books is prac-
tically a Mein Kampf, it's anti-communistic, it's anti-Mexican, and it's racist.

Ironically, I suspect that many of Ellroy's most loyal readers are left-wing and the extent of
this irony is suggested by the fact that he's happily married to a feminist writer.
47 Duncan, Third Degree, p. 254.
48 Ellroy, Cold Six Thousand, pp. 529, 533.
49 Ellroy, Cold Six Thousand, pp. 153, 511.
50 Benjamin claimed that, 'It isn't that the past casts its light on what is present or that
what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the Then and
the Now come together, in a flash of lightning, into a constellation. In other words: an image
is dialectics at a standstill': in Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of
History, Princeton NJ, 1997, p. 64.
51 On illumination and petrification, see Cadava, Words of Light, pp. 5, 22, 43, 59.
52 The classic film noir directed by Jules Dassin, 'The Naked City' (1948), was explicitly
based on Weegee's photographs and borrowed its title from one of his books.
53 Hubert Cornfield, Plunder Road, 1957.
54 Von Dutch Holland was a custom painter of hot-rod cars and bike helmets, and so on
in 1960s California. His work fed into Californian Pop Art.
55 Ellroy, Cold Six Thousand, p. 566. Here, the historically-documented 'Operation Zorro'
(as it is designated in the novel) is presented as something that exists only on paper, a fabri-
cation created specifically to distract attention from a far more insidious initiative controlled
directly by J. Edgar Hoover himself.
56 The CIA's own Inspector General described in 1967 the 'frequent resort to synecdoche'
in policy discussions.

[We] find people speaking vaguely of 'doing something about Castro' when it is clear that
what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may
not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually
meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than
was intended.

(CIA Targets Fidel, pp. 26-35 similarly notes the 'pointed avoidance of "bad words"' during
internal briefings).
57 Don Delillo, Libra, Harmondsworth, 1989. See also Don Delillo, Underworld, London,
1998. Norman Mailer, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, London, 1995 is never mentioned
by Ellroy, which is surprising given the parallels between the two men's work.

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