Ellroy Shows Life’s Gritty Details

James Ellroy is the real deal. The real, raw deal. The international best selling author of L.A. Confidential, among others, pulls no punches when it comes to the sex, drugs and violence of the American underworld, particularly in his native Los Angeles.

After standing me up for an interview that his publicist neglected to tell him about, Ellroy took me to dinner at one of Boston’s oldest patrician steakhouses. He began by ordering four shots of espresso with ice on the side—and I quickly discovered that he was loud and direct, but maintained a conscious politeness throughout our conversation.

Nor does he shy away from the gritty details of his own life. At the presentation of his newest book, Destination: Morgue!, at the Brattle Theater on Monday, his fiction was implicitly linked to his own experiences.

Billing himself as the “death dog with the hog log,” Ellroy involved the audience immediately with his vibrant demeanor and booming voice. Amid ever increasing laughter, he thanked them for coming and “taking time off from your drug habits, your sex lives and your misguided efforts to unseat President Bush.”

“If you buy one thousand copies of my book,” Ellroy shouted, “you will have unlimited sex with each and every person on this earth that you desire every night for the rest of your lives.”

The book is a collection of Ellroy’s fiction and nonfiction, which includes previously published pieces as well as three new novellas. Ellroy read from one of these, “Jungletown Jihad.” He described it as “the world’s only comedy about the specter of Arab terrorism.”

Ellroy gesticulated loudly as he read, often yelling into the microphone for emphasis, and firmly planted his legs on the stage. The story, like all of Ellroy’s work, was blunt and graphic at times, funny at others, but always hard-hitting.

“The guy jumped from the car,” Ellroy read, “his face was a four-alarm fire…[he] sizzled and fizzled. The guy sputtered sparks and dipped dead.”

Amid the alliterative sentences and one phrase paragraphs characteristic of Ellroy’s furious style are photographs of L.A. personalities and other people who had an influence on Ellroy’s life. Ellroy was particularly enthusiastic to point out the inclusion of Kaya Christian, November 1967 Playboy Playmate of the month.

Mostly, though, it is crime—brutal, clipped, ass-kicking crime—that garners Ellroy’s attention. As the title suggests, Destination: Morgue!, like most of Ellroy’s writing, does not shrink from this dark theme. Its pages, if they emulated their contents, would be ripped, blood-soaked and stomped on.

THE BACK STORY

To understand the hard-boiled nature of Ellroy’s work, as well as his midnight sense of humor, it’s vital to understand where he came from. His book jackets brusquely state that “James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948,” which he referred to as “my smog-bound fatherland.” Ellroy admitted, “I think that says it all.”

There’s more to the story, though. When Ellroy was ten, his mother was murdered and her body dumped in a ditch. A few years later his dad died too, of natural causes. His last words to his son were “try to pick up every waitress that serves you.”

For 12 years Ellroy wandered L.A., living with friends and in parks, nearly continuously drunk and high from ingesting the cotton soaked wads of Benzedrex inhalers and drinking alcohol and cough syrup. He broke into women’s homes and stole their panties. He worked at a store called Porno Villa and afterwards would “drink [himself] into oblivion,” over his loneliness.

Ellroy said he fantasized and longed for women but admitted, “I was the acquired taste that nobody ever acquired.” He upped the drinking and the Benzedrex until a doctor told him that if he continued he would be gone in a week’s time. Destination: Morgue! is not only the title of Ellroy’s latest work; it was also the conceivable future of the author when he was only 28 years old.

“Live or die,” Ellroy writes, “an easy choice once it confronts you.”

Ellroy cleaned himself up and began writing while caddying at a country club. He said he had always wanted to write and obsessed about it, even before his mother’s death.

Ellroy said a few books “profoundly affected” him, including Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions. On the whole, though, “I don’t read much,” he admitted. “I like to brood, I like to think.”

Ellroy ordered a T-bone steak for dinner and attacked it with the intensity he brings to his writing. I was only halfway finished with my meal, when he was done with his, though he had managed to simultaneously expand on various aspects of his writing. He then picked up the bone and began gnawing on it.

After the publication of his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, Ellroy’s success continued, climbed steep and his L.A. Quartet series—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz—were all international bestsellers.

But then the past came back to him. “For Christmas of ’93,” Ellroy explained, “my wife got me a copy of the photograph of me taken on June 22, ’58, the day my mother was killed…I hadn’t thought of that aspect of my mother’s death in years, and there it is in my face.”

From there, Ellroy decided to exorcise the memory of his mother, and expanded what was originally to be a magazine article into a full-length crime memoir. “The dramatist in me knew that I could write a book that would describe the arc of my relationship with my mother very well,” he said.

That he did. The resulting effort, My Dark Places, is a heartfelt, gut-wrenching 427 pages of coming to terms. “I understood that I would learn things about my mother, and I learned great things about my mother…and myself,” Ellroy said.

Ellroy wrote the book in seven months, an incredible feat for so involved and complicated a work. He wrote it quickly, he says, because the material was already inside of him. “Shit was coming out of me that I had been repressing for years,” he remarked. “It was easy.”

The memoir details not only the murder and subsequent investigation of Ellroy’s mother—Geneva Hilliker Ellroy—but also a new investigation, undertaken by a homicide detective named Bill Stoner from the L.A.P.D and Ellroy himself.

Though Ellroy admitted it was unlikely that they would find the killer 35 years after the fact, he knew the real investigation was of his mother’s life and his relationship with her. “She’s out there in the big spiritus mundi,“ he mused. “I’d give anything to hear her voice.”

RIFFS ON CRAFT

What Ellroy is most famous for is his crime novels—huge, sprawling works with hitmen, thugs, pimps, whores, victims and perps. His most recent series—The Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, which includes American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and a not-yet-published third installment—fictionalizes American history in the from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It covers a variety of events including the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination and will conclude just prior to Watergate.

When asked how he crafts such complex and multilayered works of historical fiction, Ellroy explained simply, “you write extremely big fuckin’ outlines. The outline for [The Cold Six Thousand] was 350 pages…Outline, outline, outline.”

The result is a lot of fiction. The second installment of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy weighed in at 688 pages, and the third—due out in about two year—is promised to be even longer.

Ellroy stressed plot as the first and most crucial element of writing such complex works. Still, he said the importance of plotting shouldn’t subtract from other qualities of fiction, and ultimately, “you can have it all.” Any fan of Ellroy’s will note that his writing is uniquely sonorous and carefully crafted, not the stuff of hack crime writers intent only on weaving a story. “Write the genre you like to read but be original,” he advised.

After the readi ng, Ellroy answered questions from audience members, many personal, following his note that he would “welcome the most invasively overpersonal questions” they could give him. A large smattering of people shouted questions out, rather than raising their hands, a format Ellroy seemed to enjoy.

When the question session was over, Ellroy thanked the audience for coming, leaned into the microphone, and barked like a dog.

-—Staff writer Joe Dimento can be reached at dimento@fas.harvard.edu.