'Rover' Runs Red, if Overlong

“America: I window-peeped four years of our history. It was one long mobile stakeout and kick-the-door-in shakedown. I had a license to steal and a ticket to ride… I am going to tell you everything.” At the beginning of James Ellroy’s latest novel, “Blood’s a Rover,” the third installment of his “Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy,” one of the book’s three narrators proposes to retell the history of America between June 14, 1968 and May 11, 1972, and unsurprisingly, the novel’s perspective on that history is one of general brutality, filled with accounts of racism, corruption, hatred and violence.

“Blood’s a Rover” comes as the final episode in a trilogy that recounts the tumultuous times of the American Sixties, though it can be read as a stand-alone novel. Its predecessors “American Tabloid” and “The Cold Six Thousand,” set throughout the early and mid-60s, are retellings of such events as the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., with rotating chapters containing each of three narrator’s points of view. Ellroy continued this three-narrator formula in this latest novel, following the ex-cop and mob affiliate Wayne Tedrow Jr., FBI Special Agent Dwight Holly, and burgeoning private investigator Don Crutchfield through their increasingly intersecting journeys in the political and social climate of the final phase of the 60s.

Initially the three narrators are leading separate lives, yet it soon becomes clear that their three paths intersect through the events of a mysterious unsolved robbery and an elusive woman named Joan Rosen Klein. Each protagonist is searching for something related to both Ms. Klein and the crime, a search that carries them all down a communal path of violence, hatred, and destruction. Ellroy’s is a well-crafted foray into the dark-side of America, but the author’s attempt at absolute historic totality hinders the novels complete success. Ellroy’s desire to account for almost every day in the book’s nine-year time span causes the narrative to drag, and because of the novel’s extreme length, readers not completely invested in the minute details of the characters’ lives will find themselves struggling at times to keep reading.

Like much of Ellroy’s fiction, “Blood’s a Rover” is at least in part homage to pulp literature—a genre whose mandate is one of instant gratification. But at 640 pages, Ellroy’s latest dwells too often and for too long on aspects of the plot that, for their sheer monotony, never seem important. The truth behind the robbery and Joan Klein’s identity are both revealed so slowly that the value of surprise is squandered. None of the three protagonists are ever completely invested in the novel’s seeming climax, rendering much of the book’s attention to plot somewhat irrelevant. One passage exemplifies Crutchfield’s divided attentions throughout the novel. “Memo: work on your mother’s file. Query the Racine PD. Memo: your case file is updated. Your case is dead-stalled. Memo: get your ass to the rockin’ D.R. and voodoo-vamped Haiti.” The split focus and meandering pace of the novel give the sense of only a passing interest in the novel’s supposed central event.

Ultimately, however, the goal of ”Blood’s a Rover” is to depict a certain time period in American History in a new light, and it fully succeeds in accomplishing that goal. Ellroy explores the time period at length and ends up creating a fictionalized world behind real events, depicting the fallout from Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the election of President Nixon, the presence and fear of communism, and the eventual death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover from a more cynical perspective than the history books. His account of the era orients the readers in the plot and leaves them with a true sense of the anger, both righteous and profane, that highlighted the period. Ellroy’s distinctive style—the brief, spare syntax reminiscent of hardboiled detective fiction—sets a dark tone for the novel and lends itself to this retelling of history. Yet, while the history is interesting, the unfolding of the mystery of the robbery and Joan Klein dictates the pace of the novel, and there Ellroy falls short.

Looking back over the events of the nine years of the novel in the epilogue, a narrator notes that he’s “paid a dear and savage price to live history.” The message is clear: the history of America is brutal, violent, and full of pain. Indeed Ellroy succeeds at bringing that point across through the macabre events of “Blood’s a Rover.” Yet, it seems clear that he could have used less words to create a sense of suspense and anticipation for its climax, without sacrificing that message. Instead, when the long-awaited climax arrives, the reader is so distracted by all the unrelated corruption and death that the answers to the puzzle do not seem very important. Such strengths and shortcomings leave “Blood’s a Rover” a fitting, though far from perfect conclusion to Ellroy’s trilogy.