Conversations with James Ellroy

James Ellroy Previews Blood’s a Rover

201 James Ellroy Previews Blood’s a Rover Art Taylor/2009 From Art and Literature: The Literary Blog of Metro Magazine (Raleigh, NC), 20 September 2009. Reprinted by permission of Art Taylor. On Tuesday, September 22, Alfred A. Knopf will publish James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, the third and final installment of the Underworld U.S.A. novels that began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. The new book is not only a fine finish to that trilogy but also strikes me as both Ellroy’s most ambitious novel (drawing on seven different perspectives) and the most accessible entry into the trilogy. As with its predecessors, Blood’s a Rover continues to explore how private lives can impact very public and highly political events, spanning in this case from the aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations to the eve of the Watergate break-ins. But this new book is also, at its heart, a love story, with each of the three leading men—Wayne Tedrow Jr., employed by Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, reporting to J. Edgar Hoover; and Don Crutchfield, a window peeper turned obsessive investigator—falling under the spell of women, including a radical liberal activist, Joan Rosen Klein, who may stand as the most complex female character in all the author’s books. Interviewer: Blood’s a Rover marks a magnificent end to the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, a crowning achievement for sure. Had you seen these books as a trilogy from the very beginning? Ellroy: I knew the second novel would be my big novel of the 1960s. The history was easy to foresee: the civil rights movement, the ultimate assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, more Cuban exile shit, more mob shit, Howard Hughes buying up Las Vegas, general civil rights unrest, the Klan, and my two survivors from American Tabloid, Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant, getting further into the shit. It took longer to put 202 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY Blood’s a Rover together, because going from ’68 to ’72, you’re going to have the summer of the political conventions and the ’68 election and all that hoo-ha, but my mob guys had to get to a cool locale, and it took me a while to come up with the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It’s full of voodoo, which is cool shit and certainly intensifies all the black militant shit in L.A. Interviewer: It’s been interesting to try to chart the line between documented /accepted history and your revisioning of that history in all of these books. How do you approach that research? Ellroy: One of the questions I never answer is what’s real and what’s not. The established history is there to be culled, to be analyzed, and then I extrapolate off of it fictionally with both real-life and fictional characters. For example, Don Crutchfield in Blood’s a Rover is a real-life private eye here in L.A. He has a website, and he’s a very successful Hollywood private eye, largely involved in the Michael Jackson pedophile cases. [Note: This interview took place before the death of Jackson.] I realized I could utilize Crutchfield differently. But he and I will never say what’s real and what’s not. Did he really go to the D.R. and kill all those people, kill a lot of Castroite Cubans? Well, maybe, maybe not. Interviewer: Blood’s a Rover looks at the wages of right-wing political action and explores liberal activism in new ways—with characters examining their own ideologies and changing as a result. Is any of this related to recent history in America, or is it solely embedded in the history of that era, or do various characters’ choices and actions stem from your own reflections on politics? Ellroy: This has nothing to with the world today or the world over the past several years—either the current man in the White House or his predecessor . I conceived of this book before any of that shit started to happen. What I wanted to write was a book that’s about the necessity of belief and about the exigent factors of political conversation and spiritual conversion. I wanted to create a diverse panoply of characters who thought a great deal about what things meant. Wayne Tedrow was utterly exhausted morally from his racist journey in The...