Fables of the Material World in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles

As he walked, Stillman did not look up. . . . Every now and then he would stoop down, pick some object off the ground, and examine it closely, turning it over and over in his hand. It made Quinn think of an archaeologist inspecting a shard at some prehistoric ruin.

—Paul Auster, City of Glass

James Ellroy’s detective stories detail an urban landscape in which crime is inseparable from its relationship to a grossly material world. In Ellroy’s Los Angeles, gothic bloody serial murder, rape and incest, violent armed robberies and assassinations, terrorism, institutional corruption, and petty crimes from property theft to mail fraud are everywhere tied to large-scale urban development and land deals—to the physical structures of the city. Thus, Ellroy’s work gives radically substantial form to the generic pattern in which the world of the detective story is saturated with the traces of crime. This study investigates the effects of this imbrication of crime into the fabric of the city in Ellroy’s fiction. It examines the way Ellroy’s LA concretizes the narrative and semiotic tensions that run through his work, as the shifting terms of the exchange between the semiotic possibilities produced by mysterious crimes, and the potential significances of the clues discovered through the course of their investigation, are hypostasized in the city’s relentless material activity. Thus, in the context of a critical discourse that has tended to use spatial metaphors to describe the often complex relationships among the genre’s physical spaces, the interpretive possibilities these spaces present, and the investigative action of the detectives who inhabit them, this study focuses on tracking these relationships at street level, through their expression in two material scenes from Ellroy’s work—the first from The Black Dahlia (1987) and the second from his 2004 short story “Jungletown Jihad.” But it is also concerned with the way these specific scenes signal the broader implications of the fact that every detective story describes a landscape marked by traces of the crime, and that the story’s significance is therefore always crucially enmeshed in its materiality and its narrative temporality—in the dialectical tension between subject and fable that is essential to the generic form.¹

Space and Signification in the Detective Story

More, perhaps, than any other genre, detective fiction demands that its readers pay careful attention to the material world it describes. Here, after all, anything might be a clue, and every surface is charged with latent meaning, potentially of the most crucial significance.² Detective stories are therefore typically rich with extensive descriptions of objects, designed to cater to the needs of the heroes and the readers of a genre in which the search for evidence is inseparable from the narrative form and from the pleasures of literary consumption. Put another way, detective fiction involves a deep reticulation of space and signification. However, few studies have examined the material significance of the genre’s settings,³ and these have generally been distinct from the semiotic readings that make up the majority of writing on the world of the detective story. Nevertheless, it is perhaps reflective of the crucial relationship between space and signification in the genre that our discourse on detective fiction has been characterized by some fundamentally spatial ways of thinking about signification.

A number of studies have focused on mapping the interpretative possibilities produced by the mysterious crime by way of spatial metaphors. The most popular such metaphor is surely the labyrinth, which has enjoyed popular usage on dust jackets and in book reviews (Ellroy’s “labyrinthine plotting is superb,” writes Modern Review’s David Pascoe, on the back of White Jazz), in theoretical examinations of the genre (Jorge Hernández Martin’s Readers and Labyrinths, for one), and in detective stories that offer reflexive commentary on the epistemological conventions of the form, often labeled “metaphysical,” “postmodern,” or “antidetective” detective stories. (Consider, for example, the way Eco’s labyrinthine library in The Name of the Rose opens an intertextual passage to Borges’s labyrinth in “The Library of Babel.”) In...