Conversations with James Ellroy

Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation with James Ellroy

40 Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation with James Ellroy Charles L. P. Silet/1995 From Armchair Detective: A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Appreciation of Mystery, Detective , and Suspense Fiction (Summer 1995), vol. 28, no. 3. Reprinted by permission of Charles L. P. Silet. The self-described “Mad Dog” of contemporary crime fiction, Ellroy has led a life as bizarre as one of his ill-fated characters. His mother was murdered when he was ten years old, and in his late teens he dropped out of school and went on the streets, becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol, living in abandoned houses, and gorging himself on crime novels. By 1977 he sobered up and began writing: first, a classic detective novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981), a genre that he quickly abandoned; next a sex murder book, Clandestine (1982) which was a thinly disguised version of his mother’s case; and, finally, a short-lived series of police procedurals featuring detective Lloyd Hopkins—the “Hopkins in Jeopardy”1 books—Blood on the Moon (1984), Because the Night (1984), and Suicide Hill (1985). After a first-person serial murderer novel, Killer on the Road (1986), Ellroy struck it big with the first of his L.A. Quartet, The Black Dahlia (1987), a novel about the famous unsolved mutilation death of Elizabeth Short. The success of this book fueled the writing of the rest of the L.A. books: The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). In the Quartet, Ellroy explored the underside of postwar Los Angeles with its red baiting, police corruption, racist bigotry, and sexual perversion. He developed an increasingly sparse, realistic style which culminated in a telegraphic prose experiment in White Jazz, with its riff rhythms and improvisational narrative. In 1994 Ellroy published Hollywood Nocturnes, a collection CHARLES L. P. SILET / 1995 41 of short fiction that included the novella “Dick Contino’s Blues,” based on a nonfictional, investigative piece he wrote for G.Q. Ellroy is now embarked on a series of three large novels, broadly sociopolitical in scope, that cover American history from 1958 to 1973. American Tabloid deals with the years 1958 to 1963; the next volume will cover 1963 to 1968 and is expected to be published in 1997; and the third will deal with the years 1968 to 1973 and will appear in the year 2000. Each volume is planned to be bigger and broader than the last. Currently, Ellroy is writing his first nonfiction book, My Dark Places, the story of his mother’s murder and the investigation which failed to discover her killer. He is working with a retired L.A. detective and is reinvestigating the case using modern police procedures. They hope to uncover the murderer , and if he is alive, bring him to justice. Ellroy’s lifelong obsession with his mother’s death refuses to go away. The following interview was conducted just after Ellroy’s multi-city book tour to promote American Tabloid. In it he discusses his past as a petty criminal, drug addict, and crime fiction junkie. His outspoken views on private -eye novels, serial-killer fiction, and series with likable characters will not endear him to traditional mystery fans, but they will surely stimulate serious thought about the art of crime writing. Interviewer: You have been rather widely interviewed about your checkered past—the murder of your mother when you were ten, your time on the streets, your alcoholism and drug addiction—is there anything new about that period that you’d like to discuss? Ellroy: As a criminal I was pathetic. As a drug addict and alcoholic, I was always on the cautious side. I was never a tough guy. I broke into houses and sniffed women’s undergarments, sure, but I was never a bad-ass burglar . We’re talking about the late 1960s primarily, and it was quite simply a different world. People didn’t have sophisticated alarm systems; people didn’t have telephone answering machines. So if you were called up and got no answer, chances were nobody was home. And finding a loose screen or some window access or a dog door was rather easy. I was always frightened, but the thrill of voyeuristic entry always eclipsed my fear, and I never took anything large. I took cash, I sniffed some undergarments while I was there, I stole drugs. In the summer of 1969, right after the Tate/La Bianca...