Conversations with James Ellroy

Engaging the Horror

158 Engaging the Horror Steven Powell/2008 This interview was conducted on June 12, 2008. Previously unpublished. Interviewer: In Killer on the Road Martin Plunkett has a fantasy he dubs “Brain Movies” which bears some similarity to The Big Nowhere where Danny Upshaw uses a technique dubbed “Man Camera.” Why the presence of cinematic techniques in your novels? Ellroy: I love movies, and I’m a voyeur is the best and most direct answer. You know about my childhood. I was going around looking in windows and peeping and perving out here and there. And there’s a great deal of this in this novel I’m writing now. And imagery, particularly when it comes to women and sexuality, is key to me, and thus you have a bunch of men with disordered personal lives, Martin Plunkett, Danny Upshaw in The Big Nowhere, and interestingly, you know both these guys are homosexuals, and they’re going around looking to be eroticized by interceding in the big events, lives, and criminal cases because they have chaotic inner lives and they wanna countermand their internal chaos by imposing order on external events. That’s Upshaw; it’s not so much Plunkett, who’s an out-and-out psychopath. But he needs to control external events, i.e. because he’s eroticized by killing people. Interviewer: Yes. I was just reading the novel L.A. Confidential next to L.A. Confidential the screenplay. I was interested to find that actually the novel seemed to be less descriptive and more visual than the screenplay at times, which appeared to be more descriptive, and I thought that’s a unique thing within a novel to be that visual. Ellroy: Yeah. Well for one thing the motion picture of L.A. Confidential is dramatically reduced. What is it, 18, 19, 20 percent tops of the entire story STEVEN POWELL / 2008 159 in a dramatically compressed timeframe? Different, entirely different fate for one of the three characters, Jack Vincennes. But in its concision and in its density the scenes have to be, in order to make that thing fly—it’s a five-hundred-page novel, not quite five hundred pages. It needed to be very punchy. It needed to be set up visually very accurately and very quickly. Interviewer: You mentioned that as a novel the outline for L.A. Confidential was originally the size of a small novel, so is it fair to say this sparse writing style that you’ve developed that it came about perhaps by accident or was there more design to it than that? Ellroy: Well the outline for The Black Dahlia was 144 pages, slightly more than that for The Big Nowhere. And L.A. Confidential was 211 pages, and then the outline for American Tabloid, which was my longest novel to date—just under six hundred pages, was 250. And what happened was there was an editor at Warner Books who thought the book was too long in its existing form, L.A. Confidential, albeit dramatic and violent, and she wanted me to make cuts for the sake of publishing costs. And that’s how I developed that style, and then subsequently when I wrote the concluding book of the quartet , the direct sequel of L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, I started the book out in a more normal, conversational first person style—it felt flabby to me. And then I realized that Dave Klein’s voice, panicked, insomaniacal influenced— he’s a racist cop in late 1958 L.A. His life is burning down largely as a result of bad karmic juju that he’s created—and he gets hooked inexplicably on black bebop jazz despite his racism. And that’s when I developed the fractured, dissipated style of White Jazz, which I’ll never go back to. Big, big elements of it, and I think excessively so in The Cold Six Thousand, but the novel I’m writing now, the third book of this trilogy, it’s a much more elegant, fully explicated style because it’s what the story dictated. And I try to learn from the mistakes of the previous book. Interviewer: Yes, that style in The Cold Six Thousand did put off a lot of reviewers , a lot of people. I think why I found it so riveting, for me a big draw of your work is it’s so visual. It’s action...