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Coda for Crime Fiction
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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169 Coda for Crime Fiction Steven Powell/2008 This interview was conducted on August 15, 2008. Previously unpublished. Interviewer: Your early novels featured many references to music such as Anton Bruckner,1 rock ’n’ roll, black bebop jazz. Why the link between music and crime in your novels? Ellroy: There’s not so many references to rock ’n’ roll, they’re here and there. Brown’s Requiem mirrors my flat-out obsession with classical music and Bruckner, the Romantic composers, a line that started with Beethoven and Bruckner—the enormousness, the idea of spiritual transcendence. The idea of seeking God, transmogrification, the bigness of it, the complexity of it has always floored me. And I’ve got a big poster of Bruckner. It’s an early photograph of Bruckner who died in 1896, on my living room wall, and there’s Beethoven shit all over this place. And thus that, and then the later book, White Jazz, which is in the fractured, disjointed style of a very bad, racist white cop whose life is breaking down, who inexplicably gets hooked on black bebop jazz. I’m not a fan of bebop, but I understand it as the means to express confusion and disorientation. And music is a very pure form of expression, and it’s been important to me to include it. Interviewer: That’s interesting because I was thinking the link between classical music and German classical composers and some of your earlier villains, if that’s not too crude a term, Doc Harris, Dr. John Havilland almost model themselves on Nietzschean Superman. Is there perhaps a link there between the music and how these villains model themselves? Ellroy: Yeah, I don’t associate classical music with odious philosophy. The greatest musician of all time, Beethoven, was German and his music is entirely about God and liberty and equality. We’ve all seen a lot of movies and television shows where the genius or the villain—the Anthony Burgess, Ku- 170 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY brick piece Clockwork Orange where the hoodlums dig Beethoven. I wasn’t trying for that at all. Interviewer: Well, we talked a little about John Gregory Dunne last time and his novel True Confessions and its influence on The Black Dahlia, and you also mentioned it was influencing your latest novel in the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. Ellroy: Well it’s referenced in the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy in that there are first-person prologues preceded by “NOW” in the present on a single page, and the flashback bulk of the book which is in the third person—“THEN.” And I do that in this novel. That’s as far as it goes. There’s raucous . . . and you’ve read the novel right? Interviewer: True Confessions. Yes. Ellroy: There’s raucous, profane humor to it. You know it’s full of racist shit and crude humor that I dug wildly, and in that sense, that book of Dunne’s, and it’s the only book of his I’ve read cover to cover (I started reading Dutch Shea Junior and didn’t dig it), influenced me. But I know nothing about the Catholic Church or Irishness at all. Interviewer: Right. Well, it is interesting how your influence seems to have changed over the years. Brown’s Requiem is very much influenced by Raymond Chandler, now you seem to have an aversion to Raymond Chandler. Ellroy: I think he was lightweight compared to Dashiell Hammett. And I think that the language is overripe, the philosophy is gasbag. He came out of L.A., and he wrote in the first person. And it’s the L.A. of my early childhood and the L.A. before my birth, which is intensely romantic to me. And I sure as shit loved the books while I read them, but Hammett and Cain and Ross Macdonald have held in better in my mind. And I had to reread a little Hammett , because I wrote the Everyman Library introduction to one of their volumes, and was amazed at how my sensibility of the goon and the political fixer and the bagman and the hatchet man strike-breaker came out of that. Interviewer: Yes. Is it fair to say that reading these books changed you not only as a writer but perhaps as a person? I think I read in an interview, it might have been in a documentary, you said that Joseph...