Conversations with James Ellroy

Introduction

ix Introduction As a novelist who has devoted much of the latter half of his literary career to both the mythmaking and myth-debunking of American history, James Ellroy has rather fittingly capitalized on his status as one of America’s most sought after interviewees to weave myths about his own life and work. As Ellroy would say to Ron Hogan in 1995, “every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I’ve created about my work and refine it.” Ellroy’s life story reads like a brutal, hyperbolized realization of the American dream. He was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles in 1948; his mother was a registered nurse and his father was a freelance tax accountant and failed entrepreneur. His unusual upbringing was split between his divorced, promiscuous parents. Both his father and mother had the propensity to exaggerate the truth or conceal it from Ellroy. When his mother was murdered in 1958, one of the first things Ellroy did after learning of her death was to fake tears; already Ellroy the storyteller was learning to formulate narrative and performance. Twenty-nine years later, Ellroy transmogri fied his lust/hatred relationship with his mother with his fictionalized account of the murder of Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia. In doing so, he finds a fictional solution to his mother’s murder by proxy, but not an emotional solution. It would not be until he reopened his mother’s murder case with Detective Bill Stoner that Ellroy could find a compromised peace, an acceptance which Ellroy described in his interview with Charles L. P. Silet: “The only closure is that there is no closure.” Ellroy’s father’s death in 1965 after a series of strokes left the seventeen-year-old high school dropout without a family and precipitated the worst years of Ellroy’s moral and physical decline—alcohol and drug abuse, a three-year period of breaking and entering into the upper-middle-class houses of Hancock Park to commit acts of sexual voyeurism, multiple arrests for petty crimes and several stints in the Los Angeles County Jail. That Ellroy could emerge from this life, reinventing himself as the crime novelist James Ellroy with the publication of his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, in 1981 is a testament to the American dream, albeit his iconoclastic version of it, as Ellroy says in the prologue to x INTRODUCTION American Tabloid: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.” Ellroy’s life story lends itself easily to distortion, and throughout the interviews in this collection Ellroy consistently tries to correct the misconceptions of journalists. Yet he has also found misrepresentation useful. In interviews with Fleming Meeks and Martin Kihn, Ellroy explains how during the difficult early period of his literary career he marched into the office of respected crime fiction editor Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Bookshop, New York, and declared himself “the next King of American Crime Fiction,” even though the manuscript of his third book had been turned down by seventeen publishers. Although Penzler was unaware of this fact at the time, he was initially skeptical of Ellroy’s bravado. But this meeting would prove to be the start of a long and creative partnership between the two men. If this moment marked the beginning of Ellroy’s “Demon Dog” literary persona, it was also the genesis of his ability to weave myths about his life and work in interviews. Indeed, the opening interview of this collection may form a unique part of that mythmaking process, for Duane Tucker claims he never conducted “An Interview with James Ellroy” for Armchair Detective in 1984 and has suggested Ellroy may have used his name to write the interview himself. It should be noted that the former editor of Armchair Detective, Otto Penzler, claims that such a scenario is impossible and would never have been allowed. Ellroy himself declined to comment on the authorship of the interview, other than saying he had “no recollection” of it. However, there are a few instances within the text that suggest Ellroy did indeed write the piece himself. There is the use of the unusual term “contrapunctually structured ” in the interviewer’s introduction, a term Ellroy has used elsewhere to describe the parallel narrative of his novel Blood on the Moon (1984). Also, there is the conspicuous use of the term “ikon.” This uncommon spelling of “icon...