James Ellroy, "Destination: Morgue!" (2004).

Once again I've returned to the work of the hard boiled L.A.-scribe, James Ellroy. Previously I've read and blogged about The Black Dahlia and My Dark Places. Although there were things about those books that bothered me, I decided that there was enough in the author's work to continue my explorations. Thus I picked up Destination: Morgue! (2004) during a recent spending spree at Half Priced Books. I didn't know whether this title was supposed to be fiction or non-fiction, and after reading it I'm still not sure. That in itself would be no reason to discount the quality of the writing. Ellroy consistently dwells in a netherworld that seems to merge reality and fantasy. Just so, he probably shouldn't be using those kinds of labels.

Destination: Morgue! is broken up into two parts. The first is given the heading "Crime Culture/Memoir", implying that it fits under the True Crime category. If these tales are accurately classified, there are some troublesome associations for the author. I already knew that Ellroy had a tough upbringing, what with the unsolved murder of his mother, and the untidy and untimely death of his Dad. And I knew that the young Ellroy fell into some maladaptive behavioral trends... but I had no idea about the extent of his perversions. It's one thing to be drawn to the seedy and violent side of life if you can contain yourself to voyeurism. It's quite another to get directly involved.

By his own account, Ellroy was (at the very least) a bit of a miscreant. He started off with garden variety shoplifting, and worked his way up to eating Benzadrine inhaler cotton wads, peeping, breaking-and-entering, and stealing panties. Considering his literary (?) obsessions with "hot prowls" and rape/torture/murder, I wouldn't be surprised if the guy didn't flirt with more serious crimes. Even if he was able to hold himself in check, he certainly succumbed to a life of dissolution. After spending time in various forms of incarceration, and ending up close to death from sustained alcohol poisoning, Ellroy "went straight" and got a job as a caddy at an L.A. country club. It was during that period that he was first successfully published.

While Ellroy has a certain facility for describing crimes scenes and investigations in great detail, he appears to have a lot of difficulty keeping his internal and external lives separate. He often conflates his own deeds and drives with those of historical figures, as well as his own creations. What makes this tendency particularly irksome is how self-righteously judgmental Ellroy gets. Despite his own flaws he fails to see the humanity in others (a major disability for a writer). Just one example of his hypocrisy is a completely irrelevant condemnation of Bill Clinton that he tacked on to the end of his own litany of perversion and crime. It's as if he feels justified to label others "good" or "evil" based upon political affiliations (or race, gender, sexual preference, etc.).

Indeed, Ellroy's proclivities are reinforced in Part 2 of Destination: Morgue! Here he presents a trilogy of novellas about a far right wing vigilante cop who enforces justice without regard for civil rights. And he can't restrain himself from peppering his narrative with a string of offensive ethnic slurs of all types (EX: "color coonordinated Tommy Hipnigger"). As if this weren't enough, the author continues what becomes an almost interminable habit of throwing arbitrary alliteration into every single paragraph. Dig the square loner trying to come on hip- "Local louts loitered. Porch punks paraded. They hopped house to house and shared Schlitz malt liquor." You think that's cute? Try 389 pages of that unrelenting crap.

James Ellroy, "My Dark Places" (1997).

In November I wrote a review for James Ellroy's Black Dahlia (1987). That piece of hard-boiled crime fiction introduced me to the author's obsessions with the seedy Los Angeles of the 40's and 50's. His subsequent stories of mid-Twentieth Century Southern California were increasingly lauded, and he was touted as the spiritual heir of such Noir writers as Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. He could never be accused of downplaying the more sensational details in his tales, and several of his books (including L.A. Confidential) were eventually adapted for the big-screen. Ellroy's mix of gritty realism and salacious trimmings owes itself in part to his own experiences growing up in and around L.A.

The tragic plight of Geneva Hilliker is perhaps the defining moment of James Ellroy's life. Hilliker was found in 1958, slaughtered and dumped off on an access road leading into a public school complex. She had been strangled with stocking and cord ligatures, and was partially disrobed. Although the 11-year old James Ellroy seemed to be nonchalant about this event, it would later return to haunt him. Geneva Hilliker was his mother. Ellroy's parents were initially separated by age (his father Armand was over a decade older), and later by hard emotions and thwarted expectations. Because of Armand Ellroy's inability to hold down a steady job in his later years, Geneva was awarded custody of James. Mother Geneva struggled to keep her household afloat in order to provide a decent environment for her child. Meanwhile his father still took him on the weekends, and took every opportunity to poison his son's mind against his mom.

Because of Armand Ellroy's systematic campaign against Geneva Hilliker, James viewed her murder as something of a blessing. He had been convinced that his mother was a drunken whore, and looked forward to spending all of his time with his indulgent father. The younger Ellroy was on such a long leash that he had the run of a string of neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles. It didn't take him very long to find trouble. He became a peeping tom and a petty thief, and found himself incarcerated more than once during his young adulthood. Throughout his 20's he abused alcohol until his body was just about ruined. Forced sobriety led him to consider the trajectory of his life, and he became a golf caddy and an aspiring author. Eventually he garnered both national sales and critical acclaim.

In the early 90's Ellroy was moved to come to terms with the memories of his mother. He had repressed the meaning of her life and death for way too long. He decided to re-investigate her murder, which had never been solved. He enlisted cops and reporters in his quest, and set out to find the answers that would define the missing parts of himself. Obviously the nearly forty intervening years had left a tremendously cold trail. Ellroy tried to get his hands on whatever records survived from the initial investigation. He identified a list of living witnesses, with the help of his buddies and contacts in law enforcement. He set up a chain of interviews which started in the little bar in which Geneva was last seen, and extended in concentric circles that stretched far across the country.

Along the way Ellroy was forced to confront plenty of unpleasant details about his mother's life. Most of us would probably be indelibly scarred by much of the information he unearthed. Yet this upheaval instead evoked much emotional re-evaluation in the son. The brutal honesty of Ellroy's evolving reflections on the case reveals the author in ways that a dispassionate account could never do. It is often difficult to like James Ellroy, as we accompany him on his harrowing personal journey. Unfortunately his clinical approach and irritatingly repetitive style drags the impact of My Dark Places down into a murky police-procedural mess. But in the gloomy corners of his prose one finds an occasional glimpse of humanity that comes across unexpectedly. If Ellroy had employed a better editor, this might have had the potential to become a classic within the genre.

James Ellroy, "The Black Dahlia" (1987).

Although I've watched scores of films that can be characterized as Film Noir, I haven't read very much Noir literature. The names of the most famous authors of the genre's heyday are becoming increasingly familiar- Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and James M. Cain. These hardboiled fiction writers launched the characters and plots that Film Noir was built upon. Since the classic era, several American authors have been directly influenced by this tradition. Jim Thompson, Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford and James Ellroy are among the most famous of this group. Of these literary figures I have only read books by the first and the last. In fact my introduction to Ellroy was The Black Dahlia, which I completed yesterday.

Ellroy was born in the midst of the period (1948) that Film Noir first reached popular consciousness. His upbringing (although tragic) set the tone for the type of fatalistic crime story he would become famous for. He was the product of a broken home, and his mother was murdered when he was only ten years old. That crime would never be solved, and would help touch off Ellroy's lifelong obsession with the darker side of life. He would later transfer his unresolved feelings toward his mother on to another famous unsolved murder victim- Elizabeth Short, who was killed about a year before his birth. This 22-year old woman (also known as "The Black Dahlia") met her gruesome end in Los Angeles, and was the source of much mystery and speculation for decades afterward. The extreme mutilation of her body resonated with fanatics of true crime. There were a host of suspects investigated by police investigators, and it is rumored that the lengthy list featured such prominent figures as "Bugsy" Siegel, Orson Welles, and Woody Guthrie.

Almost 40 years after the demise of Elizabeth Short, Ellroy attempted to bring together the loose ends of the case with his novel The Black Dahlia (1987). This work has been credited with bringing serious critical attention to the writer, who had previously been confined to the ignoble ghetto of "detective fiction". He would later follow up with a cycle of three more books that completed what came to be known as his L.A. Quartet. In 1997, L.A Confidential was adapted into film by Curtis Hanson, and Brian DePalma brought The Black Dahlia to the big screen in 2005. The success brought about by increasing media attention was hard earned for Ellroy. For much of his early life he had been an alcoholic, a vagrant, and a petty criminal. After achieving notoriety for his writing, he established a reputation as a slavish defender of the LAPD, a brash political conservative, and a necessary teetotaler. He has since sought to distance himself from the label of "genre writer", and now seeks to create mainstream fiction.

Certainly The Black Dahlia meets several of the requirements for becoming popular art. It has at its center a crime so heinous that it astonished a nation. There is perverse sexuality, violence, gore, and psychological trauma at its core. When constructing the plot of his novel, Ellroy obviously didn't feel constrained by the cold, hard facts regarding the historical Elizabeth Short. He introduces many characters into the story that never existed. The protagonist is an ex-middleweight boxing champion-turned-cop. "Bucky" Bleichert is a hard-bitten warrants officer with a soft center that stymies his ascension to the top ranks of the police department. He is brought into the "Dahlia" case against his best instincts, and gradually becomes infatuated with the dead girl. As he becomes progressively embroiled in the complex world of the case, he latches on to a "Black Dahlia proxy"- a dangerous and manipulative beauty from the ranks of the nouveau riche aristocracy of Hollywood. This association threatens to imperil his life and career.

I couldn't help but be impressed at the exhaustive attention Ellroy pays to the police procedural aspects of his novel. The professional jargon of law enforcement, the crime scene protocol, and the intricacies of investigative technique come off as extraordinarily convincing in the eyes of this (admittedly) shallowly-informed reader. There is also a wealth of period detail that presents a captivating and seedy urban setting for the events that enfold. These elements help to flesh out the often convoluted and twisty contrivances of the plot. Ellroy's evocative skills work to distract his audience from the unreality of his story. In the end, The Black Dahlia bears little resemblance to the historical facts it is based upon. According to the author's own admission, it is a colorfully-imagined attempt at reconciliation that allows Ellroy to come to terms with his own troubled past. It's also a genuinely diverting and memorable read.