MEMOIR: PETER MURPHYreviews The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women – A MemoirBy James Ellroy William Heinemann, 203pp. £16.99
ONLY A handful of genre writers can claim to have forged a prose style that was widely copied within a few years of its inception. By the time the crime novelist James Ellroy completed his LA Quartet, in 1992, he had fine-tuned a technique that became informally known as bullet prose.
Sometimes sensationalist, sometimes archly formal, this was a sort of literary rap that leaned heavily on alliteration and onomatopoeia, incorporating elements of jailhouse slang, street argot, present-tense screenplay instruction and the hidden literature of police reports and inter-office memos.
Ellroy did not do adverbial attribution, landscape portraits or lengthy meditations on, well, anything. He diddo short declarative sentences pumped with noun protein. He also did police corruption, extortion, racial tension, prostitution and murder, all at breakneck pace.
Here was a style so potent and caffeinated that writers as significant as the Yorkshireman David Peace prospered rather than floundered under its influence. Noir was never the same.
Since then Ellroy's style has become denser and even more telegrammatic. There was much to be admired in the three novels that comprised his Underworld USA Trilogy – American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood's A Rover– a secret history of the spooks and crooks who operated behind the United States' drapes throughout the cold war, but parts of it were hardgoing indeed.
The Hilliker Curse, his second memoir, is by contrast his most accessible work in years. It might have been titled Ellroy Confidential: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sex Maniac. The author was, by his own admission, one unsavoury customer, given to pill-popping, stalking, boozing and housebreaking.
If nothing else, it depicts just how close he was to the FBI wiretappers, private detectives, tabloid snitches, voyeurs, eavesdroppers, “peepers, prowlers and panty sniffers” who populate his novels.
Much of the new book revisits territory covered in My Dark Places(1996), a compelling account of Ellroy's attempts to reopen the investigation into the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, in 1958, a seminal event that bore more than a few similarities with the fabled Elizabeth Short "Black Dahlia" case that provided him with the mythic resonance for his greatest fictional work.
Ellroy has always sneered at the notion of closure. Here he continues to exhume Jean Hilliker’s body and conjure her ghost, burning for fuel his guilt over having once wished her dead. He also interrogates his lifelong compulsion to lose/find himself in the minds and bodies of women. Aside from a cold-eyed look at his father, he rarely mentions male peers, friends or colleagues.
“I invoked The Curse a half- century ago,” he writes. “It defines my life from my 10th birthday on. The near-immediate results have kept me in near- continuous dialogue and redress. I write stories to console her as a phantom. She is ubiquitous and never familiar. Other women loom flesh and blood. They have their stories. Their touch has saved me in varying increments and allowed me to survive my insane appetite and ambition. They have withstood my recklessness and predation. I have resisted their rebukes. My storytelling gifts are imperviously strong and rooted in the moment that I wished her dead and mandated her murder.”
The Hilliker Curseis a biography of obsession. It continually circles and revisits the author's compulsions and addictions, not least among them his fanatical devotion to rewriting the history of LA – and the American empire – to his pessimistic specifications.
IT COULD, OF COURSE, have all gone dreadfully wrong. The author could have removed the hard-boiled mask and delivered a simpering recovery confessional stuffed with therapy-speak. Instead he directs the bullet prose at himself and pushes the persona factor into the red. Ellroy the public figure has always been a bit of a ham (his readings are gonzo theatre); here he wears his Oedipal complex like a garish shirt, professing his truth – especially the ugly truth – with a bravado that dares us to still love him in the morning.
Writers are a weird breed. Perhaps because their job is to weave order out of disorder, to impose form on chaos, we think of them as an unflappable species, chiselling tablets in tranquillity. We tend not to think of them as deadline-flaunting, bug-eyed nut jobs ravenous for human connection, suffering chronic panic attacks on transatlantic flights, scratching their arms bloody looking for evidence of cancer and developing serial fixations with near strangers – a thumbnail portrait of the walking car crash Ellroy had become on the book tour for The Cold Six Thousand.
Be advised, there are sections where he hits bum notes left, right and centre. Ellroy can do driven and intense, but he can’t do playful, and accounts of wooing his first wife, the writer Helen Knode, often deteriorate into alliterative waffle such as: “Passion postponed. Palpitating souls eternally entwined . . . I was tantrically tapped and two-months tumescent.”
But, even so, there’s something compelling about a writer like Ellroy operating out of his comfort zone. He’s capable of writing badly, but he’s never boring. We turn the pages gripped with a rubbernecker’s fascination.
The Hilliker Cursecan be read in a day. It is ugly, beautiful, reprehensible and moving. In other words, a hard book to forget. Ellroy speaks to and for the obsessive creep in every man. At high volume.
Peter Murphy is a novelist and journalist. His novel John the Revelatorwas published by Faber last year
