First, the good news. James Ellroy - self-styled Demon Dog of American crime fiction, reformed junkie, and author of a fistful of dazzlingly dark novels, including LA Confidential - has embarked on a mission to re-create American history through the medium of the thriller. This is the second volume of a promised trilogy and the sequel to American Tabloid, and it's a cracker. It takes as its point of departure the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, and it doesn't bother to ask if there was a conspiracy. It assumes a conspiracy. Then it follows the conspiracy through to its logical conclusion, and without giving anything away, well, hey, we've all heard this song before, and there was more than one assassination, right? Go with its flow, and The Cold Six Thousand is black, bleak, brutal, brilliant. It doesn't just re-create America, it is America, provided America is more Mafia, CIA and Ku Klux Klan than motherhood and apple pie.
So what's the problem? Maybe there isn't one. But get this: "Pete braced the Rapid despatcher. Pete greased him. Pete bought his account book. Pete bought his soul. Pete hired him. Pete resigned his accounts. Pete got nine legislators. Pete got Nellis brass and fat cats galore." Such is a typical paragraph from The Cold Six Thousand. Actually, no: that's about twice as long as a typical paragraph. Try another one. "Two cops grab two spics. The spics bleed very large. The scene vibes busboy brouhaha. Juan fucked Ramon's sister. Ramon had first dibs. Shivs by the lowroller buffet."
A page or two of this rat-a-tat rap is edgy, atmospheric, a moody medium for mobsters. Seven hundred pages of it is, frankly, hard going. True, it is interspersed with the occasional page of telephone transcripts, trumped-up "internal memos" and newspaper headline sequences - all of which are positively chatty by comparison with the rest of it - but overall, the rhythm is not so much staccato as hiccup noir, and, until you get used to it, as distracting and wearisome as an actor's exaggerated limp. Eventually you forget about it: but if you have to ask whether the book could have been written some other way, haven't you moved into the area of reasonable doubt?
Ellroy will claim - indeed already has claimed - that he is forging a new language with which to clothe his punks, pimps, shysters, mobsters, politicians and prostitutes. Certainly he has forged a new landscape for them to hang out in. Ellroy's America is an environment of absolute artifice, all shiny spangles and Barbie-doll pink, all chrome-and-glass interiors, the vast panorama of literature's prairie spaces notably absent. In the matter of character and plot he has also achieved a remarkable blending of fact and fiction. The action moves obsessively around two interlocking triangles, one composed of men (Wayne Tedrow Junior, disillusioned cop and virulent racist, Ward Littell, crooked lawyer working simultaneously for three different bosses, Pete Bondurant, hit man with a heart), one of women (Janice, trophy wife and sexual predator, Arden/Jane, spy and bluestocking, and Barb, nightclub singer and good gal).
The real stars, however, are the celebrities who hover, god-like, at the hub of things - J. Edgar Hoover, Sonny Liston, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Cartoonish, outlandish, a fiction writer couldn't make them up; especially not Howard Hughes, nicknamed "Drac" because of his taste for blood transfusions from Mormons, sleeping palely in his penthouse suite dressed in his "Kotex-box hat and Kleenex-box slippers". With The Cold Six Thousand, it's clear that James Ellroy is pushing crime fiction into areas it was never intended to go. But is it worth it? I reckon it is - just. But then I'm at page 671 looking down, and not at page one looking up.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
