‘I isolate myself from the world – I live in the past’
James Ellroy, America’s greatest crimewriter, is on snarling, charming form as he meets Chris Harvey to discuss his latest novel
London, 7.15pm, a warm evening on the South Bank. James Ellroy, the man known as the Demon Dog of American crime fiction, writer of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, is having his photograph taken with a bull terrier called Brian. Smartly dressed in a blazer, leaning his loose-limbed 6ft 4in frame down into the shot, the novelist is affable and smiling. One hour later, at a question-and-answer session in the plush surroundings of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he’s off the leash.
A fan has dared to embark upon a speech that seems to be leading towards a question about the current president of the US, and Ellroy is on him fast. “Don’t even start…” he menaces. “Stop right there.” There’s some nervous laughter. “This is not a Trump question,” the punter protests. “Shut up!” Ellroy snaps. “Back off! I don’t answer any questions pertaining to contemporary politics, or America today, under any circumstances.” He sits back, still snarling. “First f-----question.”
In the next half-hour, he will also savage some American icons: Martin Scorsese (“shallow, egregiously overrated”), Truman Capote (“fraudulent”) and David Mamet (“nothing is more boring than a bunch of unfunny guys shooting their mouths off about popular culture”). He will also dismiss the movie adaptations of his own works, LA Confidential (“as deep as a tortilla”) and The Black Dahlia
(“execrably bad”). He got paid for them, at least, “I will always take the dough.”
The 71-year-old is in town to talk about his new novel, This Storm, the second volume, after Perfidia, of a bold, dizzying story set in wartime Los Angeles. A few hours earlier, I meet him for the first time. He’s dressed, pre-blazer, in an outsized flowery shirt. He tells me I look like an obscure film actor, Michael Gross, and I’m briefly flattered, before he adds, “He was chilling as the psycho survivalist murderer in a TV show I saw once.”
I’ve spoken to Ellroy before, by telephone five years ago, when he was living alone in LA, without a television or computer, “sustaining crushes on women” and “living largely within my head”. These days, he is reunited with his second wife, Helen Knode, and relocated to Denver, Colorado. He seems much happier.
I, too, will try to prise open some thoughts on America in the present day, but he only allows himself to be drawn once. We’ve been talking about the Hollywood that he returns to repeatedly in his work: a world of smut films, perversions and closeted sexuality that lies beneath the glamour of its Golden Age. Modern Hollywood has changed from the one in his books, he says. So, what did he make of the way the Kevin Spacey scandal played out? “What, is he in jail now?” he says.
This is a loaded reply. Spacey, of course, was in LA Confidential, playing a glamorous but sleazy narcotics detective. He and Ellroy met on set but
‘I thought Richard Madden in Bodyguard was Godawful, a little curly haired guy with a big tall woman’
are not buddies (“I said hi to him twice”). He will talk about it, though. “In one of my rare ventures into a contemporary opinion,” he says, “I would be very hard pressed to end anyone’s Hollywood career on a simple accusation without due process and a day in court. That’s the only thing I find discomfiting.” I suggest Harvey Weinstein could have stepped straight out of his novels. “Yeah,” he says. People will pick up on the latest Hollywood scandal and say to him, “Hey Ellroy, it’s your world, we just live in it.”
Most people know at least one fact about Ellroy. His mother Jean was murdered when he was 10 years old, a crime that was never solved and the haunting, autobiographical My Dark Places (1996), is about his search for her killer, 40 years on. In Perfidia, he introduced a tall, red-haired character, Joan Conville, who becomes one of the key narrators of This Storm. “Joan is my mother,” he says. “I knew that I needed to say a fictional goodbye to her.”
She remains real to him, as do other women who have found their way into his work. “A lost love, out of time, be they gone to the great beyond or be they still on this earth, they are powerful subjects of plunder.”
Before Ellroy became a novelist in his late twenties, he lived a life of petty crime and drug use, breaking into houses to sniff women’s underwear, steal money and pop pills out of medicine cabinets. These days, though, he lists “immorality” alongside “nihilism and squalor” as things that he hates.
As a writer, the controlled intensity of his prose is without equal. His near flawless LA Quartet was followed by his Underworld USA trilogy – beginning with the jaw-dropping American Tabloid – which chases dark truths about America through to the Kennedy assassination and into Vietnam. It’s a singular vision that erupts occasionally into breathtaking violence. “I love savagery as beauty,” he tells me. “I rarely dwell on violence in my books,” but “it’s the American idiom, it’s badass, and we love the badass.”
I want to know about his “white knight of the far-right” image. It’s a vulgarisation that allows him to tweak audiences, he says. “I hate fascism, I hate Communism, I hate the totalitarian Left and Right… they kill ya, they kill everyone in their way, they put the kybosh on free speech and they’re gonna subjugate your ass.”
His books employ racial invective – Japs, spooks, N-----town – to express casual race hatred in a way that is startling to contemporary readers. Is he deliberately isolating himself from the cultural currents of our time, when artistic works are scrutinised for racism, sexism and homophobia? “I isolate myself from the world at large,” he says. “I live in the past, and I always have.”
The women in his books are every bit as devious and on the make as the men. Is that his considered view? “No, I think women are superior to men in their absence of animus, their cooperative spirit.” What does he think of the Metoo movement? “It’s present day, no comment. It has nothing to do with my book. It’s 1942. Sexual predation was rampant.”
Whom would he like to play the brutal, handsome Irishman Dudley Smith, whose presence runs through so many of his works? He picks out Scottish actor Douglas Henshall. “He’s really good.” What about Richard Madden, the star of BBC One’s Bodyguard? “That show is really dumb as s---,” he laughs. “I thought he was God-awful – a little curly haired guy with a big tall woman, and his putupon wife. And then the woman gets offed in the middle of the show. Yeah, they had the one love scene and then, adios. F----- it up. Once is not enough.”
This Storm and Perfidia will form part of his second LA quartet. When we last spoke, he told me he was also thinking of writing a Cold War spy novel. “I s---canned that,” he says, “I’m either gonna write a second Underworld USA trilogy or I’m gonna die – one of the two.” He considers that for a second, then nods, “Yeah, or die half way through. I’d better make them free-standing books, hadn’t I?”
is published by William Heinemann