James Ellroy keeps pages turning with ‘This Storm’

James Ellroy’s rampage through American history continues, more furiously than ever, in “This Storm,” the second volume in a projected sequence titled the Second LA Quartet.

The original quartet, which began with the 1987 publication of “The Black Dahlia,” offered interconnected accounts of crime and corruption in Los Angeles between 1946 and 1958. Ellroy followed this massive enterprise with the even more ambitious Underworld USA trilogy, which began with “American Tabloid,” one of the great fictional examinations of the JFK assassination, and ended with “Blood’s a Rover,” a jaundiced look at the Nixon years and the origins of the Watergate debacle. In these three novels, Ellroy raised the stakes considerably, using crime fiction as a vehicle to explore the public traumas — the war in Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, the endless public unrest — that defined the era.

In his new quartet, Ellroy moves backward in time to the opening days of World War II. The result is a portrait of life on the home front that only Ellroy, with his obsessive interest in the dark underside of the American story, could have written.

The current series opened in 2014 with “Perfidia,” which begins on Dec. 6, 1941, just hours before Pearl Harbor, and continues through 23 days of violence, virulent racism and rampant war fever. The novel’s central fictional event — the ritual murder of four JapaneseAmerican citizens — provides the armature for a scathing portrait of fear and hysteria, qualities that would lead to the forced internment of thousands of innocent Japanese. In the compromised world that Ellroy’s characters inhabit, the war represents chaos, destruction — and opportunity. For Ellroy, the war years become a kind of laboratory for a merciless examination of madness, corruption and unrestrained greed on the part of powerful white men “riding the zeitgeist for all it’s worth.”

“This Storm” begins one day after “Perfidia” and brings back a host of characters from earlier novels, including William Parker, alcoholic future chief of the Los Angeles Police Department; Ed “The Fed” Satterlee, a thoroughly dishonest FBI agent; Hideo Ashida, a brilliant forensic scientist caught between two warring cultures; and, of course, Dudley Smith, LAPD sergeant and emblematic villain of many Ellroy novels.

Three crimes — two of them old, one new — propel the narrative. It all begins when an incessant rainstorm dislodges a long-buried body in LA’s Griffith Park and connects two discrete events: the 1931 theft of a train carrying gold bullion and a 1933 fire that swept through Griffith Park. All of these crimes will ultimately intertwine; all are part of a single story. The quest for the missing gold dominates that story. As he did in “Perfidia,” Ellroy handles the criminal elements with flair. By the novel’s end, the interrelated mysteries have been resolved, and it’s exciting, pageturning stuff — but it’s only one aspect of a novel that has other, bigger things on its mind.

Ellroy is as much social novelist as crime writer. Even in earlier, more personal novels such as “The Black Dahlia” — which serves, in part, as a memorial to his own murdered mother, Geneva Hilliker — the social backdrop is meticulously drawn. The world Ellroy re-creates is filled with grifters, lowlifes of every stripe, corrupt politicians and police officers on the take. Most centrally, the world of these novels reflects a racism so profound that it comes to seem a fundamental aspect of the American character.

There are few, if any, heroes in these books. In the moral universe Ellroy has constructed, the most irredeemable people run the world. Set against them are the occasional flawed individuals who learn that there are lines they can never cross, who somehow step back from the moral abyss that surrounds them.

With “This Storm,” Ellroy has reached the midpoint of his most ambitious undertaking to date. The final two volumes can’t come quickly enough. HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. “Unfreedom of the Press” by Mark R. Levin (Threshold, $28) 2. “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide” by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark (Forge, $24.99) 3. “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West” by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, $30)

4. “Siege: Trump Under Fire” by Michael Wolff (Holt, $30)

5. “Howard Stern Comes Again” by Howard Stern (Simon & Schuster, $35)

6. “Naturally Tan: A Memoir” by Tan France (St. Martin’s, $27.99)

7. “Becoming” by Michelle Obama (Crown, $32.50)

8. “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations” by William H. McRaven (Grand Central, $30)

9. “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World” by Melinda Gates (Flatiron, $26.99)

10. “Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals” by Rachel Hollis (HarperCollins Leadership, $24.99)