Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy the blood on your conscience.
*
“Almost everybody in L.A. Confidential dies. Those who don’t wish they had.
In the incontinent mayhem that masquerades as a James Ellroy novel, the line between the quick and the dead is fine. Only the ungrateful deceased are permitted to rest–in pieces, most likely; in hell for sure. For the living, it’s just a question of time.
Dead or alive, nobody is clean. Sasquatch-sized skeletons spook every closet.
“Even the fringe felons are given a certain panache by Ellroy while the real-life extras in the ’50s-vintage novel have distinctive personalities of their own: Johnny Stompanato, who, in fact and fiction, is knifed to death by Lana Turner’s daughter; mobster Mickey Cohen, safe in the pen, who has the only good lines in the book (‘I have never killed no man that did not deserve killing by the standards of our way of life’).
The plot, faster than a stray bullet and equally random, ricochets about two police cases–one past, one present, each bearing on the other.
“Among other depravities linking the two cases is a porn ring that features–hang in there–mother-son incest on roller skates!
Obviously, Ellroy spares no sensibilities. By Page 25 of a long and chaotic tale, he has offended every color, creed or kink known to man. With equal disdain, he eschews verbs, nouns, adjectives as obstacles to his unique narrative flow. What is lost in clarity is recouped in concision: One Ellroy paragraph is tantamount to a page, even a chapter in more measured parables. To wit:
Bud packed up, got out, brainstormed some more–pimp war clicks, clickouts–Duke Cathcart had two skags in his stable, no stomach for pushing a 14-year-old nymphet–he was a pimp disaster area. He tried to click Duke’s pad tossed to the Nite Owl–no gears meshed, odds on the (blacks) remained high. If the tossing played, tie it to Cathcart’s ‘new’ gig–Feather Royko talked it up–she came off clean as Sinful Cindy came off hinky. . . .
Got that?”
–Dick Roraback, The Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1990
