![]() ![]() ![]() You come to roll around in the blood and the mud, to ping along to the plot twists and betrayals. You don’t come to Ellroy for bold departures, nor for multidimensional characters. There’s generally at least one scandal a casually racist, reactionary protagonist dirty cops fallen women, etc. He was down in the nitty-gritty of that first decade of big-time bugging, wiretapping and electronic surveillance.”Įllroy’s oeuvre can get a little predictable, like most literary universes that stretch out over multiple books focusing on a single period. “He paid desk managers a retainer to steer cheating celebrities into those suites and rooms, which were bugged 24 hours a day. “He went out and greased all the bellmen, and he went in there and hot-wired specific rooms and suites at all the high-line L.A. Today’s blowhard bloggers and their tattle texts? Pussyfooting punks all.”Įllroy clearly admires the real-life Otash for his craft. “ Our gobs of gossip were repugnantly real. “Confidential presaged the infantile internet,” Freddy says in the novel. “I don’t want to get distracted by the internet,” he says.Īs for Freddy, he’s never happier than when he’s bugging a phone. When he wants to send an email, he writes his message out in longhand, faxes it to his assistant and has her send it out. Except Ellroy still doesn’t own a computer. It’s hard not to wonder what kind of juice Freddy, let alone Ellroy, might squeeze out of the internet, with its hyperactive prose, frenzied conspiracy gossip and questionable facts. Three new books - “Dream State,” “Hollywood Eden” and “Rock Me on the Water,” examine savvy pop-culture myth-making by and about the Golden State. You might have found some of this style in the old Confidential but not taken to this extreme: “So, succumb to the seditious soul of a scandal-rag scoundrel - because wicked words on paper are pop-pop-popping your way.”īooks How California’s culture industry manufactured the California dream His scandal cocktail of choice, meanwhile, consists of equal parts sex (the more subversive the better), celebrity and communism (which he sniffs out like a bloodhound).Īnd he narrates it all in relentless staccato alliteration, language that seems to get high on itself. He mixes handfuls of Dexedrine with gargles of Old Crow bourbon. The Otash of “Widespread Panic,” on the loose in the ‘50s, certainly doesn’t seem like a guy with a chance to make it to heaven. I require no verification, and then I go mad fictionally.”ĭoes he ever feel pangs of guilt, like the confessing Otash, over the objects of his slander? I work off of rumor and innuendo, speculation. “I just need a basic chronological framework. “Absolute fact interests me, moves me, not one whit,” he says. Just don’t ask him what’s real and what isn’t. Which is an amazing conceit for a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old boy. ![]() And somehow, nobody knows about it but me. “Now, as an older man, what I can tell you with some accuracy is that in the wake of my mother’s death, I sensed there was another world out there,” he says. In a sense, he’s running his own fictional scandal sheet, one book at a time. ![]() Ellroy says it’s all part of his shadow history of Los Angeles, an urban underbelly inspired by the killing of his mother when he was 10. ![]()
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