… I give the period novel a much more explicit thrust … and
since this was a time where not everything was discussed ad nauseam, well it
has a paradoxical power. I want to leave all of you with the weird, strange, ugly,
pervasive sense of bad juju ramifications extending beyond the last pages of my
books. I don’t want to ever give you a
type of book where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses on the last page or
even where the bad guy wins and the good guy loses. I want you to feel it going on and on and on
and on and on and on and on and on …
And Andrew Pepper wrote ...
In the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
attempts by LAPD officers to nominate a deviant blackness as the root cause of
criminal activities and societal problems ring hollow. Instead what Ellroy’s LA Quartet illuminates
is the constructed nature of whiteness, its parasitic dependency on blackness
or a blackness represented as morally monstrous. Strategies of domination implicit in the
crime fiction of, say, Raymond Chandler, strategies that manifest themselves,
for example, in Marlowe’s fear of the contaminating racial other, are made
explicit in the revisionist grotesqueries of Ellroy’s fiction. Yet by making these strategies explicit, by
intensifying the racist rhetoric of his various white-cop protagonists almost
to the point of parody, Ellroy shatters any pretence that what he is
representing is somehow invisible or natural.
The distorting influence of social power is omnipresent in the often
overblown rhetoric of his protagonists and cut free from its secure moorings,
whiteness becomes a free-floating signifier, a Janus-like, schizophrenic figure
whose efforts to convince as a beacon of civility are undercut by an
ill-conceived propensity for barbarism and a neo-colonial desire to control or
even annihilate dissenting voices.
The Contemporary
American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class
(Edinburgh University
Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2000)
I worry that in Ellroy's worlds there is no one who is not tainted. I fear he makes a fetish out of homophobia, misogyny, racism. I understand that ghastly, appalling events occur perpetrated by sociopaths and psychopaths. But there is decency too and ultimately, I believe, it is triumphant.
I'm not sure where that leaves me with the essay I have to submit next Tuesday.
