RARA-AVIS: Hollywood Nocturnes

Bill Hagen (billha@ionet.net)
Sun, 10 May 1998 23:26:54 -0500 (CDT) Enjoyed all the responses to my intial negative on DC's Blues. For those
of you who like that kind of frenetic interior style, I recommend Thomas
Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_, a good read even if you're not as
paranoid as we were in the 60s. [Not hard-boiled either.]

Like several of you, I found Nocturnes getting better as it went along. I
especially liked the cops on the run in "Dial Axminster 6-400," though I
couldn't figure why Blanchard would pass out (or was he knocked out?) after
a long day of action. Probably missed something. "Torch Number" had a
nice curve to it, a relatively upbeat ending, come to think of it. A song
connects you to someone, and all you have left is the song. Plus
royalties.

What's interested me in the posts about Ellroy is the research evident
behind many of the stories. I'm in the middle of _The Big Nowhere_ and
realize that I'm beginning to accept his accounts of the LAPD as, well,
pretty near the truth. Like a good realist, he's used details I know are
accurate to pull me into a general acceptance of the probabilities. But a
question of consistency arises: through the Quartet novels and these short
stories, Ellroy threads a number of characters-- Meeks, Blanchard, Cohen,
Loew, among others--and events that reappear or are recalled enough to
build his fictional world. Sort of like a hard-boiled Yoknapatawpha
County, the place that William Faulkner built. This leads me to the
question:

His research suggests that Ellroy is careful about at least some of his
historical details. Is he equally careful about characters and stories
that reappear in different fictions? Are they consistent?

Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>

#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.