Hugh Lessig wrote:
> I would recommend "Dick Contino's Blues," which I
first saw in a long-ago issue
> of Granta.
I too discovered Ellroy through DCB in Granta and found the
writing so compelling that, I think, looking back, that it
renewed my interest in hardboil. Here was a guy with
something to say, and his own way of saying it. "White Jazz"
was the first Ellroy novel I read, and I was not
disappointed. "L.A. Confidential" was a good read, but the
movie, though entertaining, was disappointingly tame, largely
because Ellroy's style was not interpreted to the
screen.
Style vs. Content? With so many talented writers about, I
don't understand why anyone would see a need to choose one
over the other. Why not demand, and have it all, with style
delivering the sense and feel of the content? Ellroy delivers
that. Much of the hardboil I read previously depicted a well
ordered, largely middle-class view of the world in which
criminals were mostly people incapable of abstract thought
(I'm thinking Leonard here) and justice usually prevailed
(Parker, anyone?). Corruption among democratically selected
or delegated authority was dangerous, but isolated and
rare.
Ellroy reminds me justice is an artificial construct,
variously interpreted and seldom achieved. I saw this at work
in the O.J. Simpson trials. Ellroy reminds me that power
corrupts. Not now and then, here and there, but always,
everywhere. And he shows me many ways, small and large, that
this happens. I can see Ellroy's petty corruptions at work on
just about every "live" TV cop show. He reminds me that the
most successful criminals insinuate themselves into positions
of power. I see his compulsive, obsessives among consumers
who shop to feel good, among the highly-valued workaholics
who run our largest corporations, among commuters driving
big, near empty cars to work each day, and among the workers
who perform the same tasks over and over to manufacture those
same cars. I see them among health nuts, alcoholics, addicts,
abstainers, gamblers, smokers, religious fanatics who think
they can overcome evil if enough people are killed, among any
and all of us who thank that if one dose of something doesn't
make people behave, then two will almost certainly do the
trick.
Ellroy shows me that the diverse, well-rounded life is the
exception, not the rule in industrialized society. We're a
mix of these obsessives and compulsions competing for
attention and power in anything but an orderly way, just like
Ellroy's styles, yet there seems to be a rythmn behind it
all, somehow. And the one constant is that his characters
still aspire to something better, however unlikely the
achievement.
Every plot has been done. What we have, the only hope for
something unique, is the author's vision of the world and how
it does or doesn't work. Ellroy's style tells us from the
first sentence that we're going to see things in a different
way.
Kerry
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