Dick wrote:
"The source might be worth recalling, and analyzing, before
we get into how the comment reflects on Ellroy. Even if he
said that Mosley ripped him off, which is not an
impossibility, did he give specific examples? Was he
sarcastically and facetiously brushing aside a question about
Mosley's writing? Was he just being the outrageous
Ellroy?"
The source was probably me. Several years ago, during the
second AFI screening of a documentary about him, Ellroy hung
out and talked with 5 or 6 of us who had seen the first
screening. He wasn't being the overblown demon dog, but was
engaging us in conversation, asking us almost as many
questions as we asked him, like which was each of our
favorite book (when I said I preferred the Lloyd Hopkins
series, he told me a bit about the never finished 4th
book).
Someone asked him what he thought of Mosley. He was
dismissive. He made some catty remarks about how terribly PC
it was that Clinton had named Mosley as his favorite mystery
writer (clearly implying that it should have been Ellroy). He
then scoffed that Mosley could not possibly have written Red
Death without having read his own Big Nowhere
(that's the one with the Commie stuff, right?), even though,
according to Ellroy, Mosley had claimed never to have read
it. Ellroy seemed to be serious miffed with Mosley.
Of course, during the very same conversation, Ellroy said he
had never read Killer Inside Me, which I have trouble
believing; the sheriff in Ellroy's Silent Terror (AKA Killer
on the Road) seems clearly based on Lou Ford. In the
documentary, Ellroy had said he spent all day long for
several years doing speed and reading any crime book he could
fins. I guess he missed Thompson somehow. As a matter of
fact, Ellroy claimed never to have read any Jim Thompson at
all, except for King Blood for which he had written a preface
of the Brit edition.
Mark
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