Author James Ellroy Spurts, Squirts And Blurts
APRIL 10, 2008
DETROIT (TNA) – If you read contemporary American crime novels, you know there are really only two names that merit serious attention: Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.
Leonard’s an ass-kicking octogenarian with a serious romantic streak. Everybody talks in flashy, street-iambic pentameter patois, nobody gets hurt too bad, and most of it – even the deadly stuff – comes down funny, or at least wildly entertaining.
Random House James Ellroy has been credited with writing crime masterpieces like 'L.A. Confidential' and 'The Black Dahlia,' but he 'blames' all his books on a mad dog named 'Barko,' who he claims knows how to type.
Ellroy’s a different animal.
He’s a laconic, 59-year-old beast of a writer who crafts dense, pungent, bristling novels – “L.A. Confidential,” “The Big Nowhere,” “White Jazz,” and “The Cold Six-Thousand” – that refuse to romanticize anything or anyone. They slaughter and slit open the underbelly of American culture – especially Los Angeles, circa the 1950s and 1960s – and then populate the entrails with a motley, steadfastly anti¬-caricatured lot of scumbags, hustlers, killers, voyeurs, hookers, pervs, perps, and the occasional hero, term used loosely.
The latest attempt at bringing Ellroy to the big screen is “Street Kings,” which opens April 11 and stars Keanu Reeves and Forrest Whitaker. Like the bulk of Ellroy’s writing, “Street Kings” – which reveals the desperate measures taken by a cop wrongly implicated in another cop’s murder – is far from naval-gazing; it’s a deeply moral saga played in a deeply immoral key.
“When I first started writing, I thought I would write painful, autobiographical novels about being a young lowlife and glutton in America,” says Ellroy. “When I don’t know why; I wouldn’t want to read that shit. Why should I want to write it?”
This type of salty, unvarnished discourse, coupled with his fierce, staccato writing style, has earned Ellroy the nickname “the Demon Dog of American Literature,” an alter ego he not only welcomes, but also courts.
During his frequent public readings, Ellroy – whose “Hollywood Nocturnes” was published last summer by Knopf – is quick to squirt, spurt, blurt, and curse, even howl more than a little bit, and “blames” all of his books on Barko, a mad dog that lives in his home and knows how to type.
“I fucking love dogs,” Ellroy sneers, “though I don’t have sex with them.”
Yes, the man the Los Angeles Times refers to as “one of the great American writers of our time” is a real killer – tightly coiled, a little scary, a predator in gentleman’s clothing, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
“James is a no-bullshit guy,” says friend and filmmaking collaborator Ben Meade, whose recently released film “Bizarre Bazaar” is a true crime collaboration with Ellroy.
“He does not lie. He has no time for anyone who has an agenda or who is full of shit. He hates to be hustled. And his persona – this Barko – speaks for all of us who are too afraid to say what we feel.”
Former LAPD detective and noted crime writer Joseph Wambaugh, a longtime friend of Ellroy’s, believes the Barko character is the marketing masterstroke of a brilliant writer, a larger than life front for a man more reserved than is good for book sales.
“He gets into the Demon Dog the way an actor gets into character. It all comes from him; don’t get me wrong. Barko is a part of James,” says Wambaugh. “But I don’t think the private James Ellroy is anything like the guy who’s out there selling books. In private, he’s a shy private kid without a mother, knocking around with his father in very uncertain times, and he’ll probably kill me for saying so.”
If Barko is merely the colorful contrivance of a writer now held in high esteem, it is also a moniker hard-earned years ago by a shiftless, agitated young man, the product of a broken L.A. marriage between an alcoholic industrial nurse and an only intermittently ethical uncertified accountant. No surprise there, but then comes the stuff of legend and nightmare: When Ellroy was barely 10 years old, his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, turned up dead in a ditch outside an L.A. high school, strangled and possibly raped. Her 1958 murder remains unsolved, though Ellroy has spent the better part of his life quixotically pursuing lead after lead, sometimes working with law enforcement, other times working out theories and motives in his books.
"I used to swallow the cotton wads in Benzedrex inhalers and I would choke my chicken for 12, 14, 18 hours at a pop. I would look at women in Playboy magazine and they would talk to me. It was a hallucinogenic state."
At least three Ellroy books – including “Clandestine,” “My Dark Places,” and “The Black Dahlia,” which director Brian DePalma brought to lurid, bloody, sex-drenched cinematic life in 2006 -- deal crisply, unequivocally with the author’s journeys into a hellish underworld of paranoia, delusion, true crime, and emotional devastation in pursuit of his lost mother and her killer or killers.
“My dad taught me to read when I was 3 ½. It was the only precocity I ever had as a child. My mother’s death – June ’58 – engendered in me a tremendous curiosity in all things criminal. I started reading crime books exclusively. I already wanted to be a novelist,” says Ellroy. “Now I wanted to be a crime novelist.”
But wanting to write and teaching a dog how to do it for you take a lot more hell, if you’re James Ellroy. Propelled through a nightmarish youth of petty crime, Oedipal fallout, intermittent homelessness, and a brief humiliating military stint, Ellroy spent his young adult years shoplifting for food, breaking into the homes of young women to steal their underwear, and frequently hopped up on low-rent speed tugged from used asthma inhalers.
“I used to swallow the cotton wads in Benzedrex inhalers. I would do that,” says Ellroy. “And I would choke my chicken for 12, 14, 18 hours at a pop. I would look at women in Playboy magazine and they would talk to me. It was a hallucinogenic state. Give it to me, Big Jim. Pour me the pork, big daddy-o.”
Before his 30th birthday, Ellroy sobered up, landed gainful employ as a golf caddy, and began pounding out his first novel, “Brown’s Requiem,” which was sold to Avon Books for $3,500 as a paperback original.
It would be nearly a decade before Barko became a keyboarding maestro, pounding out 1987’s “The Black Dahlia,” Ellroy’s breakthrough, which merged details of his own mother’s murder with the ghastly 1949 murder/mutilation of Elizabeth Short, one of the most famous unsolved homicides in American history. Ellroy has exenterated and reimagined the Los Angeles of his youth in several subsequent books, including “L.A. Confidential,” “White Jazz” (soon to be a feature film), and “The Cold Six-Thousand,” books that crackle and spark from the collision of fact, fiction, true crime, and fabricated mayhem.
“When he gets into a story, it may have been once true,” says Wambaugh, best known for his true-crime books “The Onion Field” and the recently published “Hollywood Station,” “but when he’s done, it’s James Ellroy’s truth. All of my books about true crime are true. I keep myself out of them. I report the facts. James is – how should I put this? – unfettered. It’s like what [Norman] Mailer does; it always becomes the world according to Mailer, even when he’s reporting. James does the same thing; he tells his truth.”
And for Barko – nay, Ellroy – critically acclaimed, adored by Hollywood and its top filmmakers, loved by hipsters, literati, and mainstreamers alike, his truth is, in the final analysis, the only one that matters.
“I have the immortality thing covered. I’ve written three or four masterpieces in a row. Hammett and Chandler never did that,” Ellroy says. “I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
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