JAMES ELLROY

While in Spain, I re-read James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy, all 1,900 pages of it.

Ellroy wrote the novels that form the basis for the film L.A.Confidential, which takes place in Los Angeles during the 1950's. The Underworld USA trilogy looks at the links between politics, organised crime, law enforcement and business on the national stage; American Tabloid from late 1958 to the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, The Cold Six Thousand from then until the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June 1968, and Blood's A Rover from then until late 1972. Fictional characters are woven into the lives of real people and real events. The Kennedy's, Howard Hughes, Sam Giancana and other Mafia figures, Martin Luther King, Jack Ruby, J.Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon. The assassinations, Vietnam, the Watts Riots, the 1968 Democratic Convention. There's lots of violence, often drug-fuelled. Cops and lawyers work for both the FBI and the mob. Everybody seems, at heart, totally amoral, available for a price and prepared to rat on everybody else.

Underlying it all, apart from the links above, are two constant themes; the U.S.' racial divide and the loss of Cuba to communism (Kennedy is shot by the mob, because he doesn't do anything after the Bay of Pigs debacle to get the mob's Cuban casinos back). Those themes still exist in the country today.

I don't know whether all of it is true. But it is brilliantly written, in terse staccato prose, and is eminently plausible. Highly recommended.

Walter Blotscher