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A review by duffypratt
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
4.0
Ellroy does redemption. It's not pleasant. There's a mantra that runs throughout the book: "Nobody dies." But this is Ellroy. So you can guess how well that works out.
In some ways, this review is pointless, at least as a guide to any potential reader. Let's face it: if you've read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, you already know whether you are going to read this one or not. If you haven't read either of those, then you owe it to yourself to give American Tabloid a shot, or maybe start further back with The Black Dahlia or The Big Nowhere. These are some of my favorite books (White Jazz is still tops of Ellroy for me), and Ellroy is one of my favorite writers.
After The Cold Six Thousand, I wondered how he was going to crank the style up another notch. Maybe he would figure out a way to write a book that contained nothing but one word sentences? Instead, he eased off a little bit on his formal restrictions. The fractured sentences coming in threes disappears here, and Ellroy allows himself a bit of freedom in his constructions. This makes for easier reading. Here, he allows himself sentences as complicated as you would find in a Dick and Jane primer, and he uses this to evoke an astonishing array of effects and emotions, from hipster kidding, to brutal torture, to pure hallucinogenic voodoo shit. All in short, simple declarative sentences. It's brilliant, fascinating, addicting, and a bit offputting all at once.
The main characters are typical Ellroy. Wayne Tedrow - ex-racist, mobbed-up, personal Heroin chef for Howard Hughes. He sells Las Vegas casinos to Hughes, and then helps the mob launder the skim money they steal after the sales. He has a reputation for killing negroes, but few people know that he masterminded the hit on Martin Luther King. Now he's trying to set up some offshore casinos for the mob to take the place of what they lost in Cuba.
Then there's Dwight Holly. He's an FBI enforcer, tied in tightly with J. Edgar himself. He also commands the admiration of Nixon. His main job here is to get informants into black militant groups, start the groups running heroin into the ghetto, and then make some busts to discredit the entire black nationalist movement. It's the biggest bug up Hoover's ass, in his declining years, and Holly does what Hoover wants. (He, too, was in on the assassinations of RFK and King).
The new kid on the block is Don Crutchfield. AKA Peeper and Dipshit. He turns his peeping penchant into a career. He also has insatiable curiosity, and the inability to let go of anything. In some ways, he is the proxy for Ellroy himself. Almost everyone in the book underestimates Crutch. But Ellroy makes him almost too powerful.
And, in a twist, there is a fourth POV character who comes in late for his POV sections. That would be Scotty Bennett, an LAPD officer who wears a bowtie embroidered with 18s, for the number of black armed robbers he has killed. By the end of the book, I don't know how high the number would be. Besides legal (and some illegal) murder, Bennett has a pure fixation on an open case -- an armored car robbery back in 1964 where the surviving thieves got away with a couple of mill and a shitload of emeralds.
The book starts just before the 68 convention riots, and basically covers the Nixon administration. There are two main differences between this book and the earlier two. First, this book involves a series of failures by the main characters. In those books, the characters set out to do terrible things, and by and large, they succeed. The main characters there are horrible, vicious, and very effective. Here, the main characters become riddled with doubts. And they also tend to fail in their main goals. And their failures are intimately tied to their quest for some kind of redemption. In this way, I think this book, and the main characters, hark back to figures like Buzz Meeks from The Big Nowhere. Also, I want to point out that I am definitely oversimplifying here. It's a broad impression that I have, but there are lots of details that point other ways, so other people might disagree.
This book also had some great humor. One of my favorite things in the book is the treatment of Watergate. Basically, Holly dumps off the job to Howard Hunt because he's too busy and more interested in the other evil shit he's involved with. For the real players here, Watergate merits simply an afterthought.
I haven't read many reviews, but I find it hard to believe that Ellroy, especially in these last three books, would have readers who did not react strongly. It seems to me that you should either love him or hate him. I can't imagine being blase. I love him. I think his vision of history is manic, sick, twisted and vulgar. I also find it compelling and hard to dismiss, and that comes largely from the force and conviction of his writing. It's rare to see anyone writing stuff that is simultaneously so compellingly honest, and so transparently false. It takes a rare kind of brilliance to pull this shit off, and I'm really happy that Ellroy has done it.
I also think its oddly fitting that I finished this book on July 4.
In some ways, this review is pointless, at least as a guide to any potential reader. Let's face it: if you've read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, you already know whether you are going to read this one or not. If you haven't read either of those, then you owe it to yourself to give American Tabloid a shot, or maybe start further back with The Black Dahlia or The Big Nowhere. These are some of my favorite books (White Jazz is still tops of Ellroy for me), and Ellroy is one of my favorite writers.
After The Cold Six Thousand, I wondered how he was going to crank the style up another notch. Maybe he would figure out a way to write a book that contained nothing but one word sentences? Instead, he eased off a little bit on his formal restrictions. The fractured sentences coming in threes disappears here, and Ellroy allows himself a bit of freedom in his constructions. This makes for easier reading. Here, he allows himself sentences as complicated as you would find in a Dick and Jane primer, and he uses this to evoke an astonishing array of effects and emotions, from hipster kidding, to brutal torture, to pure hallucinogenic voodoo shit. All in short, simple declarative sentences. It's brilliant, fascinating, addicting, and a bit offputting all at once.
The main characters are typical Ellroy. Wayne Tedrow - ex-racist, mobbed-up, personal Heroin chef for Howard Hughes. He sells Las Vegas casinos to Hughes, and then helps the mob launder the skim money they steal after the sales. He has a reputation for killing negroes, but few people know that he masterminded the hit on Martin Luther King. Now he's trying to set up some offshore casinos for the mob to take the place of what they lost in Cuba.
Then there's Dwight Holly. He's an FBI enforcer, tied in tightly with J. Edgar himself. He also commands the admiration of Nixon. His main job here is to get informants into black militant groups, start the groups running heroin into the ghetto, and then make some busts to discredit the entire black nationalist movement. It's the biggest bug up Hoover's ass, in his declining years, and Holly does what Hoover wants. (He, too, was in on the assassinations of RFK and King).
The new kid on the block is Don Crutchfield. AKA Peeper and Dipshit. He turns his peeping penchant into a career. He also has insatiable curiosity, and the inability to let go of anything. In some ways, he is the proxy for Ellroy himself. Almost everyone in the book underestimates Crutch. But Ellroy makes him almost too powerful.
And, in a twist, there is a fourth POV character who comes in late for his POV sections. That would be Scotty Bennett, an LAPD officer who wears a bowtie embroidered with 18s, for the number of black armed robbers he has killed. By the end of the book, I don't know how high the number would be. Besides legal (and some illegal) murder, Bennett has a pure fixation on an open case -- an armored car robbery back in 1964 where the surviving thieves got away with a couple of mill and a shitload of emeralds.
The book starts just before the 68 convention riots, and basically covers the Nixon administration. There are two main differences between this book and the earlier two. First, this book involves a series of failures by the main characters. In those books, the characters set out to do terrible things, and by and large, they succeed. The main characters there are horrible, vicious, and very effective. Here, the main characters become riddled with doubts. And they also tend to fail in their main goals. And their failures are intimately tied to their quest for some kind of redemption. In this way, I think this book, and the main characters, hark back to figures like Buzz Meeks from The Big Nowhere. Also, I want to point out that I am definitely oversimplifying here. It's a broad impression that I have, but there are lots of details that point other ways, so other people might disagree.
This book also had some great humor. One of my favorite things in the book is the treatment of Watergate. Basically, Holly dumps off the job to Howard Hunt because he's too busy and more interested in the other evil shit he's involved with. For the real players here, Watergate merits simply an afterthought.
I haven't read many reviews, but I find it hard to believe that Ellroy, especially in these last three books, would have readers who did not react strongly. It seems to me that you should either love him or hate him. I can't imagine being blase. I love him. I think his vision of history is manic, sick, twisted and vulgar. I also find it compelling and hard to dismiss, and that comes largely from the force and conviction of his writing. It's rare to see anyone writing stuff that is simultaneously so compellingly honest, and so transparently false. It takes a rare kind of brilliance to pull this shit off, and I'm really happy that Ellroy has done it.
I also think its oddly fitting that I finished this book on July 4.