Ellroy’s Vision

Blood’s a Rover
by James Ellroy
Knopf, 656 pp., $28.95

Because he writes books laced with profanity and graphic descriptions of violence, James Ellroy isn’t a writer to everyone’s taste. He is nonetheless the most intellectually ambitious writer of crime fiction in our time.

With the publication of Blood’s a Rover, Ellroy has completed what he calls the Underworld USA trilogy: three massive, complex novels that paint a haunting and horrifying picture of recent American history (1958-72). The books focus on the malign role played in that history by organized crime, rogue elements of the CIA, and (above all) J. Edgar Hoover, who is the central character of the trilogy. To my mind the books’ politics are repellent, but they are still very much worth reading—in particular the first volume, American Tabloid.

So what are the books’—and their author’s—politics? That question is disputed. In 2005 Ellroy was the subject of an admiring interview in which he stated bluntly “I’m not a liberal” and noted approvingly that “most cops are conservatives.” In other interviews he has gone further, describing himself as “a Tory by nature” who is “conservative by temperament.” Furthermore, Ellroy is clearly not an admirer of either John Kennedy or Bill Clinton: In the brief prelude to American Tabloid, speaking in his own name for the first and last time in the trilogy, he memorably declares that JFK—whom he depicts as a charming but shallow sexual athlete—was “Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab.”