Skyways – August 2019

(lily) #1
You’re known for your distinctive writing style – clipped
sentences and blunt, brutal language. It’s incredibly filmic


  • like instructions for an actor to follow and to help a
    reader accurately formulate an image of the places your
    characters operate in. At this point in your career, does
    it still require much editing to bring that out or is it just a
    natural flow?
    James Ellroy: I think I’ve expanded that to a less
    clipped style, though it’s still concise. It’s the result of
    the copiously detailed outlines I do for all my books. I
    spend a lot of time creating a superstructure that allows
    me to know that everything I add to it will make sense
    in terms of theme and the way the characters interact.
    And at this stage, I am my only frame of reference – I
    don’t look at the work of others.


The world you depict is incredibly dense – all the characters
and their individual threads – and profoundly cynical. That
can be uncomfortable to read. Perhaps that’s because
it’s a more accurate reflection of readers; our public and
private personae mashed up, complex and layered?
That’s strange. I don’t look at my books as cynical. I
think they’re redemptive and passionate. I love the
American idiom – including the racial invective, the
jazz patois, the cop talk and the alliteration – and all of
that is used here.
I’m not writing about myself. I have my facts straight,
by and large – I haven’t tripped over inaccuracies yet –
so this is my opportunity to live in 1942 Los Angeles,
in a way. I remember in 1952, when I was a child, I
said something that led my mother to believe that I
still thought it was World War Two. She had to convince
me that it wasn’t! My parents had a huge stack of Life
magazines, and I had my nose stuck in those for years.

What World War Two was like in Los Angeles will be
unknown to many non-American readers, giving the
details in This Storm an even greater impact.
Perfidia, the book before this one [and the first in
Ellroy’s Second LA Quartet; This Storm is the second],
was a novel about the advent of World War Two. This
one is a novel of World War Two. The war unhinged

LA – parties, fistfights and unwanted pregnancies. My
protagonists are agents provocateur and war profiteers.
They love the war. It’s the means to their freedom and
their insane libidos.

It might be said that there are no heroes here, just operators
working their own little corners of Sodom and Gomorrah?
There are some characters, like Dudley Smith, who are
murderous psychopaths. But Kay Lake is driven by a
kind of moral fire. And Elmer Jackson is struggling with
his emerging humanity; he has a need to confront his
own past. Overall, it’s the people who want to solve the
murder at the clubhouse [a particularly vivid, violent
crime at the centre of the narrative] versus those who
don’t. I don’t see them as hopeless people, I have to
say. I think they’re just hopped up by the war and what
it brings, and driven by dubious ideologies.

The development of the plot involves a slow build, with
many overlapping threads of differing importance relative
to the various characters.
Yes – that’s the planning I mentioned. The plotting is
done to the last detail: thinking, stitching plot details
together, reading and research, outlining the story and
knowing when to bring in real-life details. I need to
figure out what the different characters are withholding
and why, and then get them to connect with each other
in a way that makes sense.

This Storm is part of your greater Los Angeles story
[Ellroy’s celebrated LA Quartet comprises The Black
Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz,
and Perfidia kicked off The Second LA Quartet]. Where
does it fit into the greater story you’re telling?
The first two novels deal with the advent of World
War Two and then the beginning of the war in the
US. The next book, the third in the quartet, picks up
later in 1942, when people are getting used to the
phenomenon and adapting to the new opportunities
that are presenting themselves.

Text | Bruce Dennill Photography | Fred Johnson

This Storm by James
Ellroy, published by
Penguin Random
House, is available now.

War of words

Fêted crime writer James Ellroy has released his new novel This Storm, continuing his


development of a Los Angeles that not many readers will be familiar with


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