The flood of fiction from the dark laureate of Los Angeles has been mysteriously stilled for eight years while, one guesses, he wrestled with his well-publicised personal demons. The dam has broken with this, the first volume of a second “LA Quartet”, designed to install some wartime foundations into the pre-existing post-war four-parter (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidentialand White Jazz).
Overarching everything Ellroy writes is his idiosyncratic vision of the “nowhere city”. Los Angeles was transformed between 1939 and 1945 from the sleepy western town of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep into Reyner Banham’s West Coast Alphaville, where downtown traffic pulses at 60mph past futuristic sky scrapers defying the “Big One”. Apocalypse deferred.
“Perfidia” is the Spanish for treachery. Ellroy’s 23-day “real time” plot pivots around FD Roosevelt’s “day of infamy” — the treacherous bombardment of Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. The title also alludes to Xavier Cugat’s hit record of the previous year. A quick dip into YouTube will get your foot tapping.
There are always two porous borders to Ellroy’s fiction. One is with the historical world, the other with the pre-existing corpus of Ellroy novels. Summarising his plots is like straightening out the spaghetti on your plate. But large elements separate out as one wades through the always too-many pages.
Central to Perfidia are four characters. All are “law enforcement” — uniform, plain-clothes or undercover. Ellroy perceived as a child that his hometown was a “corrupt copocracy”. Nothing over the years has changed his view. Police rule. Corruptly. New to the Ellroy dramatis personae is a nisei (American-born Japanese), Hideo Ashida. In 1941 Los Angeles had the largest Japanese ethnic population in the US. “Outside of Tokyo,” says one character, “this is the Jap capital of the known world.”
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Hideo is a brilliant “criminalist” — the kind of policeman who solves crimes with science. With the total internment, into far-off concentration camps, of every “Jap” on the West Coast his only hope of staying free is to make himself indispensable to the force. Being gay does not help. In his quest for self-preservation he ricochets between two protectors (both well known to Ellroy readers): Captain William H Parker (historical) and Sergeant Dudley Smith (fictional). They embody different doctrines of how the future Police State of LA should be run. “Whisky Bill” is alcoholic, a “Catholic nut” and tormented by his repressed lust for tall red-headed women. He believes in an autonomous, pragmatic LAPD, run by its own rules (“expedient justice”) but, in its ruthless way, honest.
The “Dudster”, “suavely brutal”, is happy to form a dishonest alliance with the town’s criminal kingpin Bugsy Siegel (historical). He enjoys wild sex, graphically described, with Bette Davis — a redhead and very historical. The edges of the plot are grimily star-spangled. Young Jack Kennedy comes through town, interested in one thing only: “poon”. The Dudster fixes him up with a B-movie starlet, Ellen Drew (historical). Clark Gable is obsessed with his private archive of pubic hair. Cary Grant has lips for the penis of every handsome guy in town. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford are rampant nymphomaniacs. “Lezbo” Eleanor Roosevelt drops by for a quick inter-racial fling with Butterfly McQueen (historical), the “negress” maid in Gone with the Wind. All fantastical: but no more so than the fantasies the studios throw on to the cinema screens of a gullible world.
Perfidia starts as a roman policier and ends as a political novel. A Japanese family, on the eve of war, is found dead. It looks like seppuku — ritual suicide. It isn’t. It is a cover up for a “fifth column” and a vast criminal expropriation of Japanese-American land and property.
The fourth member of the central dramatis personae quartet is Kay Lake — familiar from The Black Dahlia. Coolly rational, but violent when roused (she bites the nose off a woman who unwisely vexes her) she observes the madness of wartime Los Angeles with wry amusement. The real war, she perceives, will start when this one ends. Indeed it did.
I look forward, eagerly, to the next three instalments. But a word of warning: if you’re unKindled don’t drop this breeze-block of a book on your toe.
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Perfidia by James Ellroy, Heinemann, 695pp, £18.99; ebook £9.98. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134