The conversation: James Ellroy

But there is a minority who take offence at his perceived grandiosity (the word “jerk” comes up often on internet threads), and even his admirers, literary critics among them, have been known to find fault with his heavily abbreviated writing style, and his use of homophobic and racist language, a claim he seldom feels the need to justify.

Alongside the Playboy video is a series that Ellroy has written entitled Why I Chase Women, in which he describes himself as a “tenuously reformed pervert” and details his messy adolescence, chaotic relationship with drugs and alcohol, and his overwhelmingly obsessive relationships with women, including the odd prostitute.

Helen Knode, his second wife and best friend, nicknamed him “a zoo animal”, while they were still together. When the marriage broke down, she told him: “You drove around Carmel in shit-stained trousers. My parents heard you jacking off upstairs. You peeped women while you walked Dudley [the dog].”

I assumed he was going to be a handful.

But in the plush Langham Hilton, Ellroy appeared tall, slightly hunch-shouldered, dapper, bald, energetic and bespectacled. I later watched him being interviewed by the cultural commentator Mark Lawson and expect that he would have behaved very differently had I been a man. Lawson, all British tea-parlour politeness, soldiered on in small-talk mode, unable to cope with Ellroy’s habit of, I think unconsciously, baring his teeth in an appearance of light menace and batting away questions with one word answers, usually “No”.

But in the Langham, the Demon Dog of American literature behaved as genially as a puppy: chivalrous, engaging, kind, warm, every word carefully chosen. How infuriating. Where was the obnoxious, at times juvenile, man who, not seven months ago, had feigned masturbation for a soft porn site?

“The interview for Playboy had no dignity,” he said, with the air of a person who has awoken remorsefully with a hangover. “I was encouraged to exercise the worst aspects of my rude behaviour. I’m an accomplished public performer and I can act. And I go on book tours and I’m like a dog cut off its leash.

“I spend a great deal of time on my own and I’m very serious in my pursuits, and put a camera in front of me or put me in front of an audience and I’m there to convert, to seduce, to take over, to dominate and I can be harsh and I can be domineering and I can be brusque. And I’m learning to be less so.”

Why bother, if the persona works?

“It’s just a better way to be. It puts fewer people off and I’m trying to grow up. Yeah. At no loss of youth or vigour, I’m just trying to grow up.”

Ellroy is now 61. But he never tires of talking about the pivotal moment of his life, the rape and murder of his mother in Los Angeles, when he was 10. The rest you should do yourself the favour of reading about in My Dark Places, a terrifically crafted memoir that I suspect women enjoy more than something like American Tabloid or L. A. Confidential, complex and macho novels that require a working knowledge of mid-20th-century American history, slang, conspiracy theories and politics.

His early erotic attachment to his mother, his desire to know her and understand the motivations for her murder, and an abstract wish to live in the period in which she was killed are explored most explicitly in Why I Chase Women, which will appear in book form next year under the title The Hilliker Curse (Hilliker is his mother’s maiden name). But the same themes, it transpires, also drive his new novel Blood’s a Rover, if in more roundabout, semi-disastrous ways. “It ripped my f***ing heart out,” he says. “I didn’t think I could go on much longer at certain points while I was writing that book.”

One of the joys of interviewing Ellroy is that there is none of that paranoid guardedness you get with so many male authors. We move swiftly on to a second turning point in his life, a breakdown he had in 2001. It began innocuously enough with a spell of insomnia and morphed into an addiction to sleeping pills and hypochondria. He spent an unsuccessful spell in a health retreat being slathered with healing oils and doing transcendental meditation. And when antidepressants didn’t work, he went into meltdown.

The whole thing was brought on, he says, by “knowledge of ultimate incapacity and death, suppressed emotion, unexpressed sexuality, romantic longing, a life lived very, very, very hard”. He was also working like a man possessed, promoting the prequel to Blood’s a Rover, The Cold Six Thousand, which “began all the events that lead to all the horror. I was exhausted. Even a phone call was taxing. I had money. I didn’t particularly need to work, I had film jobs, I was trying to sleep around the clock. I needed to rest. I needed to shut 55 years of very, very hard-lived life off.” Most of all, “I needed to fantasise, I needed to have crushes on women. I mean, I never acted on them, I was entirely honourable.”

He produces for me his list of infatuations: Anne Manson, the former principal conductor of the Kansas Philharmonic; a lesbian FedEx courier; and the Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. “The strangest group of women ever. I just needed to go off by myself and drink coffee and think.”

Coffee notwithstanding, his breakdown put an enormous strain on his marriage to Knode, culminating in her suggestion of a more open arrangement. Given his compulsive romanticism, she might have foreseen what happened next. As he says, “You shouldn’t offer a guy like me a deal like that because I’ll do it”. Anyway, he had soon met and become fanatically engrossed with a woman who he decided to turn into a character in Blood’s a Rover.

“I was 56,” he said. “I didn’t have anybody. I didn’t have any ... body. And it was the strangest, most pathetic place to be. Helen hated me at the time. And I met this woman and I should have smelt misalliance, potential obsession ... and then at a certain point I had to reveal to Helen I’m seeing someone, it’s OK, she initiated the deal, it wasn’t a cheat or infidelity and I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy and I left. I wanted to be with her and we wanted to have a child.”

It was a disaster, of course. Ellroy was needy to the point of delirium and would have panic attacks whenever left on his own: “Yeah, and I’m a big f***ing shit-kicking A-type American guy.” Probably wisely, his new partner terminated the relationship and Ellroy swiftly found himself relocating to New York. One hardly needs to ask why. “At a reading performance I had spoken to a woman for two minutes. And, why not? Why not move 500 miles because there’s some woman you met for two minutes in a chaste conversation?”

Well, I could think of plenty of reasons. None of these remotely fazed her new paramour: “It’s just this motif, I always tend to get what I want, and all I’ve ever wanted was to write great books, live a big life, know God and commune with women of great substance. And I’m disarming. It’s not an unreasonable goal if you look at it from a certain standpoint. I don’t want to be President of the United States. I don’t want to be a rock’n’roll star. I don’t want to chase showgirls or do anything stupid like that.” In the end the relationship didn’t work out but the pair are still friends and she also went on to become a central character in the book.

From an author’s view it’s all very well to draw from real life. But is he so sure that these women were keen on being immortalised in this way? “I intended nothing but love for these two women. It didn’t pan out that way,” Ellroy says. “I could have slunk away, been cowardly, or I could honour them by doing what I do best, which is write fiction.”

What Ellroy does magnificently is draw key moments from history to interpret the events of the time, in the case of the Underworld USA trilogy, the years spanning 1958-1972. His fiction, he says, is approximately one third fact, which he uses to stand up every mid-20th century American conspiracy you’ve ever heard: JFK was killed by the Mob; Martin Luther King’s assassination was linked to the head of the FBI. How conspiracy-minded is Ellroy?

Not at all, he says, though the idea for the Underworld trilogy sprang from Don DeLillo’s reading of the JFK assassination in his book Libra. On King’s death, Ellroy says: “FBI men have wondered how James Earl Ray managed to stay out of prison with impunity for over a year and assassinate Martin Luther King and was as stupid as a brick, and always seemed to have money. So I do sense a collusion.

“And I do sense repressive factions coming together to quash revolution and also I make the case in King’s case, even though I revere the man above all other 20th-century Americans, that he was losing a little bit in the last years of his life. I think because he had been so courageous for so long that he just wanted relief from all this suffering.

“So he’s down at the garbage workers’ rally in Memphis and gets shot. He was becoming more demanding, more grandiose and turning a lot of his supporters against him. So what I felt upon research was just a convergence of dissatisfaction and word passing here to here to here, and somebody shoots him.”

Living in the past as Ellroy does with such relish must make the present seem terribly dull. Yes, contemporary life, he says, shocks and bores him. “Satire irks me; irony irks me; nihilism irks me; loud, discordant music irks me. I find the canonisation of rock’n’roll especially puerile: institutionalised rebelliousness of the worst sort. Yeah. I can’t believe the staying power of rock’n’roll when you can listen to classical music or jazz. I’m not a misanthrope, but I crave peace and quiet or intense rapport.”

He avoids “distractions” such as newspapers and television. What little he claims to know about current affairs, he says, he picks up inadvertently from the plague of televisions that have invaded restaurants in the US. “The American language has become horribly mangled. Especially among young women, it’s as if feminism never existed. Young women in LA — pierced, lacquered, varnished, enhanced, tattooed — they could not have coarsened themselves more. It’s only a brief moment before they say ‘it’s like’ or ‘I’m like’.”

To illustrate his point he recalls a conversation he recently overheard: “A young woman was trying to tell her friend that she had turned down the advances of a suitor. And she couldn’t even say, ‘I rejected him’. She said: ‘It’s like, it’s like, it’s like, like, I’m like, it’s like ... No!’ It was the most amazing thing! So you have a full generation now who sound equivocal, mitigating, befuddled, unable to exposit their lines in any kind of direct language whatsoever. Whatsoever!”

One suspects that he is particularly angry about this state of affairs because befuddled women are exactly the kind he doesn’t find attractive and so his pool of potential fantasy figures has become dramatically reduced. But who is to blame?

“Kinetic art, I think, is partially at play.”

What does he mean by kinetic art?

“Movies are very, very fast-paced. I tried to watch one of the Bourne thrillers with Matt Damon. Couldn’t watch it, felt like I was having a coronary. And the vulgarity of reality television shows. People seem to be proud to be stupid. I’m just not a liberal and I’m trying not to mess with people’s heads as much as I used to. I’m trying. Yeah.”

This idea of redemption and the reformed character are key themes in his life and his work: it’s there in Blood’s a Rover in the form of an unprecedentedly hopeful ending and it’s there when he says, repeatedly, that he’s trying to grow up, and that this time he’s found The One, a woman called Erika.

What about the tenuously reformed pervert. Is that still him?

“I’m a son of a woman who was raped and murdered. It’s core-deep with me. It’s suffused with discernment and I grew up in an era of privation and so sex wasn’t available and the era of privation, fuelled by my unhygienic state and lack of social skills, induced a great gratitude for me when I finally grew up and changed my life a little bit. And it fuels me still. I’ve never lost a teenage boy’s awe pertaining to sexuality. It’s the old joke, ‘I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now’. It says it all. It Says It All. I live there.”

Which I suppose explains why, when I asked him whether in Erika he’d at last found peace of mind, he suddenly looked quite agonised: “There is a sob in my throat from here on up for women and at times it’s almost unbearable,” he gasped. “It’s just f***ing unbearable.” I believe him, although I doubt it’s the first time he’s said so to a female interlocutor — it’s the kind of save-me vulnerability that so many women find irresistible.

Half an hour later he’s on stage, thrilling his predominantly male fans with his all-American alpha male act. The talk is all conspiracy theories and the Mob. He’s a woman’s man but a man’s writer. And, surrounded by men, there is no trace of the impulsive, complicated, mother-struck, lunatic romantic that will always be lurking underneath.

Biography

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was raped and murdered when he was 10. He was expelled from school and was dishonourably discharged from the army just before his father died. By 18 he was living on the streets, drinking heavily, taking drugs and involved in petty crime. After rehab he worked as a golf caddy and published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, at 30. He earned critical acclaim for the L. A. Quartet and wrote a memoir, My Dark Places, an attempt to trace his mother’s killer. The self-described best crime writer in the world has written 18 books. He has been married twice and lives in Kansas City.

Small talk

On his writing

I want to move people. I want to obsess people. I want people to live at the extreme mental pitch that I work at when I write a book.

On Los Angeles

It’s uncivilised: there are too many cars, too many people. Parking’s a pain in the ass.

On language

The idiom has always lived in me. Alliteration, Yiddish, racial invective, hipster talk, general profanity, it’s been there and I’ve always loved words and I’ve always been talking to myself and having conversations with myself when no one else is in the room.

On Beethoven

There’s a 20-minute piece of Beethoven that describes the conjunction of men and women for me. It’s the third movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata. It’s the most sublime slow movement in solo instrumental history.

James Ellroy is the author of Blood’s a Rover, which is published by Century (Arrow Books Ltd) at £18.99. Buy this book