Nearly 20 years after he started work, James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy is finally complete. Begun during the administration of George Bush Sr., former director of the CIA, its final part emerges in the bright new dawn of Barack Obama's administration, appropriately enough for a series that covers the years from November 1958 to May 1972, the decade or so of struggle out of which Obama's America was formed.
Twenty years ago, Ellroy was the new shining star of American crime fiction. His LA Quartet The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential et al had established him as a writer of visceral power and historical reach. The quartet offered a thrilling, illicit alternative history of Los Angeles: American dreams bleeding into nightmare. By the standards of crime fiction, the quartet was extraordinarily ambitious, though still firmly located within the genre. As Ellroy once explained to me, "I just like to write about pervert killers with wolverine teeth".
Around the time the quartet came to a close, with the avant-garde noir of White Jazz, it became evident that Ellroy was starting to raise his sights. He was still happy to clown around, making outrageous liberal-baiting statements. But, as he also explained to another critic, reading Don DeLillo's Libra had inspired him to try something newer and bigger: "Fuck being a crime novelist when you can be a flat-out great novelist".
The first volume of Underworld USA, American Tabloid, shows the DeLillo influence clearly. Like Libra, it's concerned with the hinterland of Dallas, 22 November 1963. The second, The Cold Six Thousand, starts where the first ends, and carries the story through to 1968 and the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Both books are memorable, powerful and flawed. Essentially, they offer this familiar history from the vantage-point of the bad guys. The protagonists are the straight white guys who work for the FBI and the CIA, G-Man Hoover and Howard Hughes. They're the right-wing, mobbed-up killers who plot to stop revolution in its tracks by killing the leaders of the left, flooding the ghettoes with heroin, and giving Cuba back to the Mafia. By the end of The Cold Six Thousand the figures of hope are dead and Richard Milhous Nixon is waiting in the wings.
It's not the politics that are the problem with the first two books but more prosaic matters. American Tabloid, while undeniably compelling, suffers from raking over ground that had already been strip-mined by fiction. The Cold Six Thousand is mired in speed-freak prose that is both minimalist and wildly overblown, 700 pages of machine- gun sentences: bracing at first, but wearying at length.
Thus, I approached Blood's a Rover, which picks up directly from the end of The Cold Six Thousand, with a certain amount of trepidation. And for the first 100 pages or so it persisted. The prose wasn't quite as telegrammatic as before but still frenetic, and the endless references to niggers and coons and junglebunnies seemed like tired liberal-baiting schtick. Slowly but surely, though, the plot started to grip and the purpose of all the name-calling became clear: to immerse us in the mindset of then, not that of a liberal novelist from then, nor a liberal re-imagining of then, but then as it believably was, with an all-pervading racism and sexism considered completely normal.
Gradually, too, the three protagonists come into focus. There's Wayne Tedrow Jr., a closet liberal with the murder of Dr King weighing heavy on his soul; Dwight Holly, the FBI enforcer with his commie informant/lover Karen; and Don 'Crutch' Crutchfield, a geeky young wannabe PI and evident proxy for the young James Ellroy (like the young Ellroy, Crutch is a dedicated Peeping Tom).
The plot is fantastically, but satisfyingly, complex, as a 1964 armoured-car robbery in Los Angeles turns out to relate to a voodoo sex murder in the Hollywood Hills, a failed revolution in the Dominican Republic, and a people's bank in South Central LA. That's just for starters. On another level, though, it's a simple tale: the story of what happens to the bad guys once they've won the war. The answer is simple: they go on being bad. They put into action Hoover's plan to infiltrate and discredit the Black Panthers; they try to help the mob build casinos in the Dominican Republic; they bring more heroin into the ghettoes; they sell more of Las Vegas to Howard Hughes. And then they begin to go insane, and they get guilty.
As Blood's a Rover moves forward, and its angry white men become mired ever deeper in blood, it becomes clear that the victory of the right was a pyrrhic one: that killing JFK or MLK failed to prevent the forward march of racial and sexual equality, and that it failed to achieve anything else, except a morally bankrupt America.
But to reduce the novel to its plot, or politics, would be to do it a disservice. Really, this is a book about dreams. All its characters are haunted and enslaved by their dreams. Ellroy's great insight is that night-time dreams don't have the moral clarity of Dr King's speeches: they're tormented affairs in which our desires are revealed, and which we spend much of our waking life denying. This is very clear in the case of the book's most intriguing minor character, a black undercover cop. Such dreams don't have morality - they have drama, and secrets, and action. The characters in Blood's a Rover fascinate Ellroy because they follow their dreams, and the results are terrible but revelatory.
Unusually, the key to the novel's success is in the sex scenes, so often the part of a novel that you gloss over in order to be kind. In this extremely violent book, it is the moments of tenderness between men and women that are the most honest and revealing. For in sex, as in dreams, people often reveal their true selves, as opposed to the people they would like to be. If this book has a central theme, it is the often unwelcome revelation to a person of their true nature. Twenty years ago American crime fiction seemed to have a power and a potential mainstream fiction had lost. The best US crime writers - Ellroy, Leonard, Burke - combined storytelling energy with a serious will to get to grips with the state of America. Since then, much of that potential has dissipated. With Blood's a Rover, Ellroy has finally delivered on that mislaid potential. It's a seedy, erratic, bloody and compassionate masterpiece.
John Williams's 'Cardiff Trilogy' is published by Bloomsbury
Underworld USA Trilogy
In 1995, James Ellroy published American Tabloid, the first novel in a trilogy that became known as the Underworld USA Trilogy. The American novelist described the series as a "secret history" of the mid-to-late twentieth century. American Tabloid was named Time's fiction book of year in 1995. Its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand, became a bestseller. Blood's a Rover, is the final in the series. The trilogy follows a series of novels, The LA Quartet, which earned Ellroy a cult following.
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