Browse content similar to James Ellroy - Crime Writer. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
My guest today has been called America's greatest living crime | :00:17. | :00:24. | |
writer. In his LA Quartet and many other novels, James Ellroy has | :00:25. | :00:28. | |
painted a uniquely dark portrait of this city of Angels, a nightmare | :00:29. | :00:33. | |
world of psychotic killers, corrupt cops and depraved appetites. The | :00:34. | :00:38. | |
rights of what he knows, his own mother was murdered when he was a | :00:39. | :00:44. | |
child. And it is that simple terrible fact the key to | :00:45. | :00:47. | |
understanding all the words he's ever written? | :00:48. | :01:15. | |
James Ellroy, welcome to heart block -- HARDtalk. Hey, boss, what's | :01:16. | :02:05. | |
shaking? I have but I came back. I made a conscious decision with my | :02:06. | :02:10. | |
new novel to craft a second LA Quartet, taking characters from the | :02:11. | :02:21. | |
initial LA Quartet, said in a lay between 1946 and 1958, and the | :02:22. | :02:24. | |
aforementioned underworld USA trilogy, three novels set in America | :02:25. | :02:30. | |
at large between 58 and 72. Characters from those two bodies of | :02:31. | :02:34. | |
work and place them in Los Angeles during World War Two as | :02:35. | :02:39. | |
significantly younger people so I made quite the conscious decision to | :02:40. | :02:44. | |
go back to LA. Going back is something I want to do with you as | :02:45. | :02:48. | |
we talk about the evolution of your fiction because it seems to me, and | :02:49. | :02:53. | |
you've talked about it a great deal, that you can't discuss James | :02:54. | :02:57. | |
Ellroy's body of work without spending a little bit of time | :02:58. | :03:00. | |
talking about the long-running impact of that terrible period in | :03:01. | :03:05. | |
your life which began with your parents' breakup, marriage failure, | :03:06. | :03:09. | |
and ended when you were ten years old with the murder of your mother, | :03:10. | :03:11. | |
her body found on an LA street. The actual impact of my mother's | :03:12. | :03:58. | |
death reached cessation years ago. It is a fact, it will always be | :03:59. | :04:01. | |
brought up by the media, and it is the key to understanding | :04:02. | :04:05. | |
the work that I do. But it is not the key | :04:06. | :04:08. | |
to me as an individual. If you don't mind, tell | :04:09. | :04:11. | |
me why it is the key to understanding | :04:12. | :04:17. | |
so much of your work. 12 and my parents were divorced, | :04:18. | :04:19. | |
my mother was murdered. It was a sex murder in a crummy dog | :04:20. | :04:23. | |
town east of Los Angeles. A man raped and strangled her, | :04:24. | :04:27. | |
unsolved to this day. Parenthetically I wrote a memoir | :04:28. | :04:30. | |
about it, My Dark Places. I tried to solve the | :04:31. | :04:33. | |
crime posthumously. My mother's death brought | :04:34. | :04:34. | |
a tremendous curiosity for all things criminal | :04:35. | :04:36. | |
and historical. I got hooked on American social | :04:37. | :04:38. | |
history, and LA's social history, Its history from the point of that | :04:39. | :04:41. | |
transcendence to now drives me. like a series of | :04:42. | :04:45. | |
conscious decisions you took to pursue a writing | :04:46. | :04:49. | |
interest after this terrible event You also suggested that there | :04:50. | :04:52. | |
was something much more visible You talked about the | :04:53. | :04:56. | |
degree to which at the time you hated your mother, | :04:57. | :04:59. | |
and this may sound perverse, lusted. There was a sexual | :05:00. | :05:03. | |
element there as well. Here's a newsflash | :05:04. | :05:11. | |
to our British viewers. Young males are introduced | :05:12. | :05:17. | |
to the idea of sex in the home, and their mother is | :05:18. | :05:21. | |
the first archetype. With me it went a little | :05:22. | :05:27. | |
beyond the basics. Up until a certain point, | :05:28. | :05:38. | |
you have a red-haired woman, tall and statuesque in front of me, | :05:39. | :05:45. | |
I'm way off the deep end. I grew up over time | :05:46. | :05:48. | |
in relationship to my mother's | :05:49. | :05:53. | |
murder. I made an internal decision to be | :05:54. | :05:54. | |
happy, to be fulfilled. But you weren't for | :05:55. | :05:58. | |
an awful long time. When you were into booze, | :05:59. | :06:04. | |
into all sorts of different crime, you spent time in jail, | :06:05. | :06:10. | |
you lived rough are quite a while. Give me access | :06:11. | :06:13. | |
to a public library And way back when some | :06:14. | :06:39. | |
mind-altering chemical, I can find joy | :06:40. | :06:47. | |
and fixation within myself. It wasn't until I got sober | :06:48. | :06:49. | |
at the age of 29 and started reading books that I went beyond | :06:50. | :06:53. | |
this idiot happiness and people across the world | :06:54. | :06:55. | |
will know this, Black Dahlia. That was about a horrible murder | :06:56. | :07:01. | |
of a young woman in LA. Your book was fascinating, | :07:02. | :07:05. | |
but to me what is interesting is that it seems the | :07:06. | :07:07. | |
detective in that novel seems to resemble you, | :07:08. | :07:10. | |
but at the same time I am wondering whether as you were growing up | :07:11. | :07:13. | |
and making sense of what happened to you as a child, whether you would | :07:14. | :07:16. | |
have identified more I have always identified | :07:17. | :07:19. | |
with police officers. I would rather live in a society tha | :07:20. | :07:55. | |
on the side of authoritarianism | :07:56. | :08:00. | |
than in a society that errs I take myself and I superimpose my l | :08:01. | :08:02. | |
losses, sorrows, and my own yearning, | :08:03. | :08:06. | |
which is the chief thing. I write in my memoir that | :08:07. | :08:09. | |
yearning is the chief fount I yearn for women, I yearn | :08:10. | :08:11. | |
for history itself, I yearn for big lives juxtaposed against large | :08:12. | :08:36. | |
geopolitical events, and to return to your question, yes, | :08:37. | :08:38. | |
I take these authoritarian characters, rogue in nature, | :08:39. | :08:41. | |
and I give them a great case. From the 1944 movie, | :08:42. | :08:44. | |
Dana Andrews, a lonely, haunted detective falls in love | :08:45. | :08:49. | |
with the portrait of the dead woman, Not surprisingly, I have just been | :08:50. | :08:52. | |
commissioned by 20th Century Fox When you say to me | :08:53. | :08:58. | |
you are a natural born authoritarian, that | :08:59. | :09:05. | |
raises questions. If you are an authoritarian | :09:06. | :09:08. | |
you surely have to believe that That in essence, the police, | :09:09. | :09:11. | |
authority, security services, represent good, and the | :09:12. | :09:15. | |
villains represent evil. But your books are so | :09:16. | :09:23. | |
much more ambiguous They have a message that says, | :09:24. | :09:30. | |
the law enforcers can be and are corrupt, they can be deeply | :09:31. | :09:35. | |
flawed, they can be almost as problematic morally | :09:36. | :09:38. | |
as the wrongdoers. I take those characters | :09:39. | :09:46. | |
who are problematic. I juxtapose them against | :09:47. | :09:50. | |
evil that is pervasive, it is in the outer world, | :09:51. | :09:54. | |
we must interdict and suppress it. I am on their side, and they are not | :09:55. | :09:57. | |
meant to represent American law Some of the most famous betrayals | :09:58. | :10:01. | |
of corrupt cops in literature come from you, from LA | :10:02. | :10:16. | |
Confidential, for example. I love them anyway, | :10:17. | :10:18. | |
they are my guys. I give you their heartbreak, | :10:19. | :10:21. | |
I give you the society at large. I give you malefactors who are 40 | :10:22. | :10:32. | |
times as flawed and out on missions of systematic evil, | :10:33. | :10:35. | |
and my guys quash them. But if you are prepared | :10:36. | :10:44. | |
to tolerate the corruption inside the public bodies | :10:45. | :10:46. | |
that govern our lives, it is a recipe for societies | :10:47. | :10:48. | |
going wrong, going very bad. If it takes hitting a child molester | :10:49. | :11:01. | |
with a phonebook in order to secure his conviction | :11:02. | :11:12. | |
and ultimate imprisonment, or one-way ticket to the gas | :11:13. | :11:13. | |
chamber, then I'm on the side Are you? | :11:14. | :11:17. | |
Yes. I am rewriting my assumptions | :11:18. | :11:21. | |
about you as I speak. I was going to quote | :11:22. | :11:25. | |
to you the words of PD James, and was expecting you | :11:26. | :11:28. | |
to contradict them. She said, the classic detective | :11:29. | :11:30. | |
story confirms our belief that we live in a rational | :11:31. | :11:33. | |
and generally benevolent universe. I thought you would say, | :11:34. | :11:35. | |
that is nonsense! No. | :11:36. | :11:44. | |
I agree. So much of modern crime writing, | :11:45. | :11:50. | |
and a lot of it owes a lot to you, so much of it is about | :11:51. | :11:58. | |
ambiguity, and as Ian Rankin says, writing fiction where good | :11:59. | :12:04. | |
does not always triumph, where evil can't always be | :12:05. | :12:06. | |
rationalised, and the reader is sometimes seduced to take | :12:07. | :12:09. | |
side with the evil side. You always know | :12:10. | :12:18. | |
who my good guys are. I believe in good guys, | :12:19. | :12:26. | |
and I think the heroes of my books They have first person and third | :12:27. | :12:32. | |
person subjective viewpoints, and you understand each and every | :12:33. | :12:39. | |
one of their rationales. Even the evil Irish | :12:40. | :12:42. | |
cop, Dudley Smith... He's the one who says, | :12:43. | :12:54. | |
"I control people, and if I can't A slow, tortuous path | :12:55. | :12:57. | |
to self-sacrifice, Maybe the conversation | :12:58. | :13:03. | |
we are having and the explanation you give for ultimately | :13:04. | :13:24. | |
the sympathy you have, and who are very bent and corrupt, | :13:25. | :13:26. | |
maybe that is one reason why some people in the US have come to see | :13:27. | :13:30. | |
you as a defender of, for example, the LAPD, | :13:31. | :13:33. | |
even during the Rodney King fallout, the videotaped beating of a black | :13:34. | :13:36. | |
citizen, and you said, If you see the entire | :13:37. | :13:39. | |
three-minute sequence of events, pertaining to Rodney King, | :13:40. | :14:03. | |
you will not judge the LAPD anywhere The extracted 56 blows | :14:04. | :14:06. | |
to the head are shocking But that abbreviated context | :14:07. | :14:16. | |
is nothing but a lie. You have to see all of | :14:17. | :14:22. | |
the events that preceded it. You say you think | :14:23. | :14:33. | |
like a detective... I am by the way the yearly MC | :14:34. | :14:38. | |
of the LAPD's Jack Webb awards. You've only said, "A lot of my good | :14:39. | :14:41. | |
friends are inside the LAPD". But I wonder with all | :14:42. | :14:59. | |
the allegations of racism and institutionalised | :15:00. | :15:02. | |
abuse within the LAPD, whether you are blind to it | :15:03. | :15:04. | |
because you're too close to it? No, what I'm not blind | :15:05. | :15:07. | |
to is the idiocy these human rights groups and their impacted, | :15:08. | :15:10. | |
stiffnecked sense of victimisation. This is James Ellroy, | :15:11. | :15:12. | |
who earlier in his career, I think gloried in the idea that | :15:13. | :15:15. | |
you were a demon dog, who would say it like it really | :15:16. | :15:18. | |
is in American culture, even despite the forces | :15:19. | :15:28. | |
of liberalism and PC... I'm shocked that pit bulls | :15:29. | :15:30. | |
are banned in a climate of hysteria I stand up for Staffordshire Bulls - | :15:31. | :15:40. | |
a British dog that I have Well, let's not get | :15:41. | :15:44. | |
too hung up on dogs, but let's apply this | :15:45. | :15:57. | |
to American culture today, No, we're not going to talk | :15:58. | :15:59. | |
about politics in America today, no. I don't mean party politics, | :16:00. | :16:05. | |
whether you are a Republican or I just mean the flavour | :16:06. | :16:08. | |
of the times. For example, in your | :16:09. | :16:11. | |
latest book, Perfidia... It's a very interesting book | :16:12. | :16:13. | |
because you place it around the time of the Pearl Harbor | :16:14. | :16:21. | |
attack and soon after. And what you portray | :16:22. | :16:23. | |
is a Southern California which is in the grip of a fear, | :16:24. | :16:26. | |
a fifth column of an enemy within. And because of that | :16:27. | :16:30. | |
fear, corners are cut. ..adapted, shall we say, | :16:31. | :16:32. | |
to ensure that for example 100,000 Japanese Americans can be locked up, | :16:33. | :16:36. | |
can be interned in camps. I just wonder whether you | :16:37. | :16:39. | |
see a parallel today? Let's cut right | :16:40. | :16:42. | |
through that right now. I write my books in | :16:43. | :16:48. | |
a state of immersion. As far as I'm concerned, | :16:49. | :16:52. | |
Franklin D Roosevelt is the president | :16:53. | :16:55. | |
of the United States. I know he's not, but that's | :16:56. | :16:59. | |
the world I live in. there are no corollaries | :17:00. | :17:13. | |
to any event preceding That book is written | :17:14. | :17:16. | |
in blood, and in real time. The bombs fall on Pearl | :17:17. | :17:23. | |
Harbor 80 pages in. Then we're through, around | :17:24. | :17:27. | |
the clock, up until the 29th. Abrogation of civil liberties - | :17:28. | :17:30. | |
we know it happened. It was the Japanese | :17:31. | :17:33. | |
internment, and it was wrong. And we are inside the perspective | :17:34. | :17:36. | |
of a closet homosexual The other cops, even Dudley Smith, | :17:37. | :17:42. | |
the corrupt cop, will come to view Because people, in my books, | :17:43. | :17:53. | |
are always on a tortured But even if you say you wrote | :17:54. | :17:57. | |
this book in the mindset of 1942, and you refuse to move | :17:58. | :18:02. | |
that mindset to today, you, as, you know, | :18:03. | :18:12. | |
an important literary voice in America today, surely | :18:13. | :18:15. | |
have a view as to whether there is a justification post 9-11 | :18:16. | :18:23. | |
for things like the Patriot Act, that we saw in the Bush | :18:24. | :18:26. | |
administration, or indeed And I do not acknowledge anything | :18:27. | :18:28. | |
outside the history that And it is that very quality, | :18:29. | :18:38. | |
the fact that I deny the world today, do not use a cellphone, | :18:39. | :18:43. | |
have never logged onto a computer And it gives these books | :18:44. | :18:46. | |
their immediacy, and the feeling that they were written | :18:47. | :18:53. | |
in that time period. I will die in 34 years, | :18:54. | :18:57. | |
slightly after my 100th birthday. But I will have a lot | :18:58. | :19:07. | |
of books that will stand. And they will stand | :19:08. | :19:10. | |
because they were written Will you, in the course | :19:11. | :19:12. | |
of the next 34 years, that we both hope you have, | :19:13. | :19:21. | |
will you turn your mind to events that go beyond the period | :19:22. | :19:33. | |
of the United States in the '30s and '40s, which has been the focus | :19:34. | :19:37. | |
of your attention so much Will you address what has happened | :19:38. | :19:40. | |
in the last ten years, My historical curiosity | :19:41. | :19:44. | |
runs out in May of 1972, when my novel Blood's a Rover, | :19:45. | :19:52. | |
my most recent novel, before Perfidia, concludes | :19:53. | :19:57. | |
with the death of J Edgar Hoover. I am going to write | :19:58. | :20:00. | |
the second the LA Quartet. I am going to write a post-war | :20:01. | :20:02. | |
trilogy that will run concurrent in its timeframe with | :20:03. | :20:06. | |
the first LA Quartet. And, brother, at that time I will be | :20:07. | :20:10. | |
old and I will be tired, and hopefully I will have enough | :20:11. | :20:14. | |
money in the bank to live the rest Let me ask you about the genre, | :20:15. | :20:18. | |
if that is the word you use. You have been a pioneer, | :20:19. | :20:24. | |
and I have mentioned people like Ian Rankin who say they owe | :20:25. | :20:32. | |
a huge debt to you in the UK. There has always been this | :20:33. | :20:36. | |
discussion, maybe based purely on snobbery, in the world | :20:37. | :20:39. | |
of literature, whether crime fiction should be allowed in to the sort | :20:40. | :20:41. | |
of literary circle. I'm not crime writer, | :20:42. | :20:44. | |
nor am I noir writer. I have written a bunch of books | :20:45. | :20:57. | |
set in LA in the height That's the novel that is resting | :20:58. | :21:01. | |
under your left hand right now. and I am happy to have influenced | :21:02. | :21:15. | |
a generation of crime writers. And I think the designation of crime | :21:16. | :21:19. | |
writers, historical writers, all of this, it's | :21:20. | :21:24. | |
interesting in the moment, and really, in the end, | :21:25. | :21:34. | |
it only pertains towards where your I suppose, I have been | :21:35. | :21:37. | |
reading some criticism of you and one thing that struck me | :21:38. | :21:40. | |
is that a lot of writers have compared you, perhaps surprisingly, | :21:41. | :21:44. | |
with James Joyce, for your inventive use of language - stream | :21:45. | :21:47. | |
of consciousness at times. One critic said the Conrad | :21:48. | :21:49. | |
comparison works because you explore Do you think we are - | :21:50. | :21:53. | |
have a savage heart as a species? I think we have a savage heart, | :21:54. | :22:00. | |
mitigated by conscience. And I think the very best of us come | :22:01. | :22:07. | |
to spiritual flashpoints, points of explication | :22:08. | :22:15. | |
in our personal lives where we see ourselves in the context | :22:16. | :22:18. | |
of the world. Other human beings, | :22:19. | :22:22. | |
I believe that we are all I believe in the spiritus mundi, | :22:23. | :22:25. | |
the collective unconscious. And in that respect I am perhaps | :22:26. | :22:34. | |
as one with James Joyce or Joseph Conrad, who I have never | :22:35. | :22:37. | |
read, or Dostoevsky, But put all of that aside, | :22:38. | :22:40. | |
I don't think of this stuff. I wasn't fighting you or baiting | :22:41. | :22:54. | |
you just to fight you or bait you when I was talking about history | :22:55. | :23:01. | |
versus the contemporary. If I'm not yearning for some woman, | :23:02. | :23:04. | |
I'm yearning for history itself. I'm yearning for conjunction of men | :23:05. | :23:17. | |
and women within history. Are you yearning as much | :23:18. | :23:20. | |
now as you ever did? We talked at the beginning | :23:21. | :23:23. | |
about the murder of your mother, about what a difficult | :23:24. | :23:26. | |
childhood you had. And I can understand the yearning | :23:27. | :23:28. | |
that came from that. But still today in your | :23:29. | :23:33. | |
60s, you are yearning? Because I'm deeply in love | :23:34. | :23:40. | |
with a British woman. But that sense of yearning that | :23:41. | :23:43. | |
has driven you on... That's why the demon | :23:44. | :23:47. | |
dog analogy is so good. It's why I am chagrined that they're | :23:48. | :23:51. | |
banned here in Britain. My girlfriend and I are going | :23:52. | :24:02. | |
to Dartmoor and we are going to find the Hound of the Baskervilles, | :24:03. | :24:14. | |
and he is going to say, James Ellroy, thank | :24:15. | :24:17. | |
you for being on HARDtalk. | :24:18. | :24:24. |