James Ellroy - Crime Writer HARDtalk


James Ellroy - Crime Writer

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My guest today has been called America's greatest living crime

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writer. In his LA Quartet and many other novels, James Ellroy has

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painted a uniquely dark portrait of this city of Angels, a nightmare

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world of psychotic killers, corrupt cops and depraved appetites. The

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rights of what he knows, his own mother was murdered when he was a

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child. And it is that simple terrible fact the key to

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understanding all the words he's ever written?

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James Ellroy, welcome to heart block -- HARDtalk. Hey, boss, what's

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shaking? I have but I came back. I made a conscious decision with my

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new novel to craft a second LA Quartet, taking characters from the

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initial LA Quartet, said in a lay between 1946 and 1958, and the

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aforementioned underworld USA trilogy, three novels set in America

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at large between 58 and 72. Characters from those two bodies of

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work and place them in Los Angeles during World War Two as

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significantly younger people so I made quite the conscious decision to

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go back to LA. Going back is something I want to do with you as

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we talk about the evolution of your fiction because it seems to me, and

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you've talked about it a great deal, that you can't discuss James

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Ellroy's body of work without spending a little bit of time

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talking about the long-running impact of that terrible period in

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your life which began with your parents' breakup, marriage failure,

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and ended when you were ten years old with the murder of your mother,

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her body found on an LA street. The actual impact of my mother's

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death reached cessation years ago. It is a fact, it will always be

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brought up by the media, and it is the key to understanding

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the work that I do. But it is not the key

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to me as an individual. If you don't mind, tell

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me why it is the key to understanding

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so much of your work. 12 and my parents were divorced,

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my mother was murdered. It was a sex murder in a crummy dog

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town east of Los Angeles. A man raped and strangled her,

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unsolved to this day. Parenthetically I wrote a memoir

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about it, My Dark Places. I tried to solve the

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crime posthumously. My mother's death brought

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a tremendous curiosity for all things criminal

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and historical. I got hooked on American social

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history, and LA's social history, Its history from the point of that

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transcendence to now drives me. like a series of

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conscious decisions you took to pursue a writing

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interest after this terrible event You also suggested that there

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was something much more visible You talked about the

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degree to which at the time you hated your mother,

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and this may sound perverse, lusted. There was a sexual

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element there as well. Here's a newsflash

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to our British viewers. Young males are introduced

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to the idea of sex in the home, and their mother is

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the first archetype. With me it went a little

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beyond the basics. Up until a certain point,

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you have a red-haired woman, tall and statuesque in front of me,

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I'm way off the deep end. I grew up over time

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in relationship to my mother's

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murder. I made an internal decision to be

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happy, to be fulfilled. But you weren't for

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an awful long time. When you were into booze,

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into all sorts of different crime, you spent time in jail,

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you lived rough are quite a while. Give me access

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to a public library And way back when some

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mind-altering chemical, I can find joy

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and fixation within myself. It wasn't until I got sober

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at the age of 29 and started reading books that I went beyond

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this idiot happiness and people across the world

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will know this, Black Dahlia. That was about a horrible murder

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of a young woman in LA. Your book was fascinating,

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but to me what is interesting is that it seems the

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detective in that novel seems to resemble you,

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but at the same time I am wondering whether as you were growing up

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and making sense of what happened to you as a child, whether you would

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have identified more I have always identified

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with police officers. I would rather live in a society tha

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on the side of authoritarianism

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than in a society that errs I take myself and I superimpose my l

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losses, sorrows, and my own yearning,

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which is the chief thing. I write in my memoir that

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yearning is the chief fount I yearn for women, I yearn

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for history itself, I yearn for big lives juxtaposed against large

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geopolitical events, and to return to your question, yes,

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I take these authoritarian characters, rogue in nature,

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and I give them a great case. From the 1944 movie,

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Dana Andrews, a lonely, haunted detective falls in love

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with the portrait of the dead woman, Not surprisingly, I have just been

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commissioned by 20th Century Fox When you say to me

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you are a natural born authoritarian, that

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raises questions. If you are an authoritarian

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you surely have to believe that That in essence, the police,

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authority, security services, represent good, and the

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villains represent evil. But your books are so

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much more ambiguous They have a message that says,

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the law enforcers can be and are corrupt, they can be deeply

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flawed, they can be almost as problematic morally

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as the wrongdoers. I take those characters

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who are problematic. I juxtapose them against

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evil that is pervasive, it is in the outer world,

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we must interdict and suppress it. I am on their side, and they are not

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meant to represent American law Some of the most famous betrayals

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of corrupt cops in literature come from you, from LA

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Confidential, for example. I love them anyway,

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they are my guys. I give you their heartbreak,

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I give you the society at large. I give you malefactors who are 40

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times as flawed and out on missions of systematic evil,

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and my guys quash them. But if you are prepared

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to tolerate the corruption inside the public bodies

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that govern our lives, it is a recipe for societies

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going wrong, going very bad. If it takes hitting a child molester

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with a phonebook in order to secure his conviction

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and ultimate imprisonment, or one-way ticket to the gas

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chamber, then I'm on the side Are you?

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Yes. I am rewriting my assumptions

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about you as I speak. I was going to quote

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to you the words of PD James, and was expecting you

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to contradict them. She said, the classic detective

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story confirms our belief that we live in a rational

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and generally benevolent universe. I thought you would say,

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that is nonsense! No.

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I agree. So much of modern crime writing,

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and a lot of it owes a lot to you, so much of it is about

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ambiguity, and as Ian Rankin says, writing fiction where good

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does not always triumph, where evil can't always be

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rationalised, and the reader is sometimes seduced to take

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side with the evil side. You always know

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who my good guys are. I believe in good guys,

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and I think the heroes of my books They have first person and third

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person subjective viewpoints, and you understand each and every

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one of their rationales. Even the evil Irish

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cop, Dudley Smith... He's the one who says,

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"I control people, and if I can't A slow, tortuous path

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to self-sacrifice, Maybe the conversation

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we are having and the explanation you give for ultimately

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the sympathy you have, and who are very bent and corrupt,

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maybe that is one reason why some people in the US have come to see

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you as a defender of, for example, the LAPD,

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even during the Rodney King fallout, the videotaped beating of a black

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citizen, and you said, If you see the entire

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three-minute sequence of events, pertaining to Rodney King,

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you will not judge the LAPD anywhere The extracted 56 blows

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to the head are shocking But that abbreviated context

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is nothing but a lie. You have to see all of

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the events that preceded it. You say you think

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like a detective... I am by the way the yearly MC

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of the LAPD's Jack Webb awards. You've only said, "A lot of my good

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friends are inside the LAPD". But I wonder with all

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the allegations of racism and institutionalised

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abuse within the LAPD, whether you are blind to it

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because you're too close to it? No, what I'm not blind

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to is the idiocy these human rights groups and their impacted,

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stiffnecked sense of victimisation. This is James Ellroy,

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who earlier in his career, I think gloried in the idea that

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you were a demon dog, who would say it like it really

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is in American culture, even despite the forces

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of liberalism and PC... I'm shocked that pit bulls

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are banned in a climate of hysteria I stand up for Staffordshire Bulls -

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a British dog that I have Well, let's not get

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too hung up on dogs, but let's apply this

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to American culture today, No, we're not going to talk

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about politics in America today, no. I don't mean party politics,

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whether you are a Republican or I just mean the flavour

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of the times. For example, in your

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latest book, Perfidia... It's a very interesting book

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because you place it around the time of the Pearl Harbor

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attack and soon after. And what you portray

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is a Southern California which is in the grip of a fear,

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a fifth column of an enemy within. And because of that

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fear, corners are cut. ..adapted, shall we say,

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to ensure that for example 100,000 Japanese Americans can be locked up,

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can be interned in camps. I just wonder whether you

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see a parallel today? Let's cut right

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through that right now. I write my books in

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a state of immersion. As far as I'm concerned,

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Franklin D Roosevelt is the president

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of the United States. I know he's not, but that's

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the world I live in. there are no corollaries

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to any event preceding That book is written

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in blood, and in real time. The bombs fall on Pearl

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Harbor 80 pages in. Then we're through, around

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the clock, up until the 29th. Abrogation of civil liberties -

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we know it happened. It was the Japanese

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internment, and it was wrong. And we are inside the perspective

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of a closet homosexual The other cops, even Dudley Smith,

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the corrupt cop, will come to view Because people, in my books,

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are always on a tortured But even if you say you wrote

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this book in the mindset of 1942, and you refuse to move

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that mindset to today, you, as, you know,

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an important literary voice in America today, surely

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have a view as to whether there is a justification post 9-11

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for things like the Patriot Act, that we saw in the Bush

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administration, or indeed And I do not acknowledge anything

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outside the history that And it is that very quality,

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the fact that I deny the world today, do not use a cellphone,

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have never logged onto a computer And it gives these books

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their immediacy, and the feeling that they were written

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in that time period. I will die in 34 years,

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slightly after my 100th birthday. But I will have a lot

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of books that will stand. And they will stand

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because they were written Will you, in the course

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of the next 34 years, that we both hope you have,

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will you turn your mind to events that go beyond the period

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of the United States in the '30s and '40s, which has been the focus

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of your attention so much Will you address what has happened

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in the last ten years, My historical curiosity

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runs out in May of 1972, when my novel Blood's a Rover,

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my most recent novel, before Perfidia, concludes

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with the death of J Edgar Hoover. I am going to write

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the second the LA Quartet. I am going to write a post-war

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trilogy that will run concurrent in its timeframe with

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the first LA Quartet. And, brother, at that time I will be

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old and I will be tired, and hopefully I will have enough

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money in the bank to live the rest Let me ask you about the genre,

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if that is the word you use. You have been a pioneer,

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and I have mentioned people like Ian Rankin who say they owe

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a huge debt to you in the UK. There has always been this

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discussion, maybe based purely on snobbery, in the world

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of literature, whether crime fiction should be allowed in to the sort

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of literary circle. I'm not crime writer,

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nor am I noir writer. I have written a bunch of books

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set in LA in the height That's the novel that is resting

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under your left hand right now. and I am happy to have influenced

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a generation of crime writers. And I think the designation of crime

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writers, historical writers, all of this, it's

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interesting in the moment, and really, in the end,

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it only pertains towards where your I suppose, I have been

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reading some criticism of you and one thing that struck me

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is that a lot of writers have compared you, perhaps surprisingly,

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with James Joyce, for your inventive use of language - stream

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of consciousness at times. One critic said the Conrad

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comparison works because you explore Do you think we are -

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have a savage heart as a species? I think we have a savage heart,

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mitigated by conscience. And I think the very best of us come

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to spiritual flashpoints, points of explication

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in our personal lives where we see ourselves in the context

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of the world. Other human beings,

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I believe that we are all I believe in the spiritus mundi,

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the collective unconscious. And in that respect I am perhaps

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as one with James Joyce or Joseph Conrad, who I have never

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read, or Dostoevsky, But put all of that aside,

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I don't think of this stuff. I wasn't fighting you or baiting

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you just to fight you or bait you when I was talking about history

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versus the contemporary. If I'm not yearning for some woman,

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I'm yearning for history itself. I'm yearning for conjunction of men

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and women within history. Are you yearning as much

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now as you ever did? We talked at the beginning

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about the murder of your mother, about what a difficult

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childhood you had. And I can understand the yearning

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that came from that. But still today in your

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60s, you are yearning? Because I'm deeply in love

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with a British woman. But that sense of yearning that

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has driven you on... That's why the demon

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dog analogy is so good. It's why I am chagrined that they're

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banned here in Britain. My girlfriend and I are going

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to Dartmoor and we are going to find the Hound of the Baskervilles,

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and he is going to say, James Ellroy, thank

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you for being on HARDtalk.

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