Title: Crime Wave
Author/Artist: James Ellroy
Publisher: Century
Media: Book
Reviewer: Pan
It’s a problem that Joseph Heller’s struggled with since ‘Catch 22’ – how do you top something that’s monumental, seminal and so fucking brilliant it redefines an entire genre? Let’s face it, the likes of you and I are never going to have to grapple with this one, but it’s one that Mr James Ellroy seems to be having trouble with right now.
Having produced the nightmarish, twisted vision that is the LA Quartet, he’s now faced with the task of writing something to match it. And, like Joseph Heller before him, he’s having trouble hitting his game.
After the detour that was ‘American Tabloid’, ‘My dark Places’ was a return to the scene of the crime in many senses. The LA of the 50’s that he evoked as memory echoed the fictional alternative reality that he had crafted to perfection in books like ‘The Black Dahlia’. In moving from fiction to memoir he managed to produce a compelling insight into the long journey from kid whose mum was murdered to maladjusted schoolboy Nazi to druggie panty sniffer to Mr James Ellroy crime writer par excellence. However, good as ‘My Dark Places’ is, it still left me with the feeling that he’s stuck, looking back at what he’s done and struggling to find somewhere to move to next.
On the evidence of ‘Crime Wave’ the answer is that he’s not moved anywhere yet, and that he still show’s no sign of knowing where to go. ‘Crime Wave’ is a collection of reportage and fiction culled from the American edition of GQ magazine with a couple of new short stories thrown in for good measure.
The non-fiction mostly reprises material from ‘My Dark Places’, which is no surprise because that book grew out of a feature from GC in the first place. Aside from his mother’s case, he looks at another unsolved homicide in the same area and with a similar MO. He looks at the OJ Simpson case; he spends time with cops; he meets with people he went to school with. It’s all mildly interesting stuff but that’s it, perfect magazine fodder but somehow lacking when collected together in book form.
The short stories are, if anything, even more disappointing than the reportage. All the Ellroy trademarks are here: alliteration; short, sharp sentences; plot changes aplenty. Unfortunately it reads like a caricature of Ellroy. The alliteration is taken to the nth degree, so that a couple of pages into the story ‘Hush Hush’ you want to scream. And there’s a plot change every sentence, as though he feels compelled to produce fiction that’s ever more complex.
I like James Ellroy and consider the LA Quartet to be amongst the best works of American literature this century. He illuminates a nether world of cops and corruption, racism and homophobia, paranoia and violence that has been air-brushed out of history. If his relationship to the ‘big bad white men’ who have the power is at times ambiguous, it’s no matter because he pulls no punches. I just hope that he can get it together to write better books than this one. If you want a recommendation then check out ‘The Black Dahlia’, ‘The Big Nowhere’, ‘LA Confidential’ and ‘White Jazz’.