E-mail a friendJames Ellroy
airdate October 13, 2009
Crime writer James Ellroy is often called an American master. His best-selling novels include a series that would become known as "The L.A. Quartet"—The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential being two that have been adapted into feature films. An L.A. native, Ellroy worked as a golf caddy while pursuing writing and overcame the tragedy of his mother's murder, which was the basis of his '96 memoir, My Dark Places. His latest novel, Blood's A Rover, is the conclusion of a trilogy that began with American Tabloid.
Novelist explains his technique in writing historical fiction. (1:06)
Full Interview (13:31)
James Ellroy
Tavis: James Ellroy is an award-winning novelist and author whose many notable projects include a quartet of books about his beloved hometown of Los Angeles. Included in that list are classics like "L.A. Confidential." He's out now with his first novel in eight years. The new book is called "Blood's a Rover." James Ellroy, nice to have you on the program, sir.
James Ellroy: Mr. Smiley, a pleasure.
Tavis: Where you been, what you been doing?
Ellroy: For eight years?
Tavis: Yes.
Ellroy: Eh, eh. (Laughter) Let's see, I had a nervous breakdown, I got divorced, I had a couple of obsessive love affairs that ended up in that book. Spent a lot of time lying in the dark thinking about American history and writing that book.
Tavis: Wow, so nothing, really for the last eight years.
Ellroy: Yeah, nothing, nothing.
Tavis: Just kind of laying around doing nothing.
Ellroy: Lying in the dark.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) Let me start with the obvious here - "Blood's a Rover." The title, explain it.
Ellroy: A. E. Housman quote - "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's a ware that will not keep. Up, lads, when the journey's over there'll be time enough to sleep." It's about bad guys doing bad things in the name of authority, and they rove worldwide.
Tavis: Do you come up with your titles before, after, or during?
Ellroy: I had that title in mind for 15 years.
Tavis: Wow.
Ellroy: Yeah, I had to have that title.
Tavis: So you were just trying to wait till the moment was right to match it to the appropriate text?
Ellroy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Tavis: So you discovered something 15 years ago that you know you want to use as a title. Does that end up influencing what the book is, the fact that you know you want to peg this title to it? Does that make sense?
Ellroy: Yeah. This is a book about imperialistic American adventuring. It shows you how bad I am at geography because in the previous book the mob wants to set casinos, after they lost Cuba, in Central America, right? I didn't know that the Dominican Republic had joined Haiti in the Caribbean. There's a Black militant plot in here, Haiti tied in, zombification, racial animus in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I could have saved myself three years if I had a map. (Laughter)
Tavis: Since you started to go there, give me a little bit more about what - without giving too much away - what the storyline is in this, which is the third and final book in a trilogy.
Ellroy: Yeah.
Tavis: Yeah.
Ellroy: Okay. It's the summer of '68, right? Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King have been assassinated.
Tavis: It starts where the last book leaves off.
Ellroy: Right, right. The guys who are involved in the assassination of King have been snookered into it. They're starting to unravel, psychically. King is the presence that overweens the entire story. They're starting to go nuts. Yeah, they want redemption. What happens when you want redemption? What do you look for? Well, you look for God, you look for a woman. It gets a little bit confusing for these guys there.
Democratic convention, riots, right? Race riots at the GOP convention in Miami - history in a nutshell. Nixon's elected, dirty tricks during the 1968 campaign. Then I've got to fictionalize. Then I've got to come up with some all-new stuff because the books I wrote about the '50s and '60s, I knew the history damn well. Then I look at the map - oh, man, the Dominican Republic could join Haiti, voodoo, threw in an armored car heist, a couple of old girlfriends, lying in the dark. (Laughter) Before you know it, I had a novel.
Tavis: Where does that come from? You start with, as you laid out a moment ago, the facts of history, and then you have to fictionalize that. Where does that - does it come from the ether? Where does that come from?
Ellroy: History exists as subtext. You don't need to see Martin Luther King give the big speech, "I Have a Dream." You don't. We know. It's subtext. It's there. Better to show him in a private context with fictional characters. It's more intimate. It gives you a sense of the private guy.
What you have to create is the private infrastructure of big public events. When I was a kid I always had a sense of some guy with a briefcase and a gun that's sitting outside the corridors of power. It's his story. What's he thinking about?
The guys who implement public policy at the lowest possible level - what are they thinking about? What are their private lives like? Who are they in love with? That's history to me.
Tavis: Does James Ellroy gladly go there or resist letting us know in his - fictionalizing what his view is of various public policy issues?
Ellroy: I assume the perspective of the bad guys who change. They start out doing bad things and then something happens. So if I can take two of the three assassins of Martin Luther King and give you their souls, give you their consciences, give you the way that they change, imbue them with humanity, get back to the Christian themes of salvation and redemption, then you've gone on a big, big, big, big journey which is what I think people want in historical fiction.
I want a big story. Art, for me, big movie, a novel, a big, big, big, big journey, big spiritual change, big love stories, big action, big geopolitics, big history.
Tavis: Why historical fiction for you? You're a fiction writer. You could be an expert, I suspect, in any genre of fiction writing. Why historical fiction for you?
Ellroy: I sensed it - I'm 61. I sensed it all around me as a kid, but I was unimaginably dim in my social sense. But I sensed it all around me. I couldn't put my finger on it. I lived through the '60s, the early '70s. Yeah, I was bombed throughout a lot of it but I sensed it going on all around me and I sensed personal stories at the center of it and I couldn't put my finger on it.
I needed to read a lot more books and I needed time between then and now to grow up, to feel history, to look at things retrospectively.
Tavis: Speaking of personal stories, James, how much of your wanting to imbue these characters with humanity, troubled though they may be, has to do with your own personal narrative, with the - we've read your own personal memoir - the difficulties, the troubles, the travails that you endured?
You just mentioned a moment ago the drug issues that you had, the alcoholism. How much of your imbuing these characters with humanity has to do with your own struggle to overcome, if I can put it that way?
Ellroy: Most of it. Most of it. You don't want a story about the guy who starts out as a happy egg and ends up as a happy egg. You want to go on the dramatic journey with him. All great crime stories are stories of redemption. However tenuously these guys act in the end, they get to it. They get to it. That's the basis of drama for me, is they're going to get to it sooner or later, and you understand, you start dropping clues early on that make you like these guys who've done horrible, horrible things in the name of authority. You can feel it eating away at their conscience.
Tavis: If I'm getting too personal here, let me know and I'll back off, but you've written about this before. Did the murder of your mother, a crime still unsolved all these years later -
Ellroy: Right, right.
Tavis: I don't want to say did it. What impact, to the extent that it has, what impact has that had on the kind of writing you do?
Ellroy: I sensed, and I'm 61, so it's 1958. My mother's dead. It's unsolved. Just one of those things that gets unsolved. So I know there's two different Americas. There's two different L.A.s. I grew up here. There's two different versions. So I'm not buying the party line at 10. I wasn't a particularly bright kid. I couldn't tie my shoes very well; I couldn't ride a two-wheel bike. But I knew there were two, three, four, five, six versions and that all crimes weren't solved.
I read books like the Hardy Boys or Ken Holt, yeah; the crimes occur off-page, everybody's happy at the end. You watch "Dragnet" on TV; they always get the bad guy. He goes to the gas chamber, he goes to prison. I'm not buying it. I sensed a separate L.A. history, I wrote about it in the L.A. quartet. Then I sensed a separate American history, here, in these books. So I always knew there was something else going on. That's what it was.
Tavis: What's at the epicenter of that separation, those different Americas?
Ellroy: A lot of things. Racial animus, greed, disparity in monetary wealth, personal psychology that's almost undefineable in human beings. How many people do you know casually, how many people do you know intimately, how complex are the relationships? How complex are your relationships with your family? Don't they mutate moment to moment?
Tavis: When you refer to this - again, given that this is the third and final book in this trilogy - when you refer to this trilogy as an underworld U.S.A. trilogy, you mean by that what?
Ellroy: The guy outside the corridors of power with a briefcase, he looks like you or me. He's got a suit, but he's got a gun with a silencer there. Stuff's going on. Public policy gets implemented at the lowest possible levels by some guy taking orders with a gun and a bag full of money. That's interesting to me.
Tavis: If you had not been a historical fiction writer, what might James Ellroy have done?
Ellroy: Beats the hell out of me. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Tavis: You were born to do this?
Ellroy: I was born to do this, yeah.
Tavis: What confirmed that for you?
Ellroy: I sat down, I sent up a prayer on January 26th, 1979. I said, "God, it's been a while, I've got to start this book." I started the book and I knew I had it. Why did I have it? I had just read a lot of books. I have no formal education but I read, read, read, read, read, read, read, and that's a person's informal education. You take it in your mind - have you written books?
Tavis: Yes.
Ellroy: Okay. You had it. You know why? You read a lot of books.
Tavis: You know what the difference, though, is, though? And I'm not saying - this is not a false sense of modesty. I have such - I've said many times on this program I have such a great respect for fiction writers. My stuff is all nonfiction. So I'm taking stuff that's real and offering my own assessment of it. You create stuff that comes out of nowhere. This is real creativity.
Ellroy: I've got research briefs and I understand verisimilitude. So okay, you've got the semblance of truth. If I can make you believe that the personal stories of these bad guys and their crises of conscience are real, if they are psychologically sound, then the larger history that they comport in will be valid to you. I've got a way into it that's been working for me for a while.
See, your formally educated; I'm not. I can't learn formally. I can read, I can walk down the street, I can think, I can talk to people and assess people. You can multiply and divide, right? You can do algebra; you can do all those things. I can't. I can't. You could put a gun to my head and I couldn't learn algebra.
Tavis: You know what? Given your success, I wish I were less gifted. (Laughter) I wish I were a whole lot less gifted if that's the way you read it, and you used one of my favorite words that I've been trying - I'm a Scrabble player, speaking of - I've been trying for years to use the word verisimilitude on a Scrabble board. I ain't figured it out yet.
Ellroy: V-E-R-I-S-I-M -
Tavis: Yeah, I can spell it, I just can't figure out how to get it on the board.
Ellroy: You'd win, because it's - (laughter) 14 words.
Tavis: You got my point.
Ellroy: Yeah.
Tavis: That's what I'm trying to figure how to do, so I can win. (Laughter) James Ellroy's new book is called "Blood's a Rover." We've been waiting on this for eight years, and it is here. Enjoy. James, nice to have you on the program.
Ellroy: Sir, a pleasure.
Tavis: Pleasure's mine.
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