James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed greatest crime writer of all time, reveals just what it is that makes him so successful – in a world that he is constantly trying to contradict
ON HIS 10th birthday, James Ellroy’s mother hit him, causing him to fall and gash his head open, because he told her he wanted to live with his father instead of her. In childish revenge, the young Ellroy “summoned her dead”, using a curse he had discovered in a book of witchcraft and spells. Three months later, his mother – Jean Hilliker – was murdered. The killer was never identified.
The raging psychic hole left by this sequence of events is at the very centre of the great American crime writer's professional and private existence, shaping the dark, distorted, guilt-ridden imagination – or, as Ellroy himself characteristically puts it, his "trademark craaaaazy shit" – that produced crime classics such as The Black Dahlia, American Tabloidand LA Confidential.For Ellroy, the killing is the fever dream that fuels his "insane appetite and ambition", his "recklessness and predation". In his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, Ellroy – now 62 – says that he owes his mother "for every true thing that I am".
“My storytelling gifts are imperviously strong,” he writes, “and rooted in the moment that I wished her dead and mandated her murder.” So you might think that Hilliker’s unsolved death would be a good place to start if you want to know about Ellroy’s development as a writer. But you’d be wrong.
“My mother’s murder is not a defining moment in my writing career,” he announces, in his ponderous, gravelly drawl. “I have talked about it too much. I have nothing more to say about it that I haven’t already written.”
Such dramatic reversals and apparent contradictions are pure Ellroy. A brazen contrarian, he appears to relish wrong-footing interviewers who are perhaps not sufficiently in awe of his prodigious talent, or who refuse to take grand, oblique statements such as those about “seeking consciousness” at face value, and keep asking him what he means. A short time earlier, he had taken offence and walked out of an interview with Matt Cooper of Today FM, dismissing his line of questioning as “bullshit”, and throughout our conversation, it feels as though Ellroy is continually on the edge of terminating this interview too, answering my questions in a manner of prickly, tense forbearance.
What Ellroy is willing to talk about, it turns out, is the craft of his writing, the philosophy that informs the way he works. It’s a story of pure self-belief, overweening personal conviction.
"On January 26th, 1979, I began writing my first novel, [ Brown's Requiem]" he says. "I knew I had a gift, and that I would succeed. That inner conviction was fuelled by the fact that the words appeared fluently, logically, and they spoke of talent. With my second novel [ Clandestine, published in 1982, and set in the 1950s], I found I could write period-set fiction and make it work. While I was writing The Black Dahlia, I already had the direct sequel, The Big Nowhere, and the entirety of LA Confidentialin mind. So I know that whatever I can conceive, I can execute. That was was my biggest revelation, and the expression of my enormous ambition: the desire to create large-scale art. Finally, to create richer, deeper, emotionally resonant fiction, I need periods of rest and contemplation.
“After my second marriage blew up, I had the good sense to take a break from writing fiction, to recharge my batteries, and allow ideas to germinate. I would have never written another book if I hadn’t done that.” There are no ums and ahs with Ellroy, none of the usual conversational hesitations and qualifiers. Everything is delivered straight, spelled out with great deliberation, as though read off an inner script.
In the past, Ellroy has claimed to be “the greatest crime writer who ever lived”, that he is to the crime novel “what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music”. So where does that enormous self-confidence come from? “I lived with the idea of doing this for so long that when I finally started doing it, I had read so many crime books that I had assimilated the craft on a very deep level. So I was enacting that.”
Ellroy spent most of his early adult life in a monomaniacal haze: drunk, drugged and sex-obsessed, he roamed LA peering in windows, hungry for private glimpses of women. Haunted by his mother, his compulsive womanising was driven by the hope that he would find “her” – the ideal woman who would complete him and heal his pain. After a spell in the army, and then in prison for petty crime, Ellroy eventually found work as a golf caddy, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and discovered that he could write. “I am nothing if not an opportunist,” he says. “I have the ability to turn a shit sandwich into a steak sandwich.” Brooding is one of Ellroy’s favourite activities. He pronounces it ‘brooooooding’, a low, menacing hoot. “I spend a lot of time thinking in the dark. I don’t follow politics, or read books, or watch television.
“That is distracting. I like solitude. I like to be alone. I like to be with God, and I like to pray. I contemplate meaning. If I let my thoughts scattergun out in odd directions, ideas will come to me.” Ellroy is on a continual quest to “become more conscious”, to take risks, to cut across genres: “I have looked deeper and deeper within myself. I try to write more profound books, to view the world more consciously.” The fact that Ellroy is a Christian – a Lutheran, who attends church regularly – may come as a surprise to those familiar with his raunchy slang, but it’s not a topic he likes to dwell on. “I am a Christian and my faith is key to my view of the the world. It is the sustaining fire that gets me through.” Beyond that, the subject is off limits.
Ellroy is becoming increasingly tight-lipped and terse. Even a question about his hero, Beethoven, whose work he discovered in a music appreciation class 50 years ago, gets short shrift. “He was the greatest artist who ever lived.” Why? “If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to know.”
In The Hilliker Curse, Ellroy describes how, as a teenager, he taped pictures of Beethoven over his bed alongside Playboyposters, and had imaginary conversations with the composer (even though "he was deaf, and I didn't speak German"), believing that Beethoven understood his deep loneliness and sorrow. But he doesn't want to talk about that now.
Later, as he strides on to the stage in Belfast – a maverick showman, tall and rangy in his beige chinos, legs spread aggressively wide at the lectern – Ellroy’s public persona is restored. Addressing the audience in customary fashion as “peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps”, he begins with a joke: “A Catholic lion is f**king a Protestant zebra . . .”
Erudite references to TS Eliot, Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas follow, and a tribute to the “Beethovian soul” of his current partner, the writer Erika Schickel: the long-sought “her”, “an alchemist’s casting of Jean Hilliker, and something much more”. Ellroy is in his element. He absorbs the audience’s admiration like a drug, irresistibly in thrall to his own myth.
The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Womenis published by William Heinemann
Essential Ellroy
LA Confidential (1990)
The third offering in the so called LA Quartet – which comprises The Black Dahlia(1987), The Big Nowhere(1988), LA Confidential(1990) and White Jazz(1992) – was Ellroy's breakthrough novel. Set in LA in the mid-1950s, it weaves fictional cops Bud White, Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes into a historical backdrop that includes real-life figures such as Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and gangster Mickey Cohen. The novel was adapted by Curtis Hanson for the Oscar-winning 1997 movie of the same name.
My Dark Places (1996)
Ellroy dedicated his 1987 novel The Black Dahliato his mother, who was murdered in 1958 when the author was a boy. My Dark Placesis a memoir detailing Ellroy's attempts to uncover the identity of his mother's killer, for the purpose of which he employed a retired LA police detective. By turns brutal and tender, the narrative is equal parts cold case investigation, impassioned eulogy and self-serving guilt.
The Underworld Trilogy
American Tabloid(1995), The Cold Six Thousand(2001) and Blood's a Rover(2009) comprise Ellroy's epic historical cycle dubbed the Underworld Trilogy, which offers a fictional, revisionist take on the crossover between organised crime, politics and state-sanctioned terrorism in 1960s America. The first novel leads up to the assassination of JFK; the second, which represents the apotheosis of Ellroy's signature style of brutalised prose, deals with fall-out from the Bay of Pigs; while the third ranges from the assassination of RFK to the malign influence of Richard Nixon.
