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Summary
Summary
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History. Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover's pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover's racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow, ex-cop and heroin runner, is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan-- and each of them will pay a dear and savage price to live History. Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it-- our recent past razed and fully reconstructed. Blood's A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
Author Notes
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L. A. Quartet novels - "The Black Dahlia", "The Big Nowhere", "L. A. Confidential", & "White Jazz" - were international best-sellers. His novel "American Tabloid" was Time magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir, "My Dark Places", was a "Time" Best Book of the Year & a "New Yorker Times" Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995's American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision, and his characters-many of whom readers will remember from The Cold Six Thousand and from American history classes-are a motley crew of grotesques often marked by an off-kilter sense of honor: stone bad-asses, in other words, though the women are stronger than the men who push the plot. The violence begins with an unsolved 1964 L.A. armored car heist that will come to have major repercussions later in the novel, as its effects ripple outward from a daring robbery into national and international affairs. There's Howard Hughes's takeover of Las Vegas, helped along by Wayne Tedrow Jr., who's working for the mob. The mob, meanwhile, is scouting casino locations in Central America and the Caribbean, and working to ensure Nixon defeats Humphrey in the 1968 election. Helping out is French-Corsican mercenary Mesplede, who first appeared in Tabloid as the shooter on the grassy knoll and who now takes under his wing Donald Crutchfield, an L.A. peeping Tom/wheelman (based, curiously, on a real-life private eye). Mesplede and Crutchfield eventually set up shop in the Dominican Republic, where the mob begins casino construction and Mesplede and Crutchfield run heroin from Haiti to raise money for their rogue nocturnal assaults on Cuba. In the middle and playing all sides against one another is FBI agent Dwight Holly, who has a direct line to a rapidly deteriorating J. Edgar Hoover ("the old girl") and a tormented relationship with left-wing radical Karen Sitakis, and, later, Joan Klein, whose machinations bring the massive plot together and lead to more than one death. Though the book isn't without its faults (Crutchfield discovers a significant plot element because "something told him to get out and look"; Wayne's late-book transformation is too rushed), it's impossible not to read it with a sense of awe. The violence is as frequent as it is extreme, the treachery is tremendous, and the blending of cold ambition and colder political maneuvering is brazen, all of it filtered through diamond-cut prose. It's a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Ellroy, author of the classic L.A. Quartet, finally finishes his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001) presented the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK through a mirror darkly, with Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan as mere puppets manipulated by a fractious alliance of mafiosi, anti-Castro Cubans, and government agents conspiracy as hellish bureaucracy. Blood's a Rover proceeds similarly, with ex-cop Wayne Tedrow Jr. overseeing the Mob's plans to rebuild Cuba's casinos in the Dominican Republic, while FBI agent Dwight Holly orchestrates the infiltration of black militant groups in L.A. But after you've assassinated the bright lights of the liberal movement, what's left? In this case, a left turn: as we're introduced to Communist revolutionary Joan Klein, the guilt-ridden men join those they've beaten, their ideological surrender symbolized somewhat bizarrely by a stew of bloody, hallucinogenic voodoo encounters in Haiti. And, finally, a new target is revealed: J. Edgar Hoover, a sort of Miltonic Satan throughout the trilogy. This isn't easy reading: framed as an evidence-filled file, the prose is so brutally terse that even telephone-call transcripts provide welcome relief. Ellroy's men, hard-charging obsessives capable of tracking details while loaded on intoxicants that would cripple most mortals, tend to blur together. And although the Red Goddess Joan is an intriguing foil, like most of Ellroy's women, she is most alluring when absent. Ellroy has either missed his moment or overstayed his welcome; even his fans seem likely to lose interest as these bad men scrabble in the ruins of morality. Those who do keep reading will be obsessives in their own right.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2009 Booklist
Guardian Review
James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history - from 1958 to 1972 - with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred. When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit". Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy. American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" - the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players - and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time". As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world - acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze - there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults. Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words - one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation. Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.) Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups. Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. At first, Crutch - whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's - comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline. This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic. There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption. Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how." In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one. These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots"). The upheavals of the 60s - Ellroy's ostensible subject - are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be. In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best - when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting - he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself. To order Blood's a Rover for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Pet subjects . . . James Ellroy writes from within the worldview of killers and bigots Caption: article-ellroy.1 Though less extreme in some ways than [James Ellroy]'s White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words - one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation. Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots"). - Christopher Tayler.
Kirkus Review
Ellroy calls this third leg of "The Underworld USA Trilogy" (American Tabloid, 1995, The Cold Six Thousand, 2001) an historical romance, but it's also very much a gangster novel, a political novel, a tragic-comedy, a poignant love storyand remarkably entertaining no matter how you slice it. The stage is mammoth, and big-time players get to strut around on it: J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, for instance, interacting to make 1968-72 so undeniably colorful. And, to some, so regrettable. No pussyfooting portraits here. Ellroy limns a Nixon convincingly tricky, a pernicious Hoover, fatally poisoned by his own hate-mongering, and a paranoid, physically ruined husk of a Hughes, nicknamed Dracula, and kept alive by daily injections of heaven-knows-what. But it's the lesser-knowns who give this story its strength, particularly the women. Karen Sifakis, out of Smith and Yale, tall, striking and very tough, whose politics are unswervingly left, but who will transcend them when it matters. Joan Rosen Klein is even more emphatically left. And a shade tougher. The daughter and granddaughter of Communists, she's prepared to die for her causes and will kill for them too. Both are powerfully drawn to Dwight Holly, an FBI agent with agendas so byzantine that even Ellroy seems hard-pressed to untangle them. What Dwight lacks in clarity, however, he makes up for in bad-boy charm. The action begins with a daring, daylight Wells Fargo heist that is all meticulous planning and endless betrayals. Snakelike, it coils its venomous way through the novel. The book is repetitious in places and confusing in others. Still, you won't easily put it down. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The "Demon Dog of American Literature" is back, and he's barking. Yeah, Ellroy, that performance artist-cum-author, concludes his "American Underworld" trilogy (following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) with this traffic accident of a book. It's loud, explosive, and not pretty, but you can't not look. An incident involving a milk truck and a Wells Fargo armored car is the acorn from which springs this mighty, 600-plus-page oak, which offers an encyclopedic and paranoid look at the late 1960s and early 1970s. The cops are indistinguishable from their adversaries, and there are three degrees of separation between L.A.'s back alleys and the Oval Office. The scenes bounce among Los Angeles (of course), Haiti, Chicago, and DC, and a dizzying parade of real-life figures (e.g., Sonny Liston, Giancana, and a drooling J. Edgar Hoover) put in cameo appearances. Verdict An amalgam of supermarket tabloids and Hollywood Babylon, as edited by William S. Burroughs, and telegraphed in. On the QT, and very hush, hush, this is essential for Ellroy fans. Otherwise, Ellroy will track us down and take appropriate action. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]-Bob Lunn, formerly with Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part I CLUSTER FUCK June 14, 1968-September 11, 1968 Wayne Tedrow Jr. (Las Vegas, 6/14/68) HEROIN: He'd rigged a lab in his hotel suite. Beakers, vats and Bunsen burners filled up wall shelves. A three-burner hot plate juked small-batch conversions. He was cooking painkiller-grade product. He hadn't cooked dope since Saigon. A comp suite at the Stardust, vouchered by Carlos Marcello. Carlos knew that Janice had terminal cancer and that he had chemistry skills. Wayne mixed morphine clay with ammonia. A two-minute heating loosened mica chips and silt. He boiled water to 182°. He added acetic anhydride and reduced the bond proportions. The boil sluiced out organic waste. Precipitants next-the slow-cook process-diacetyl morph and sodium carbonate. Wayne mixed, measured and ran two hot plates low. He glanced around the suite. The maid left a newspaper out. The headlines were all him . Wayne Senior's death by "heart attack." James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan in stir. His front-page ink. No mention of him. Carlos had chilled out Wayne Senior. Mr. Hoover chilled out the backwash on the King/Bobby hits. Wayne watched diacetyl mass build. His blend would semi-anesthetize Janice. He was bucking for a big job with Howard Hughes. Hughes was addicted to pharmaceutical narcotics. He could cook him up a private blend and take it to his interview. The mass settled into cubes and rose out of the liquid. Wayne saw photos of Ray and Sirhan on page two. He'd worked on the King hit. His worked it high up. Freddy Otash ran fall guy Ray for King and fall guy Sirhan for Bobby. The phone rang. Wayne grabbed it. Scrambler clicks hit the line. It had to be a Fed safe phone and Dwight Holly. "It's me, Dwight." "Did you kill him?" "Yes." " 'Heart attack,' shit. 'Sudden stroke' would have been better." Wayne coughed. "Carlos is handling it personally. He can frost out anything around here." "I do not want Mr. Hoover going into a tizzy over this." " It's chilled . The question is, 'What about the others?' " Dwight said, "There's always conspiracy talk. Bump off a public figure and that kind of shit tends to bubble. Freddy ran Ray covertly and Sirhan up front, but he lost weight and altered his appearance. All in all, I'd say we're chilled on both of them." Wayne watched his dope cook. Dwight spieled more news. Freddy O. bought the Golden Cavern Casino. Pete Bondurant sold it to him. "We're chilled, Dwight. Tell me we're chilled and convince me." Dwight laughed. "You sound a little raw, kid." "I'm stretched a bit thin, yeah. Patricide's funny that way." Dwight yukked. The dope pots started boiling. Wayne doused the heat and looked at his desk photo. It's Janice Lukens Tedrow, lover/ex-stepmom. It's '61. She's twisting at the Dunes. She's sans partner, she's lost a shoe, a dress seam has ripped. Dwight said, "Hey, are you there?" "I'm here." "I'm glad to hear it. And I'm glad to hear we're chilled on your end." Wayne stared at the picture. "My father was your friend. You're going in pretty light with the judgment." "Shit, kid. He sent you to Dallas." Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride. He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mor Excerpted from Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
