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What it argues
L.A. Confidential is the third novel in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, set in Los Angeles between 1951 and 1958. Three LAPD detectives — Bud White, a brutal enforcer who hates woman-beaters; Ed Exley, an ambitious careerist who will sacrifice colleagues to get ahead; and Jack Vincennes, a celebrity cop who sells access to a gossip magazine — are pulled into a web centered on a mass murder at a coffee shop called the Nite Owl. The case seems solved quickly, and then it isn't.
What the book is really about is the machinery that produced the 1950s Los Angeles fantasy: the construction of celebrity, the suppression of crime by embedding police departments in criminal enterprises, and the specific violence directed at Black Angelenos during a decade of housing segregation, police brutality, and civic boosterism. Ellroy is not interested in nostalgia. The postwar city in his telling is rotten at the foundation, and the three protagonists are all rotting with it in different ways — through violence, through ambition, through vanity.
What it gets right
- 1.
Ellroy's telegraphic prose style — shorn of articles, conjunctions, and transitions — is an aesthetic achievement that forces readers to fill in emotional gaps the sentences refuse to supply.
- 2.
The three protagonists are not a good cop, a corrupt cop, and a redeemed cop. They are three different kinds of compromise, and the novel judges them all.
- 3.
1950s Los Angeles as Ellroy constructs it is a machine for suppressing truth: the celebrity press, the LAPD, the DA's office, and organized crime are all nodes in the same network.
What it covers
Who wrote it
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was murdered when he was ten, and her unsolved case haunts his work — most directly in My Dark Places, his memoir about reinvestigating her death. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz), the Underworld USA Trilogy, and numerous standalone novels. He is widely regarded as the defining voice of American noir in the late twentieth century.
