Inside the Dark Mind of James Ellroy

Master of modern noir James Ellroy talks about how writing the final novel in his Underworld U.S.A. triology nearly drove him mad in our new issue. Read more from his Q&A here.

Your new book Blood's a Rover marks a return to writing about Los Angeles for you. Was it strange to move back to L.A.?
I love this place or I wouldn't be here. L.A. I'm from here. I've assimilated this place very, very deeply. My books have been "L.A." on a very big historical scale. Since World War II L.A. has been the place you go to be someone else. It's a big, booming place and it's become more untenable, but it's more diplomatic and it's more egalitarian because the racial lines and gender lines and sexual preference lines have all blurred because we've all been pushed together.

You've been pretty hard on the most famous L.A. noir writer of all, Raymond Chandler — why?
The plots are patchworks — they don't hold together well at all. And I don't think he knew very much about people. Dashiell Hammett knew a great deal about people. And James M. Cain knew a great deal about people. The Chandler wisecracks, and this Phillip Marlowe knight character, bored me for a long time. I read them when I was 17, 18, 19, and dug the shit out of them, and wanted to go back and be Phillip Marlowe — I still want to go back and live in L.A. in the '40s. And so would you, if you saw the way it looked.

Race and racism are such a huge part of this book.
Oh yeah. You're supposed to be seduced and shocked by the casual racism in Blood's a Rover. This book is so full of race shit, it's fucking hilarious shit. There's a lot of scene of black people and white people cracking jokes. And as much as the people grandstand about race in this book, they're driven by racial animus and the idea of racial reconciliation. Because of political correctness we are losing the outrageousness of humor. I always think of Frank O'Connor's line from a million years ago: "a literature that cannot be vulgarized, is not literature at all and will not last."

But do you worry some readers will miss the message of the book by getting offended by it?
If you are a voice in the culture, people want you identified — there's a very, very strong sense of political identification out in the world. From the scattered way that I observe right now, people want to define cultural personages by political stance on the shallowest level and they want to either embrace or reject you on that level and my job is not to make it easy for these people.

You seem very comfortable with yourself despite all your conflicts and ambiguity ...
It's true. But I distrust people who do not err on the side of action. And there's a distinction between being conflicted and being ambivalent. Ambivalence connotes wishy-washiness, being conflicted connotes a clash of dramatic choices. And so I despise the idea of shades of grey or ambiguity standing as ultimate moral value or literary value.