James Ellroy's American Apocalypse

"James Ellroy's American Apocalypse" was originally printed in Issue 1089. Read Ellroy's take on why fiction should be vulgar and why he's not a fan of Raymond Chandler in our bonus Q&A.

On a recent New York morning, James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed "Demon Dog" of American fiction, is in a good mood. "I feel like the weight of a lifetime has been lifted off me," he says, sitting in a hotel room. "I'm 61, and I feel like a kid. All I've wanted, ever, was to write great fucking novels, have a couple of dogs and fuck women. What else is there? I mean, a good hamburger's OK, but. . . ."

Ellroy is a master of shtick. Over the course of a few minutes he can veer from over-the-top braggadocio ("I'm the Beethoven of crime fiction") to hipster jive ("can't make the scene without caffeine") to unapologetic perversion ("I'm a sex fiend!") to biblical righteousness ("I'm a Scottish minister's son, and I believe in privation and a personal responsibility to God"). Best known for his modern noir classic L.A. Confidential, Ellroy has just released Blood's a Rover, the last novel in his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. The book completes his bleak and disturbing vision of the metastasized cancers at the heart of the midcentury American empire — from the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam to J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes — as seen through the interconnected schemes and criminal enterprises of rogue FBI agents, homicidal cops, mobsters and contract killers.

Ellroy's obsession with the dark side of America can be traced to the well-documented traumas of his early years: his mother's unsolved murder, his ne'er-do-well father who died not long after. A teenage voyeur who broke into women's homes to steal their lingerie, Ellroy washed out of the Army and spent the next decade addicted to speed and booze, jailed for petty thefts and often homeless, living on the streets of L.A. After sobering up in 1977, he began earning a living as a golf caddie, got some books published, then emerged out of nowhere as the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, with a distinctive and brutal style that one critic described as "so hard-boiled it burns the pot."

But as his fame grew, Ellroy's personal life grew darker. Two marriages crumbled, and he threw himself deeper into his work — and wound up suffering a mental breakdown in 2001, during the book tour for The Cold Six Thousand. "Flew too high, worked too hard," he says. "Crazy suppressed shit came out and just blew up in my face." Now, eight years later, he's finishing up a memoir called The Hilliker Curse and enjoying the release of Blood's a Rover, a giant historical noir that provides a romantic coda to his Underworld U.S.A. series. The protagonists, whom Ellroy calls "right-wing leg-breakers," pursue redemption in the form of a left-wing agitator named Joan, making it like so many of his novels: three men obsessed with a single woman over the course of a great big bloody book.