L.A. Confidential

James Ellroy's LA Confidential will no doubt go down in history as a landmark work like Chandler's The Big Sleep and Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Ellroy's style in entirely unique; there is really no one else like him. This novel is told in the noir traditions but with a contemporary writer's touch. Characters as real as the people you know are found in these pages, made even more real by their flaws. If you're one of those who saw the movie but has not read the book, consider this: The movie is amazing. And it cheats the power of this novel. A must-have for any crime fiction fanatic.

It's a spider web. It's a labyrinth, and the minotaur at its heart is both a psychotic murderer and the central selves of its three main characters. As a surface read, this novel is a stellar exemplar of the noir California genre. The Los Angeles it conjures up is both a nightmare and a reality (Johnny Stompanato, the gangster lover of Lana Turner, is a character, and his murder by Turner's daughter provides a final knife-twist in the plot). Ellroy's dark city exhibits more seething, foul vice crawling over itself than I have ever encountered between the covers of one book. Yet it turns out to be about the ultimate redemption, or at least coming to terms with self, of the three primary characters. Ed Exley, a privileged son whose apparently burnished war record is a sham; Jack Vincennes, whose weakness for pills and booze has led him into a shameful error he can't shake; and Bud White, who is trying to overcome his powerlessness to prevent his mother's brutal murder by finding wife-beaters and rapists and punishing them all to a bloody pulp. This trio of damaged and damaging cops all converge on an insanely ramified late night slaying at the Nite Owl cafe. It lines to prostitution, drugs, plastic surgery as a racket, harder than hard-core porn, organized crime, blackmail, extortion, and a host of petty and major criminals both inside the LAPD and outside. Ultimately, though, the lines go way further back by 35 years, to a series of child murders done to create a grotesque little eros--a thing composed of the wings of birds and parts of children. This horrific image should tip you off--you are in the presence of something more epic and mythic than mere noir. What these policemen are searching for and combating is the destruction of innocence and love--their own innocence and ability to love as well as the long-dead children. Ultimately, despite distrust, rivalry and even hatred, they combine forces and experience to untangle the whole ghastly mess. Vincennes dies redeemed by full confession to his loving wife, Bud pushes through tremendous temptations to succumb to Neanderthal violence to actually use his mind to fight evil, and Exley confronts his own and his father's secrets. The psychotic murderer at the root of it all proves to have been the kind of monster we keep inside ourselves--repeatedly altered by plastic surgery and imperfectly controlled by drugs, he keeps destroying until he is unmasked and dis-enabled. Finally--this IS a noir novel--the consciously wicked man remains standing, and powerful, at the close. Read it if you can. It's a hell of a trip to redemption.

LA Confidential is without a doubt the most satisfying, retro 50's crime novel I have ever read, and will prove a treasure trove of additional thrills to any fan of the critically acclaimed movie released in 1998.I picked up the hardcover version of this book in 1992 and since then have read it a dozen times, making it one of the most dog-eared books in my collection. Ellroy's original novel carries about two and a half times the story (compared with the movie) and is much stronger for it. Characters Bud White, Edmund Exley, and Jack Vincennes are fleshed out more meticulously in more studied and disturbingly graphic detail, as they wind their way through the frighteningly amoral landscape of this 1950's L.A..Here, White isn't a thug, he is a barely controllable monster, whose physical power (oh, lets say roughly 3x the size of Russell Crowe)and penchant for beating felons to death makes him the most feared man in the department. Surprisingly, White is the only character here that comes close to redemption by story's end. On the other end of the spectrum is Ed Exley, whose brains and ability to accurately read people and situations prove a powerful survival tool in this complex plot of frame ups, evidence plantings, and intra-LAPD subterfuge. White, Vincennes, and Exley have their skeletons, which are dragged into the light and examined in meticulous detail, adding additional levels of story and subplot not present in the abridged edtion (or movie). The real star here is author James Ellroy, a brilliant writer who weaves a fantastic yet thoroughly believable, complex tale that never rings false or ridiculous. His incredible ability to craft such complex plot/sub-plots in such powerful, adrenalized, descriptive prose makes him nothing less than a national treasure from the dark side. Highest recommendation.

LA Confidential has been rightly hailed as a masterpiece of American fiction, not just of American crime fiction. But you need to do your homework first, as this is actually the third book in Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. The set includes, "The Black Dahlia," "The Big Nowhere," "LAC," and "White Jazz." By the end of White Jazz, the driving plot and Ellroy's maturity as a writer have honed an already sparse style to something just short of hebeprenic monosyllabic stuttering. Perversely, though, rather than becoming almost funny (like Hemingway could get (The rain fell down. It fell on the trees. The trees got wet. I was drunk, in the rain.)), the spare language actually gets out of the way of the forceful and gripping dialogue and action.I strongly recommed that you read these four books in order, as the story arc unfolds over that much time. Cruical characters such as "Buzz" Meeks (who was criminally shortchanged in the film version) and Dudley Smith appear in two, three, or four of the books, all of which makes LA Con, the best of the uniformly excellent four, even better in context.It may be a lot of work to do, several thousand pages, but true fans of American fiction could do much worse.