Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed

The crime writer on God, drugs and his mother’s murder

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always thought that? ‘When I finished the LA Quartet. I knew there was nobody like me and there wasn’t.’

Ellroy’s new book, This Storm, is the second novel in a projected set of prequels to his LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz) set between LA and the Baja peninsula in Mexico in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. America is going to war, Japanese citizens are being interned, and the characters pick their bloody way through a whole stew of fascists and communists, Japanese sub-marine incursions, stolen gold, fifth columnists and racketeers.

It’s classic Ellroy stuff: dark and dense as hell, told staccato in jazzy period slang peppered with old-time tabloid alliteration, casual racial invective and spiced with interludes of staggering brutality. He says he decided to do the prequels ‘to deepen the characters, differentiate the overall action and densify on an historical level’.

‘When this quartet is completed a couple of years from now, I will have written a total of 11 novels that cover LA, my hometown, America, my country, 31 years 1941 to 1972. No one has ever done anything like this and I’m proud of the work I’ve done.’

His novels are notoriously long and complex — he maps his plots out in minute detail in advance, and says of the ‘my characters tell me what to do’ school of writing: ‘That’s a crock of shit.’ This Storm is no exception. ‘I love big pieces of art. I love symphonic music, I love the Bruckner symphonies, the Mahler symphonies, the Shostakovich symphonies.

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