With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy.
With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It’s been eight years since the second volume, The Cold Six Thousand, written in a staccato shorthand prose that seemed always about to veer out of control, marked the apotheosis of Ellroy’s feverish and frenetic style. Something had to give, and at first it was Ellroy himself, who suffered a breakdown and eventually quit Middle America to return to his spiritual home of Los Angeles. Reviewing The Cold Six Thousand back in 2001 I called Ellroy either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great writer, and although this novel is far more approachable than his last, the evidence of obsession is even more marked.
After a brief flashback to an armoured car heist central to the plot, Blood’s a Rover opens in the summer of 1968. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are already dead, and we play plot catch-up with Wayne Tedrow, Jr., who ended American Tabloid, the first of the trilogy, in Dallas for the JFK assassination. Ellroy’s Underworld is a confluence of gangsters, cops, politicans, and what we call politely the ‘intelligence community’. Tedrow, fallen into that life as a solider of fortune, has killed his right-wing father and is maintaining his dying step-mother with heroin smuggled by the CIA from Vietnam. Ellroy structured each part of the trilogy around three men, introducing new characters, like Tedrow, as apprentices to the existing leads. Thus Tedrow and FBI thug Dwight Holly are here joined by Don Crutchfield, abandoned by his mother years before, a part-time skip-tracer and tail man for sleazy Hollywood private eye Fred Otash, and an accomplished peeping Tom addicted to the windows of older women.
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