Evil under the sun

When James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential appeared in 1990, it introduced us to a world of blatant corruption, casual racism and routine police brutality that, a year before anybody ever heard of Rodney King, might have seemed fanciful to some. Set in the early 1950s, the novel was a landmark in neo-noir writing, in which historical detail mingled with pacy fiction to conjure up a city that was both highly glamorous and rotten to the core. At the same time, Ellroy’s staccato, near-telegraphic prose drove the action relentlessly onwards, with an urgency that seemed designed to swamp not just the reader but also the protagonists themselves with noise, movement and a lowering, inescapable sense of doom.

For Ellroy, this brutal, sleazy world was personal: growing up in Los Angeles, he had not only witnessed its violence first-hand but, at the age of ten, had lost his mother, Jean, in a rape-homicide case that was eerily reminiscent of the infamous Black Dahlia murder, on which the L.A. Quartet’s first volume was based. Now, with This Storm, Ellroy redeploys some of his original cast, while adding a whole new layer of sinister figures, including historical players who, in various ways, helped shape the America we know today. (A helpful dramatis personae is included as an appendix, offering some provocative home truths about the nature and extent of corruption that has always haunted American political life.)

The book opens, in inimitable Ellroy fashion, with a no-holds-barred alcohol and drug-fuelled party at New Year’s Eve, 1941: as America prepares for war, Los Angeles prepares to reap the rewards, of which the most lucrative, for now, is the routine business of relieving Japanese-American citizens of their valuables before dumping them in internment camps.