James Ellroy’s latest attempt to unseat the Great American Novel

Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that, as P.D. James observed, it seems stretching a definition to place both groups in the same category. Over here we have, or used to have, a comforting story concerned with restoring order to the mythical village of Mayhem Parva; across the Atlantic, the detective novel is expected to tackle the rotten, usually urban, underbelly of the American Dream. Violent, cynical and disquieting, it has also become a significant challenge to the more refined attempts at the Great American Novel.

James Ellroy’s detectives are not only inured to confronting vice but are often the perpetrators of it too. British audiences will be most familiar with LA Confidential, the third in Ellroy’s quartet about 1940s Los Angeles; it remains a rare example of a good book which became a good film.

Perfidia launches a new series, set in the same rancid world and featuring younger, slighter more innocent versions of the same characters. We meet Dudley Smith, an ex-IRA killer and violent lawman who we know will evolve into a big-time baddie in later books. His enemy is a real-life cop, William H. Parker, who is the only one in the novel not to behave as a knee-jerk racist to their Japanese colleague, a police forensic expert, Hideo Ashida. Parker is embroiled with Kay Lake, an intelligent, pretentious young woman whose life has drifted into drugs and prostitution; first appearing in The Black Dahlia, she is going to become one of the women Pierce Patchett surgically re-creates to look like a film star in LA Confidential. We get her diary; the rest is recounted, with dates and times, in Ellroy’s characteristically terse style.