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.