Ellroy on The Cold Six Thousand

Disclaimer: This interview was conducted on April 18th, 2001 by the Night Waves team of BBC Radio 3. It was presented by Philip Dodd and produced by Tim Prosser. I in no way have any rights to it, nor do I claim involvement. I have never tried transcription before, so apologies if this is not in the style to which you are accustomed. I attempted to be as accurate as possible. The transcription of James Ellroy's reading from 'The Cold Six Thousand' is based on his reading style, rather than on the original text.



PD: ...We begin with a new novel, whose modest ambition is to re-imagine American history in the 1960s. James Ellroy's 'The Cold Six Thousand' brings together the FBI's war on the Civil Rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the CIA's presence in Vietnam.

One of its protagonists is Wayne Tedrow junior, a Las Vegas cop. He turns nasty when a black pimp he'd been hired to kill but let live returns to wreak devastation on his family.


JE: Hate. It moved him. It ran him. It called his shots. He stayed cool with it. He stayed justified. He never said nigger. They weren't all bad. He knew it and stayed justified. He found the bad ones. They knew him. Wayne Junior, he baaad. He worked the deuce, he threw hurt, he spared his hands and used his sap. He never said nigger. He never thought nigger. He never condoned the concept. He worked double shifts. He stayed double justified. The owner had rules, the pit boss has rules. Rules ruled the roost high and wide. Wayne had rules. Wayne enforced said. Do not paw women, do not hit women, treat whores with respect. He enforced his rules. He bridged race lines. He enforced his rule of intent. He predicted rude acts, he pre-empted them. He employed all due force. He tracked them, he trailed them, he prowled West LV. He looked for Wendell Durfee, it was feudal. He knew it. The hate drew him there.


PD: James Ellroy, reading from his new novel 'The Cold Six Thousand'. Ellroy's the self-declared "Demon Dog" of American literature. His literary heroes are masters of pulp fiction such as Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson but his style is his own. It can be nasty, short and deliberately brutish. His books revel in murder, mayhem and cruelty.

In books such as the 'Black Dahlia' he showed his fascination and understanding of guilt and obsession as he explored the unsolved murder of a prostitute. In a book like L.A Confidential he unravelled the corruption at the heart of an LA police system. His new book, 'The Cold Six Thousand' is the second of a trilogy, devoted to writing the underbelly of American history from '58 to '72.

It starts immediately after President Kennedy's death and ends in 1968, having been to Vietnam and back. Its central character is the Las Vegas cop, but there's also an ex-liberal lawyer working for Jimmy Hoffa and Howard Hughes and a mercenary trying to fund revolting Cuba through heroin profits. But the real protagonist of 'The Cold Six Thousand' is Las Vegas. The corrupt capital of a corrupt culture without public principles.

I spoke with James Ellroy earlier today and asked him why he'd gone back to the 60s in his new novel.


JE: I sensed as a youth in the American 1960s (and I was just about 12 when the period began and just about 22 when it ended) the human infrastructure of great public events. I lived through the Cuban Missile crisis, John Kennedy's assassination, the FBI's war on the Civil Rights' movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Was not moved, inwardly or outwardly by these events, but I sensed that human stories were at the heart of them. I sensed that there were satellite characters who were playing shotgun to history, who were there attending the great events. Now I get to go back and re-write American history to my own specifications.


PD: There is something autobiographical to this, by that I mean you are drawn back to what for you was a formative moment...


JE: Great question. It is imaginatively autobiographical because my imagination was held by this sense of the inner workings of history back then and now, as a mature adult, a middle aged man, I can go back and do the job.


PD: I remember Norman Mahler writing that he thought the novel had to become history in order to justify its continuing existence. There is a way reading 'The Cold Six Thousand' - it's so wonderfully and at moments infuriatingly playful about history that I thought this was a man who wanted to write a history book but a history book with a difference. And I was brought up as a jazz fan so I know Wardell Gray who you claim was shot dead by a guy who--


JE: Or beaten dead--


PD: Sorry, beaten dead by the man whose wife Wardell Gray slept with ain't true and that actually he--


JE: Well we know that Dexter Gordon said that Wardell Gray OD'd and he, Gordon, and some of his jazz buddies took him out to the desert and dumped him. Well that's just what Dexter Gordon says.


PD: Am I supposed to believe what you say or are you playing with my expectations that you're playing with history?


JE: I am playing with history, I am creating verisimilitude, here. The one question I never answer about 'The Cold Six Thousand' is what's real and what's not because I am going for a cohesive whole that co-opts real life events, fictional events, real life people and fictional people.


PD: So a history that's provisional is it, it's not meant to usurp and displace all other histories, it's another version dropped into the pond.


JE: Yes, it is most simply - and believe me I'm not being disingenuous here - it is most simply stated as thus: it's there to be read and assessed on whatever damn level you want to.


PD: As I read the book, one of the things that struck me was a cinematic analogy. And this was - there are these extraordinary figures in the book, almost every character has a kind of an intensity about them that's rare, I think, in contemporary fiction and I couldn't help thinking about Martin Scorsese as a film maker and I had this thought which I want to put to you which is: when Scorsese makes those films he doesn't make them as anthropology, he doesn't make them looking into this world, but he makes them, as it were, from within that world looking out. The issue with Scorsese's films and reading this book, I didn't know morally where I was expected to stand, in fact I couldn't find a moral position from which, as it were, to look on what I was reading. Now is this just a kind of British concern with ethics--


JE: I'm a..I'm a... Martin Scorsese's a brilliant film-maker with very little to say. I think he's primarily a stylist who burned out a long time ago and I don't care about his characters. They have no grandeur. Francis Ford Coppola's Italian-American characters have great depth, tragedy and grandeur. The characters in 'The Cold Six Thousand' have great depth, tragedy and grandeur but I am an American Protestant artist and I judge these characters sternly. They are morally judged at every step of the narrative. I believe that morality in fiction is largely expositing the horrible cost of immoral actions and the Karmic price that people pay for perpetrating them. Thus I judge these people every step of the way, thus they suffer for their misdeeds, thus the Karmic boomerang is coming back on them over and over and over again.


PD: One of the remarkable things about the book, and I keep chewing it over as I re-read bits of the book, is the style...


JE: Yes.


PD: Because I've read what I call the Black Dahlia and you call the Black Dahlia¹ and that has got a range of stylistic idioms, it's absorbed inside of psychological explorations that this book in a kind of very willful way at one level kind of refuses. I've never met a book that doesn't have a passive form of the verb in it until I'd read 'The Cold Six Thousand'. Now this is a really deliberate, kind of hyperbolic choice. You know, short sentences, noun, verb, finish. Noun, verb, finish.


JE: Right.


PD: Did you discover this style writing it or is this something you decided to do as you were thinking about the book?


JE: I refined this style that you describe. It is a deliberate telegraphic style. It is there for one reason. It is there to redefine the language. It is there to redefine the language because this is to me the best possible way of expressing the violence of the base narrative, which is another way to say the violence of history, and the violence of the inner and outer lives of the three main characters. This style encompasses racist invective. Yiddish. Profane lingo from across the board from hepcat jazz musician talk to southern cracker talk to the Klan speak of the Ku Klux Klan. It's a feast of the American language - you obviously got it.


PD: There is a moment in the preface, I think it is, to 'American Tabloid', where you say America was never innocent--


JE: Yes.


PD: Okay, now, this pulls against a long tradition in American writing. It pulls against Gatsby, I mean Fitzgerald's book, which doesn't know if there was a moment of American innocence but wants to think about it. And in some of the cuttings I've read, you know, you speak with respect of Don Delilo's work--


JE: Yes.


PD: And 'Underworld' is an interesting book because it plays with that moment--


JE: Yes.


PD: --Of innocence. There's nothing interrogative about your position. America was never innocent.


JE: No--


PD: Is that--


JE: Individuals are innocent. America itself as an entity was founded on a bedrock of racism, slavery, land-grabs and the slaughter of the indigenous people. That's it. To ascribe, as I say in the prologue of 'American Tabloid', our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances is fatuous, and wholly wrong.


PD: Politically, where does that get us, because I just want to chew over the politics of this book for a moment because you're less than kind to Jack Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy, there is an elegiac feel--


JE: Bobby Kennedy was the greatest American crime fighter of the twentieth century. Martin Luther King I'm very kind to--


PD: Yes


JE: I think he was the greatest twentieth century American, period. And of course both these men are seen through the eyes of the great liberal idealist Ward J. Littell.


PD: Okay. But of course, you only see them secondhand.


JE: Yes


PD: --As it were. You see them through--


JE: Yes, they are like Gods, importuned by the various people and damned and cursed by the various people. They do not appear in the actual text. The villainous J Edgar Hoover - the heroic Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy - for a good reason. Everything in this book is from perspective.


PD: Okay, and this perspective as it were, it's the shotgun rider's perspective. In British terms, it's seeing Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.


JE: That's exactly right.


PD: It's not the prince, it's the kind of server. It's written, or rather published just after George Bush junior comes to power. Am I also, as I read this book, meant to think of Clinton?


JE: No, no. This book - and I despise Bill Clinton - and this book is of the 1960s solely. This book is not a metaphor for America today, it's not even a story of the whole of America, it is about the confluence that I call 'The Life'. The Life is a nexus of renegade Cuban exiles, right-wing nuts, Ku Klux Klansmen, corrupt police officials, low-rent lounge entertainers--


PD: Okay but this, forgive me--


JE: Intelligence operatives--


PD: But this sounds remarkably like 90s America. Doesn't it? The way you describe it.


JE: America is actually not as bad as it used to be because we've had many years of public accountability.


PD: Okay, I want to push you on this, because it's a very important phrase for you, this notion that actually partly what you're writing is the pre-history of public accountability. There is somewhere I've read a phrase where you said that this is a kind of private nightmare--


JE: --Of public policy.


PD: Can you try and explain to me what you mean by that phrase?


JE: These people who comprise The Life, serve to ramify public policy at its lowest levels, so these are the leg-breakers of history. These are the bad guys that train the crazy Cuban exiles that went out forty years ago yesterday to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Thus their minor, minor parts... their extreme Rosencrantz and Guildenstern parts in American history served to affect the whole of America. As I say in the prologue of 'American Tabloid', had any one moment of their lives deviated off course, American history would not exist as we know it.


PD: You haven't chosen 1890, you've chosen 1960, obviously this is - you and I are around the same age - this is partly a kind of historical generational matter--


JE: Right, right--


PD: But it's not only that, so there is something happening in the late 50s through the 60s that is epochal is there?


JE: Yes. And what it is, it's the last gasp of determined, fanatical anti-communism as an agenda that would justify any means. This book is an exploration of the mindset of men in packs, men with shared agendas, enacting repressive agendas.


PD: What do you want to be said about the book?


JE: I want people to think this is a great American novel, this is a ground-breaking work of fiction. This is a fearless book, this is a book that will not be magnaminously praised, as you and I know. Every fifth review of this book will call it a failed exercise in language and call it unreadable. I expect that in Great Britian, I expect that in the United States, I would be somewhat disappointed if I don't see it. If you're not pissing some people off, you're not taking the risks it takes to grow. I would like people to say; 'oh my Lord, I understand the 1960s now, and very very oddly I feel compassion for these horrible people who attended the ride'.



--James Ellroy. April 2001.


[1] This comment obviously loses something in the translation but amounts to 'I say D-ay-lia and you say D-ar-lia'.