Books like Blood's a Rover

“I paid a dear and savage price to live History.”And that’s the message of James Ellroy's bloody and brilliant Underworld USA trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover) summed up in one sentence. Here at the end, it’s all about remorse, radicals, revolution, rebellion, revenge and redemption. (To borrow some Ellroy-style alliteration.)The book begins with a brief flashback to an armored car heist in 1964 that might have been planned by The Joker considering the body count and betrayal involved. A fortune in emeralds and cash is unaccounted for years later and is one of the main issues driving the plot.Cut to 1968, where Wayne Tedrow Jr. is dealing with the aftermath of the last book and his involvement in the plots to kill Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Wayne’s weird form of racism has been burnt out of him like a fever following the MLK and RFK hits, but he quickly takes over fronting the Mob’s on-going plans to sell Howard Hughes their Vegas hotels and build a new casino empire in a Latin American country so they can recreate Cuba pre-Castro. But Wayne is now severely conflicted. The guy who processed massive amounts of heroin being run out of Vietnam is now adamant about a no-heroin policy. He worked on the MLK hit and killed several black men, but starts dating a black woman he’s linked to by tragedy, and he’s vowed to find her missing son. Wayne doesn’t want the local population abused while the new casinos are built in the Dominican Republic even though he’s the guy making it happen.Dwight Holly was also in on the MLK and RFK hits as J. Edgar Hoover’s preferred enforcer with the FBI, but his years of loving a radical woman he’s protected with an informant status are also starting to influence him. He’s worried about how fast Hoover is getting senile, but since Hoover still has a blackmail file on him, he has to keep going along with Hoover’s plans of infiltrating and discrediting the militant black movement.Don Crutchfield (Crutch) is an idiot kid who uses his voyeur tendencies as an errand boy for low-rent private detectives in L.A. When he accidently finds out some dirt on Wayne and Dwight, he gets pulled into their lifestyle, but he’s so geeky and impressionable that he still thinks rabid anti-Communism is cool even as they waver between warning him off or killing him. Hanging over all of them is Red Joan, a legendary left-wing radical who is involved with all of their plans in ways they can’t even imagine.This is a departure for Ellroy. He backed way off his hipster staccato style in this one, going with more simple declarative sentences and dropping a lot of the schtick that made The Cold Six Thousand almost unreadable in spots. It’s his most traditional writing since The Big Nowhere.Ellroy also steps away from the real history to spin this wild tale of the three men and Red Joan. Hoover still appears in an increasingly delusional state via the usual transcripts of phone calls, and Richard Nixon makes a few very funny call transcripts too as the ultimate political hack who knows he’s been bought and paid for. But the real people and events start to fade over the course of the book. Watergate is barely mentioned as a planned Nixon black-bag job. The old power structures are crumbling. Hoover and Nixon may be the last ones standing, but the country is growing out of their control. By killing the leaders who would have worked within the system, people are turning to more radical means of change so the Bad White Men revised the rules without realizing it when they killed JFK, RFK and MLK. The focus here is on Wayne and Dwight’s growing horror at the lives they’re leading, and Crutch’s growth from an idiot geek they call Dipshit to the same lessons that Wayne and Dwight learned. And as always with Ellory, the attempts at redemption have a terrible cost.Crutch is one of Ellroy’s oddest creations. Supposedly based on a real Los Angeles private investigator who Ellroy claims has some extra knowledge of events of this time frame, Crutch is also part-Ellroy, incorporating his well documented tendencies for break-ins, panty sniffing and window peeping when he was a teen-age homeless drunk and drug addict before getting clean and becoming a writer. Crutch is a weird hybrid of a couple of real guys written as the watcher who sees everything burn when all the old debts come due.Brutal, violent, profane, but surprisingly tender at times, I don’t think I’d put this one in the class of American Tabloid yet, but it’s going to haunt me for a while.