The Cartel Wins The Dagger Award

I was shortlisted for the Dagger Award this year, so you'd think that I'd be bummed out I didn't win last night. I'm not. The winner was The Cartel which is a book I believe has raised the bar for crime fiction and that can only be a good thing. Really good crime writing is really good writing, period...Here's my review from last year which originally appeared in a slightly different form (no swearing and fewer histrionics) in the newspaper. My prediction at the end proved prescient...
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Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog was one of the great American crime novels of the last twenty years. Indeed Winslow, Dan Woodrell and James Ellroy so raised the bar of American crime fiction in the early 2000's that every other writer in the genre has been struggling to keep up. You can't get away with weak prose and poor characterisation in US crime writing any more. (If you're a shitty prose writer and you don't care about your characters you should probably write literary fiction - they still tolerate that kind of thing over there.) 

The Power of the Dog told the story of Art Keller a DEA agent fighting the drug wars in the 1970s and 80s particularly in Mexico where he ran afoul of Adan Barrera, the dauphin of the Sinaloa Cartel. Bloody, violent, scary and brilliant The Power of the Dog was not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. But Winslow was not being deliberately sensationalist he was just telling it like it was. The Power of the Dog, like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand unpacks the foundation myths of America - the Republic was not founded and maintained by philosopher kings but by violent men fighting other violent men for land and power and money. 

The Cartel is the sequel to The Power of the Dog which again takes up Art Keller's story. Dog ended with Keller divorced and trying to live in anonymous motels as his various Mexican enemies tracked him down. He has been cut loose by the Feds and must survive on his wits and his dwindling financial resources. After Adan Barrera escapes from his prison and resumes his quest to be the patron of patrons of all the cartels in Mexico, Keller is recalled to the life by the DEA. 

The Cartel is a fictionalised account of what's really been happening in Mexico for the last decade and as such it is terrifying. We get to see the Narco wars between the cartels, the corruption of all branches of the Mexican army and police and finally the appearance of the good guys - the Mexican Marines and in particular their special forces unit the untouchable FES. The Cartel isn't so much a crime novel as a war novel and Keller and his comrades are soldiers in that war. If you don't like war novels this probably is not the book for you as there are some pretty strong scenes of combat and violence. My favourite part of the novel comes near the end when an old Mexican gentleman named Don Pedro defends his house against the Zeta Cartel, Straw Dogs style...

Keller's character - Catholic, half Mexican, smart, honourable, is brilliantly drawn as is the character of his nemesis the chilly, intelligent, cunning Adan Barrera. Winslow's women are written as well as his men and there are many extraordinarily brave women in the book who are based on real people; indeed The Cartel is a tribute of sorts to the incredibly courageous Dr Maria Santos Gorrostieta (right) who appears, thinly veiled, as Keller's love interest (and who was - in real life - tortured to death by the narcos). 

No novel is without its flaws and I'll admit that I became disheartened by all the murder, mayhem and mutilation in the final third of the novel. But that's part of the point of the book too. The war was relentless. And lest that put you off let me emphasise again, that The Cartel, like The Power of the Dog, is a crime masterpiece. It is being taken very seriously by serious reviewers (that cool image (top above right) is from the New Yorker review.) If there were any justice they'd be giving it the National Book Award or the Pulitzer and at the very least it should get the Edgar and the Dagger next year. 

10 Novels For Men

Men don’t buy novels anymore. They’ve pretty much stopped buying magazines and they don’t go to the cinema in as big numbers as they used to. What do they do? The answer is that nobody knows. Advertisers don’t know. TV programmers don’t know. Publishers certainly don’t know. Probably they’re playing Halo online, watching Louis CK videos on YouTube and googling for free pornography, but we can’t be certain.

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In my local Borders they have a "Guy Lit." section which contains thrillers by ex SAS men, alternative histories where the Nazis win the war and Nick Hornby novels...Is there a middle ground between the SS jackboot and the lime green Converse high top? Yes, I think so. Here’s my list of 10 novels for men who don’t normally like to read novels. Each one has the advantage of giving you a passport into a genre or an author that will keep you going for a while.


10. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler. It’s raining in Bay City (Santa Monica) and the slick streets are thick with ironic private eyes - the most poetic and interesting of them is a guy called Philip Marlowe.
9. Use of Weapons - Iain Banks. A crazy, violent space opera set in Banks’s Culture universe. A dude called Zakalwe is a major league bad ass with a power suit and a big gun. Havoc ensues pretty much all the time. At one point he gets his head chopped off by a bunch of insane cannibals. He survives.
8. In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck. Commie agents in 30's California get the living shite knocked out of them as they lay the groundwork for revolution. This is a book to make Glenn Beck keek his whips and cry into his pillow. Nobody reads this anymore. Shame because its awesome.
8. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway. A romantic (but in a manly Hemingwayesque way) American ambulance driver falls in love with war and then a nurse. He falls out of love with the former when he quickly sees how bloody horrible WWI actually is. All the way through you're thinking, this isn't going to end well...Unlike For Whom The Bell Tolls no one gets called "my little rabbit".
7. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse. Zen master Jeeves keeps his upper lip intact even in the most trying of circumstances. You think Snoop Dogg’s laid back? Jeeves would out limbo that mother any day of the week were he so vulgar as to engage in any kind of stick based contest.
6. The Ipcress File - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer is a spy, a gourmand, he counts his coppers, lives in a flat, flies to America and watches an H bomb test (they couldnt afford to put that bit in the movie).
5. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy. It’s basically the Wizard of Oz retold with J Edgar Hoover as the Wicked Witch of the East and with Dorothy blowing her brains out at the end.
4. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen. You know those Irish tourist board ads featuring sandy beaches, jolly times in pubs, pints of Guinness with shamrocks on them? Well Ken Bruen doesn’t write about any of that bollocks. He writes about smart crooks who know that there are many many uses for a good ten pound hammer.
3. Moby Dick - They’ve taken a three year passage on board a leaky nineteenth century whaling ship with a mad captain, dangerous harpoonists and the heavy hand of fate hanging over them. Let’s see the Sea Shepherds try their water hoses on these bad boys.
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Its WW2 through the eyes of Captain Yossarian a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who has become the bombardier on a B17. He has to laugh otherwise he will cry and cry. Ou sont les Snowdens d'antan?
1. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy. Gun battles and horrific slaughter in the old west and Mexico. You'll try and get the wedding party massacre out of your head for the rest of your life. You wont succeed. McCarthy’s masterpiece.

James Ellroy

from Saturday's Melbourne Age
The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, by James Ellroy

During a 2006 book reading at the famous Skylight bookstore in East Hollywood, James Ellroy scanned the crowd of about two hundred fans and noted with satisfaction that about a third of them were women. After being introduced, he walked up to the lectern and addressed his audience: “Stop me now! It’s going to my head. I need a strong woman to tame me with her love and walk all over me in high, black boots.” After the reading seven women slipped him their phone numbers and he took three of them out to dinner.
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The Hilliker Curse is full of stuff like this. It’s a funny and self depreciating memoir that uses the framing device of James Ellroy’s relationships women as a way of filling in his post teen life story. His previous memoir, My Dark Places, unpacked the horrific events surrounding his mother’s unsolved murder and his years as an adolescent neo Nazi and borderline sex pervert who got his kicks from stalking girls, breaking into their houses and sniffing their soiled underwear.
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Well into his thirties he was haunted by the image of his sexually adventurous mother, Jean Hilliker, who he both loved and hated. (Shortly before she was murdered he told her that he wanted to live with his father and for that she slapped him so hard that it was still stinging fifty years later when he came to write about it.) Ellroy went to live with his wastrel father and became a junkie, alcoholic and ne’er do well who somehow felt that if only he could get his act together he would become a great artist like his idol, Beethoven. Beethoven, of course, was a product of the German Romantic movement and much of The Hilliker Curse feels like a Bildungsroman: the poverty stricken orphan struggles to make his way in the world and after many setbacks is triumphantly redeemed by the power of his pen.
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In another writer this could get pretty precious but Ellroy is an autodidact who dodged Freud and is thus able to tell his story in a straightforward manner without a lot of psychobabble. For the uninitiated, however, he has made few compromises in his prose style: verbs are dispensed with, sentences clipped and he often writes in the breathless tones of a 1950's scandal sheet. Ellroy doesn’t “look” he “peeps” or “scopes.” He doesn’t “remember things” he “time travels”. This can get a little bit exhausting and it is perhaps symptomatic of a larger problem with The Hilliker Curse. Ellroy’s view of women is old fashioned and all together too reverential. He puts women on a pedestal and worships them and then condemns them for not living up to this image of perfection. I was reminded of a scene from Mad Men when Peggy upbraids her mentor Freddy Rumson for his talk of “broads” and “dames” and explains to him that women and times have changed. Ellroy’s Rat Pack language and attitudes were already becoming out of date in 1965. Not that Ellroy was ever too concerned about the counter culture. He hated hippies, kept his hair short, didn’t like girls who wore too much make up or nail polish. In his twenties and early thirties his main encounters with women seem to have been with prostitutes that he initially only wanted to “speak to” before succumbing to their other attractions. After producing such modern classics as LA Confidential and American Tabloid Ellroy appears to have hung out with an awful lot of adoring fans and you have to wonder whether hookers and groupies are the best pool from which to build a theory of the female gender or to find that elusive mother/lover for whom he was searching.
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Interestingly I think Ellroy’s attitude towards women infects his fictional female characters too. I have never been completely convinced by any of them and they do not talk or act like any women I know, although, in his defense, no women I know are mixed up in plots to assassinate the President. Ellroy calls himself the “Tolstoy of crime fiction,” but you never really see him producing a character like Anna Karenina or Natalia Rostova. Then again, perhaps he was only kidding when he said that; he is one of America’s wittiest writers and The Hilliker Curse is full of hilarious scenes, many at his own expense. It is also scathingly honest and although it is not quite up there with My Dark Places it is certainly a worthy edition to the Ellroy canon and is recommended to both die hard fans and newbies alike.

It's an LA Thing: Pynchon, Ellroy & Philip K Dick

In the early 1970's James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick were all living within a few miles of each other in Greater Los Angeles. Ellroy was a 23 year old kid beginning his first experiments with writing, Pynchon was 34 and editing the book which would become Gravity's Rainbow and Dick at 42 was reaching his peak as a novelist, having the experiences and working on the book which would become A Scanner Darkly. There must have been something about that time and place because - joining Scanner - we've now gotten Pynchon's version of events in Inherent Vice and Ellroy's take in Blood's A Rover and they all seem to share certain thematic unities: pandemic drug use, paranoia, corrupt LAPD officers, belief in government conspiracies, supreme disillusionment with politics, and, in the case of Ellroy and Pynchon, an odd obsession with Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. The overriding impression you get from these novels is that America as an ideal has reached a dead end here at the edge of the continent among the wastrels, drug dealers, dreamers and movie stars. And it might even go deeper than that - not only has America failed, but the whole enlightenment project has failed. The modern world is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed; democracy has no future - you either have total license or total tyranny and the proponents of these extremes are shrill and crazy.

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But that just may be Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I like LA. Fat Burger and Santa Monica and Malibu Creek are worth the drive, but I don't think you could have written Rover, Scanner or Vice in New England where people are not known for their demonstrative or hyperbolic nature. William Faulkner tells a story about how he was driving in Maine once and asked for directions. "Can you get to X, from here?" Faulkner wondered. "Yes." a local farmer responded. "Thanks," Faulkner said and off he drove before finding that the road he was on ended in the middle of nowhere. He drove back and encountered the farmer again. "I thought you said I could get to X from here," he wondered. "Not on this road," the farmer told him. Faulkner claims that he was impressed by the Mainer's precise answer to his question. In Mississippi they would have gone out of their way to show you the right road, but that was unnecessarily verbose in Maine.

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I have to say, although Faulkner was subtly dissing the north east, I really like it up there: people keep to themselves, they're suspicious of authority and innovation and they don't fall easily for the latest trends. Perhaps in the Los Angeles of 1971 America's future seemed bleak - as it does today - but drive up to New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine (and many other places in the heartland I'll bet) and you'll see a landscape and culture unchanged in nearly four centuries and a hardy, skeptical people who are not afraid of the future and who can handle just about anything.

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(Except maybe the terrible circumstances of another novel I read recently - Cormac McCarthy's The Road. )

James Ellroy On Desert Island Discs

James Ellroy appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs this week. The premise of the venerable show (its been going since 1942) is that you are cast away on a desert island with only 8 records. You then talk about what 8 records (or pieces of music) you would pick, what they mean to you, and of course we get to hear snippets from all of them. You are also allowed one book on the island and you talk about that too. Ellroy's choices were surprising: really heavy on the Beethoven and Bruckner, nothing from North America. And for his book he went for Don Dellilo's Libra. I thought Libra was a great novel and will always remember that beautiful scene of Lee Harvey Oswald riding the subway in New York, at the front of the very first car looking out into the dark tunnels; Libra makes it clear that Oswald indeed shot JFK and was the lone gunman. Interestingly Ellroy's most important work The Underworld Trilogy takes the opposite tack and has the unlikely premise that Oswald was an utter patsy and that JFK was killed by Hoover and the Mafia. Anyway you can hear Ellroy explain himself (and for three more days you can listen to the entire programme) here. The pic is of Ellroy talking to Stu Neville at the great No Alibis bookshop in Belfast (Ellroy is the lanky, bald one). I've written about Ellroy a couple of times, most recently here.

Novels of the Decade

Let me jump on the listmania bandwagon and give you my favourite novels of the decade. Maybe these aren't the best books of the noughties but they're the ones I liked most.

1. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
3. L'Amour est très surestimé - Brigitte Giraud
4. Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino
5. Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
6. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
7. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen
8. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
9. The Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
10. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Blood's A Rover

JAMES Ellroy, a devoted boxing aficionado, is a little like the Joe Frazier of American letters. While Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy get spoken of as contenders for the title of America's greatest novelist, Ellroy often gets dismissed as a mere crime writer. His amour-propre, his past as a teenage neo-Nazi and the fact he writes about that most gauche place, Los Angeles, has never endeared him to the literary establishment. 

Blood's a Rover, however, may well change their opinion. It is the completion of Ellroy's near 2000-page American Underworld trilogy that began with the evocative American Tabloid and continued with the extraordinary The Cold Six Thousand. 

American Tabloid is a technically impressive and often brilliant novel structured around the Cuban revolution and John Kennedy's assassination, written in a clipped ultra-telegraphic prose style that reinvents American crime fiction in a way no writer has attempted to do since the 1920s. 

Harsh, single word, verbless sentences pile on top of one another like the dripping tap of a water torturer, producing a hypnotic, trance-like effect that repels as many readers as it seduces. 

But where American Tabloid is a book teetering on the edge of a cliff, The Cold Six Thousand jumps into the abyss with an even sparer haiku-like prose style and a complex narrative of conspiracies, invasions and cover-ups starting with JFK's murder and ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. 

Blood's a Rover breathlessly continues the story in the days following King's death in Memphis. The central characters are the ones we got to know (and in most cases dislike) in The Cold Six Thousand: the conspirators who planned the hits on both Kennedy brothers and MLK. 

If this sounds a bit crazy, well, it is. 

In Ellroy's America (and one assumes he does not actually believe this) King was shot by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI working with the mafia, Cuban exiles and the CIA. King's murder incites rioting in America's black ghettoes and Richard Nixon rides the conservative backlash to get elected with a little help from the mob, Dominican drug dealers, an ex-FBI macher called Dwight Holly and a murderous ex-Las Vegas cop, Wayne Tedrow Jr, who ended book two of the trilogy by helping beat his father to death with a golf club. 

To complete the Freudian triad of central protagonists in Blood's a Rover we are introduced to the new character of Donald Crutchfield, a neophyte private investigator, voyeur and pervert. 

Ellroy has described himself as the Tolstoy of crime fiction and Crutch is transparently Ellroy's Pierre Bezukhov, a mostly sympathetic avatar of the novelist who gets his kicks (as Ellroy once did) by breaking into women's homes to sniff their underwear. We follow these diverse sociopaths on a wild ride through the politics, controversy and insanity of America in the 70s, with Ellroy gleefully libelling the conveniently dead Nixon, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Howard Hughes, who were all in on the whole Kennedy thing. 

And, yes, I know this is a novel and not history but I still find it a little disturbing that Ellroy absolves real-life individuals such as Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, all of whom are patsies in the wider conspiracy. 

Then again, maybe that is the point, as in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Ellroy's world is not quite our world: this is an alternative 1970s, a slightly darker America where intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and very rich men are the sinister puppet masters. 

Ellroy's strengths are his descriptions of men of action doing violent deeds or preparing for them. In these scenes his writing jumps off the page and his language is ironic, cynical and at times humorous. Watching professionals do their job can be a lot of fun, even if they are ice-cold killers. 

The writing in Blood's a Rover is Ellroy at his most confident and mature; the staccato prose style has been dialled down a notch from The Cold Six Thousand and the plot is inventive, surprising and, because we are still talking about a crime novel here, exciting. Ellroy's weaknesses are his weirder flights of fancy, the occasionally peculiar motivations of his characters and his female leads who, although given much more room to breathe in this book, still act and talk like few women any of us would recognise. 

Blood's a Rover is a line from A. E. Housman, which gives you a clue to Ellroy's sensibility; as George Orwell noted in his essay Inside the Whale, Housman is the poet par excellence for men baffled by "treacherous, half-human" women. (Although perhaps a writer whose mother was murdered by persons unknown when he was 10 should be cut a little slack.) 

Ellroy's language, too, can be offputting, riddled as it is with ethnic slurs and homophobia, but it is a canard to accuse Ellroy of racism; he is an ironist, not a racist, and the entire American Underworld trilogy can be read as an apocalyptic parable about the rise of fascism. 

Blood's a Rover is not quite the masterpiece that was The Cold Six Thousand but it is an ambitious, bold, outrageous, over the top tour de force that confirms Ellroy's place as one of the most important living novelists in the US. 

I tackled (I use the word advisedly) the book in two sittings and it will almost certainly in my top 10 crime novels of the year. While Ellroy may never be the favoured son among the New York literary elite, he has shown with this trilogy that he can go 15 rounds with Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth or any other heavyweight American novelist you care to name.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD