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The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time. Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.… (more)
User reviews
It's not that I don't like midcentury American crime, even if it has to be set in ignoble LA. I don't particularly care for all the layers of police procedure, but even that can easily be overlooked. BUT I cannot forgive an author making me wade through 350 pages and never presenting any evidence of humanity on the part of his hero.
In this case, every single character is beyond redemption. The world would be a better place if they were all dead. There is no humanity at all, and every time you think you see a glimpse, events serve to stomp it out with a vengeance. Two buddies, JC and Herrick, come to LA to make their fortunes? Have them screw each other's wives! Give a weak man a chance to protect his sister? Turn it into an incestuos peep show! Displaced refugees? Show only their ugly underbelly! A love story amid the ruin? Make it completely unmotivated and unlikely, so as to render it meaningless. And finally: give Dave Klein a chance to confess and reptent, and spend the last lines of the book reminding us he's only concerned about squaring up with the world, not God or his own sense of morality.
The best thing I can guess about Ellroy, who I have not read before, is that it does not appear that he hates women as much as he does everyone else. They alone escape - numb and stupid, but innocent.
Endless, horrible, over-the-top, disgustingly enthusiastic racism: considering he wrote this book in '01, Ellroy is either a genius at insisting on accuracy, or he just enjoys it all a little too much. It reads like the latter. And please don't say "he busts on everyone - blacks, jews, etc." as though it were an excuse.
The tight, staccato prose *might* be palatable for a short story. Of under five thousand words. At such length, it's giving me a headache even thinking about it.
People say JE has written better books. Not sure I'll be up for finding out myself for a while.
Actually, Ellroy gets a bit of credit for keeping keeping things relatively simple in "White Jazz" and for tamping down some of his more extreme noirish tendencies. The police side of thing is more-or-less limited to the misadventures of a single detective, and the plot's relative economy makes the plot a bit more believable -- not to mention easier to follow -- than most of the other novels that make up the author's "L.A. Quartet." His prose's more reined-in, too, and you can see him developing a sparer, more staccato narrative voice that makes his writing in "The Black Dahlia" seem positively florid. Even so, this doesn't mean that you can't call "White Jazz" minimalist in any sense of the word: the book's too long, and readers who refuse to suspend their disbelief are unlikely to finish it. Still, Ellroy's talent for establishing historical setting -- and for writing snappy, cheerfully profane period dialogue -- is sharp as ever; I suspect he'd be a pretty good historian, or at least a good historical novelist, if he ever wanted to give his neo-noir gig a rest. Anyway, after three or four Ellroy novels, I think I'm ready to take a break from him. It's back to the "literary fiction" section for me. I can always re-watch "The Big Sleep" if I feel the need for a dose of seedy, dangerous mid-century L.A.
Nothing wrong with the plot, although the cast of characters got unwieldy toward the end. I struggled with some of the jargon and slang, but figured much out as I got deeper into the reading. To his credit, Ellroy assumes his reader is intelligent.
This book is not for the squeamish. It is laced with violence, gore, racism and brilliance. The first person narrative/stream of consciousness left me exhausted, as Ellroy packs more into a paragraph than most authors do into a chapter. The fragmented
The ruthless Dave Klein is driven by greed and anger, and has no redeeming side to his character, other than protectiveness of his sister, which itself is engendered by an incestuous love.
All of the usual well-drawn characters are in there, including Ed Exley, Dudley Smith and of course Mickey Cohen.
Overall a great read if you are into that gritty, no-holds-barred noir style.
This book is not for the squeamish. It is laced with violence, gore, racism and brilliance. The first person narrative/stream of consciousness left me exhausted, as Ellroy packs more into a paragraph than most authors do into a chapter. The fragmented
The ruthless Dave Klein is driven by greed and anger, and has no redeeming side to his character, other than protectiveness of his sister, which itself is engendered by an incestuous love.
All of the usual well-drawn characters are in there, including Ed Exley, Dudley Smith and of course Mickey Cohen.
Overall a great read if you are into that gritty, no-holds-barred noir style.
This is the final book in a loose series written by Ellroy; given where the last book ended, I was hoping for a lot more of the story that was started in the
Furthermore, while all of Ellroy's protagonists have been less-than-stellar people (to put it mildly in some cases), this is the first time his main character is downright unlikable. I didn't really feel like there were any high stakes here because I didn't care what happened Klein. In fact, it was disappointing that of all Ellroy's protagonists Klein is one of the few
For the audiobook reader, I was amazed to find myself unhappy with Scott Brick as the narrator for this book. While I've loved Brick's narration of other books in the past, he was not a good fit here. He could do distinct voices and accents well, but his tone was all wrong for Klein and for the book as a whole. When I've read other noir-style mystery titles as audiobooks in the past (including ones in this series), the readers have managed to convey that old-film style of speech that fits the genre well. In addition, Ellroy's use of short, staccato sentences did not mesh well with the audiobook format (or perhaps just with Brick's reading of this title).
Overall, this was a big letdown for the finale of a series I had been invested in reading.
3 stars.