Adam:
Item! Picked up an imported U.S. hardcover of Blood's A Rover at Readings on Friday night — the local paperback has been delayed for some reason. Fifty bucks, but so be it. Read 200 pages yesterday — fucking great. Any fears of a drop-off are as yet completely unfounded. Plus it's got his greatest narrative coup, a genuine motherfucker of a trick. Don't want to say too much, but I wanted to applaud, laugh out loud and damn him for his daring SIMULFUCKINGTANEOUSLY. The prose has a little more breathing room that Cold Six Thousand while still being uber-tight and rapid.  Once I clock off, I'm running back home for another extended session with the Demon Dog; current brutal headache hopefully containable.

Rino:
I've just segued like a cigarette chain from American Tabloid to C6k. Much I had forgotten about in AmTab. Like the Kemper hit. Kemper in my mind is visually indistinguishable from Kevin Spacey. The Jack Kennedy portrait is oddly sympathetic in the first half. And the odd-sympathetic romance of the Bondurant marriage — it's almost sweet. The Ellrrroy motivation is to push the reader's face in the dirt, or rather, as close to the face of a mutilated corpse in the morgue as is readerly possible. Already I keep telling people AmTab is simply the best, most authoritative book on the Kennedy Assassination there is.
But I have to read C6K sparingly cos I'm busting to force some personal writing. Jammed in my head. And the bloody problem with good racy smart books is they start infiltrating your style. Quicksmart.
I can almost feel where the edits happened in C6K — I would've kept some of the padding — print costs be damned. And yet another part of me says Ellrrrroy should only be read in paperback.

Adam:
You do cast the Ellroy's U.S. novels in your head, don't you? I think Jon Hamm would make an impressive Bondurant. Tedrow Jr.'s the tough one. If there was ever a series of books which screamed HBO production, it's these. But the violence would need to be tamed, and that's a big vile loss. And you'd need to find a filmic perspective that retained the poison and racism and rest of the prose voice. Which is hard — something like Sam Fuller's tabloid perspicacity cut with FOX News. Maybe a HBO/FOX collaboration.
Hardcover? Necessary, my friend. The fucker is heavy too — 670+ pages. A solemn JE pressed into the front cover. Epic.

Rino:
Think I might tweet a C6K chapter or two. Nuts. Just for the hell of it; like you said this is possibly the first Twitter novel in existence, and it predates Twitter. I'm about 200 pages deep in it now, but jeez it's like reading a book in morse code. I find myself having to reread bits all the time. So sharp/quick.

Adam:
Indeed — glad it wasn't just me actually. After a great opening 60/70 pages with Wayne in Dallas, the book does hit info overload with the long intro brief about Vegas drug code and Hughes' expansion plans.
Rover is still kicking my ass. It slightly bogged down in the middle as many a good book does, but am 500 pages in now with 150 or so to go, and it's rallied beautifully. Actually, with the way things are aligning and realigning, it's close to perfect in its organisation. And there's no obvious endpoint like in AmTab and C6K. It's also sadder, and more politically complicated. And more infected with early Ellroy noir than the first two. Mucho to say. The time will come.

Update: finished Blood's A Rover all of an hour ago. Am still a little breathless. It's the most ambitious of the trilogy, and not all of it works, but its cumulative power renders carping pointless. Pure narrative force — it demands readerly fealty. It fucks with narrative perspective a lot more than the first two. Too many possible spoilers here for me to say much, so as soon as you finish C6K, this will hopefully be out in paperback. Buy it — consume. Re-entering the world after a back to back to back reading of all three, the world seems a little plain. Again, so much to say — but you'll be there soon, and I'll wait for the ramble then. Hell, I even cried a little at the end. Believe it. Fuck him — it's some kind of masterpiece. Again, the book has its problems, and I've heard from the Ellroy diehards who scoffed it down even quicker than I that it's the weakest of the three, but I don't buy it. FUCK RANKINGS. Right now, hell, it's my favourite. SO MAYBE RANKINGS ARE GOOD AND I'M SAYING IT.
And I've got the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy lined up in paperback ready to go — back to the early 80s, when James was still caddying, sobering up and dreaming of the big novels to come.

Adam:
Two Ellroy side effects:
1. You start using 'vibe' as a verb. Last night I said to Mel, re: a work arrangement, "It doesn't vibe right with me." . She looked at me like I was an Adam impersonator.
2. Casual racism. This is a little embarrassing for such a good lil' liberal like me, but after getting repeatedly blocked off / jumped ahead of in the line to an Asian-dominated chicken joint on campus last week, the line "move it you fucking chink" passed through my mind. I mean, WHAT THE FUCK. But you soak in this juice long enough, and it just seeps in. It wasn't like I was even that annoyed, or had much loathing for the Asian brotherhood (my racial loathings are less obvious, more original and obtuse...), but the words just came to me unbidden. Odd, and curious, and more than a little disquieting. And again, not that it needs to be said, but it's not like Ellroy is a racist — this is super clear even in the early stages of Blood on The Moon. But he's so fucking canny at evoking the unshakeable linguistic brutality of one-track racism that it just gets to you after a while.

Rino:
I would add two effects:
~ restless dreams.
~ tough guy quips.
he does creep in though, pervasive-like. Terms like braced, jazzed, juice, accrete in the brain.

Update: It is done. C6K is a monster of a book.
I feel like I've been on a looooong rollercoaster ride... and am still rattling a bit. The boat job scene is almost as good as the ledger heist in AmTab. What a huuuuuge book. Mad. Unrelenting. This guy should write a history book... or maybe he has.
C6K is an endless pile-up... it's supremely hard-boiled fiction (what comes after & above hard-boiled?) that just hits and never lets up. C6K may lack the dirty dovetailing & sheer organic causal chain of AmTab, and the change in shift/role/plays of Hoover is a key element methinks, but it's an endless joyride of amoral action. Interesting how morality, conscience and goodness are totally skewered; how goodness is corrupted and brought down like fair game. And mirrored in the relationship development, the maturation of Tedrow Jr, the moral barnacling of Littel (and I stupidly read something on the second last page — just a snippet — that I shouldn't have). It's so broad in the full sense of 20th Century potential — not just a narrow perspective like Noir — it's America-all-encompassing and dementedly full-on and brilliant in execution and colour and jive/jibe and also the furthest thing from mere conspiracy-mongering. It encompasses and feeds a DOZEN conspiracy theories and stays BIGGER than them all... The racial shots are almost hilarious. The riff on Sammy Davis in the casino, the diss on Sinatra... It's almost disturbing how at home Ellrrroy is in all this... cue persona issues. And YouTube videos.
When I've finished I'm gonna have a little break, watch Miller's Crossing again, and then maybe eventually cross over into volume three.

Adam:
I know — each book leaves you completely wrung out. Agree with you about the boat scene — an old-fashioned book-ending action scene. And despite Bondurant's complete ghastliness as a human being, you're somehow rooting for him. That he doesn't kill women as a rule and is able to honestly love Barb makes him, in this world, better than most.
Oh how I do love that ledger heist scene, and the 100 or so Littell pages either side of it. What a sympathetic obsessive mess he is at the start of AmTab — and just look at what he becomes, and how it ends.
The path Ellroy takes Wayne Jnr down is amazing — the crossed sympathies, the moralism vs. immoral behaviour. The innate racial contradictions.
Had your phrase 'moral barnacling' bouncing round my head all yesterday. Perfect phrase if you don't mind me saying. Captures perfectly the slow collection of misdeeds and compromises that finally makes and breaks these guys.
C6K is almost my fave of the three — easily the most condensed, the most brutal and cynical, the most nard-bashing. A book only Ellroy could have written. No-one else would have had the patience and vision and sheer dogged stamina. I'm glad he chanced his hand on the short-style on the middle volume. What you gain in brute force you lose in range. It's the perfect holding pattern / acceleration book. And then the slowed, expansive, crazy-connections of the third.
The Underworld U.S.A style is the perfect novel style, imaginable only in that form. Fuck the perfectly turned long sentence, fuck jewels in mud. It's sheer accumulation. A billion nasty short sentences that somehow form a cathedral.

Also finished Blood On the Moon. It's craaaaaazy overblown. Now on My Dark Places, which I remember a little of from the first read back in '99.

 
Rino:
Also — I love Ellrrroy's power with shifting valence/allegiance/angles. The good plays of AmTab are the dodges and has-beens of C6K, the good guys are just slightly less evil, the bad guys merely changing the theatre or contextual rules of war. Or building better conspiracies (in the purely structural sense of the term). Rotating and fluid allegiances, debts, shakedowns. Usefullness vs Expendability. Money and naked power driving all. And also note the change in Hoover — much more malignant, aggressive, directly scheming, to the passive withholder and manipulator of AmTab.
I find Bondurant quite charming. The cat, the winks, the just-enough intelligence.
I like how Ellrrroy never once says 'jetlagged' but always 'travel-fucked.'
Do tell me there's more Nixon in Rover? He's the perfect stooge for Ellrrroy plays methinks.

Adam:
Yeah, and Hoover gets nastier, more venal in Rover. And yep, there's more Nixon in Rover, though mostly in transcripts. The imitation of his voice is quite funny — crass, crude/intelligent, colloquial. Nice relief after the officiousness of the Hoover voice. He's funny, almost likeable. Though Nixon is not a big player in the book plotwise — he's mostly a background player in the opening 300 pages re: the '68 election vs. Humphrey.
I've got to say — though I don't want to write like him in any way, reading the trilogy's really put the wind in my sails writing-wise. Maybe it's just the scale of the thing, and our readerly knowledge of the effort he's put in, but I've walked away all lightheaded and aspirational and alive. Again, not a decision to mimic and switch genres (I couldn't write a procedural for shit). Just larger notions of ambition, diligence, personal vision.
Whatever works, I guess.

Rino:
What I like about Ellrrroy's style in C6K — it's almost purely informational — but in a way that shags like Chricton/Grishams just never attain. What's astounding is that so much piling brevity can also contain so much colour, inflection, suggestion. Some of the back & forth discussions cover a wealth of innuendo and understanding. There's not a wasted word. And the repetitions are always right-on. Repetition has meaning, purpose, always. And then the stylistic repetitions — he baaad etc — form the gestalt writerly style. Damn he good.

Adam:
The other thing I like about the sustained short style is how effective it is for action, esp. a quickly revealed perception. He saw him. He saw the gun. Mesplede moved. etc. Ellroy does it with more brio and grace than my feeble imitation — but still, it's a fitting style for so much of the material, and so much more than just Spillane hard-boiled rebop parody as other critics would have you believe. Look at Wayne's showdown with Moore at the end of the book's first section — it's an apt atomisation of what in 'real life' would be two to three seconds. A Faulknerian high style is equally good for this, but rarely a middling safe style with all the syntax boxes neatly ticked. As with most true stylists, it's a required style. How else would you write it up?
There's a joke in DeLillo's Libra that the Warren Commission Report is the supernovel that Joyce would have written if he'd grown up in Dallas and lived to be one hundred. C6K is sorta that book. Sorta.
Well, just this, and briefly too: the comedown from the U.S.A. trilogy is meeeeeean. Blood on The Moon is gauche and pacy and barely functional. My Dark Places is decent non-fiction and occasionally hilarious (eg: describing his taste in women in the early 80s), but that material is so much more vivid in The Black Dahlia and, in a way, Rover. That's not a spoiler, trust me. But you'll see what I mean...
And then I move on to some more Wambaugh, and this morning it's Ed McBain's Ice on the train, trying to concentrate while sitting next to someone playing death metal on their iPod at SEVEN IN THE FUCKING MORNING, and so on and so on, but really, these are decent crime/police writers and maybe even decent writers per se, but after Ellroy's masterwork, which shames his own earlier efforts and easily outpaces the L.A. Quartet, and ab-so-lute-ly DECIMATES the field otherwise, not to mention outpacing the books he claims to have been influenced/inspired by (one of which, Wambuagh's The Onion Field, I'm presently reading, and which is so far quite good), I mean, really, it's all so very downhill from here.

Great art royally fucks over the 99% mediocre-to-decent world, for sure.

Also — I cannot read any more Ellroy. When I finish The Big Nowhere, that'll be it for a while. It's exhausting, and the L.A. Quartet, as good as they are for straight crime novels, can't match the U.S.A trilogy. And I think reading too much crime fiction has fucked with my brain a little. A tad too anti-intellectual of late, I suspect....