L.a. Confidential

Locations
Call Number: Mystery
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Mystery	4-week checkout	On Shelf

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Brain-stretchingly complex. submitted by eknapp on September 18, 2013, 9:57am The most massively sprawling cops-vs-criminals saga I've ever encountered, in any medium. Very detailed, heavily researched, with a huge cast of characters. It has a long timeline for a non-epic, spanning at least eight years. LA Confidential reminds me of The Wire in its depiction of widespread public corruption, universal pressure to "play the game", and entrenched, self-sustaining systems of graft and malfeasance.

Ellroy uses this odd convention where he drops nouns and verbs in order to convey action or mental leaps. Sometimes it's effective, other times it's just...dense:

Ed, staked out at 1st and Olive. His father's shotgun for backup, a replay on his hunch.
Sugar Ray Coates: "Roland Navarette, lives on Bunker Hill. Runs a hole-up for parole absconders."
A whispered snitch: the speakers didn't catch it, doubtful Coates remembered he said it. R&I, Navarette's mugshot, address: a rooming house midway down Olive, half a mile from the Hall of Justice Jail. A dawn breakout--they couldn't make Darktown unseen. Figure all four of them armed.
Scared--like Guadalcanal '43.
Outlaw--he didn't report the lead.

James Ellroy: "No time for predicates! Thinking! Running and shooting!"

His dialogue is unsurpassed, however. There's an utterly fantastic scene in which the protagonist interrogates three suspects who are innocent of the mass murder at the heart of the story but are guilty of another horror. They can't alibi themselves without sealing their own doom. Best part of the book, amazing dialogue.

I've never experienced such a concentration of colorful slurs: "fruits", "jigs", "yid", "schvartzes", an abundance of N-words--it was relentless (and often quaint). The background racism of the time was displayed in all its foul glory: "Leroy, if she's dead and she was colored you can cop a plea. If she was white you might have a chance." This stuff was jolting in that it wasn't held up for scrutiny; it was just always there, oozing from every chapter. While the stream of offensiveness served the setting and characterizations wonderfully well, it was more than a little off-putting...but worth it, I think.