C
I was wondering if I would ever get sick of James Ellroy’s depraved, vile look back on the criminal world of 1960s USA. After finishing The Cold Six-Thousand, the answer is yes. After American Tabloid, the goal with this book seemed to out-do its predecessor on every front: the hyper-staccato prose, the enormous web of conspiracy, the racism, and the racism. The problem is that American Tabloid already pushed this type of storytelling to its limit. The Cold Six-Thousand crosses the line. It’s bloated, over-the-top even by Ellroy’s standards, and directionless.
Following from the immediate aftermath of the first book, The Cold Six-Thousand follows series newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr. and returning characters Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. Ellroy’s signature machine gun prose still puts the book at a breakneck pace as we follow their journey from the fallout of JFK’s assassination in 1963 up to MLK and RFK in 1968. But while the pace of the prose is dizzying, the actual plot is a frustrating combination of agonizingly slow sections where multiple chapters span the course of a day to months of time flying by in less than five pages. At nearly 700 pages, this is the longest book between the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy by a significant margin, and it really, really did not need to be this long. Trying to capture everything that was happening in the 5 year timespan this book takes place in was a huge mistake and doesn’t give a clear climactic point that everything is building towards like American Tabloid. The coverup of JFK’s assassination and the characters’ involvement doesn’t flow well into the heroin trade out of Vietnam to fuel gun runs to Cuba and push drugs on the black population of Las Vegas, which I still don’t really understand how this worked for Howard Hughes’ purchase of Vegas Casinos and what the organized crime rings were getting out of it, and almost none of this really had anything to do with MLK and RFK’s assassinations. In fact, the main characters had so little connection with the assassinations that the majority of the setup was done via recorded conversations exclusively between side characters and news headlines.
The arcs for the three POV characters are just not all that satisfying to follow either. Wayne’s descent into being a super racist like his father stems entirely from the brutal murder of his wife by a black man that he let live in Dallas, who had no reason to even come back to kill his wife in Vegas, and Wayne’s relationship with her was already shown to be something he doesn’t really care about anyway with the way he voyeurs after his stepmother and ignores her for the entire time she’s on the page. Ward’s pathetic attempt at redemption was muddled with how much time he spent just going through the motions of managing all of the schemes of everyone he’s involved with. And Pete’s just kinda there.
James Ellroy always soaked the language of his books in the era of history they take place in. Racism, homophobia, and violent disdain for anyone remotely left of Nazi has always been commonplace. But Ellroy gets really enthusiastic about it here, making puns out of racial slurs and replacing c with k in reference to the KKK. Sometimes it feels like it’s an insight into the personality of the POV characters, but oftentimes it just feels like Ellroy really wants to be Quentin Tarantino and just drop n-bombs twenty times in a paragraph for the sake of it.
Reading this book was frustrating. A lot of what made the previous books in this criminal underworld series so good is still here. Real historical figures and events are woven in with the fictional characters that I had to google some names just to make sure I knew what was real or not. Each POV character had a pretty distinct personality that was conveyed through the prose, and little phrases would sometimes show up in other POV’s chapters as a way of showing how they influence each other. The unapologetic bluntness of the descriptions of hatred and violence are so sickeningly believable. But these elements without a compelling plot and characters to bind them ring hollow.
I was wondering if I would ever get sick of James Ellroy’s depraved, vile look back on the criminal world of 1960s USA. After finishing The Cold Six-Thousand, the answer is yes. After American Tabloid, the goal with this book seemed to out-do its predecessor on every front: the hyper-staccato prose, the enormous web of conspiracy, the racism, and the racism. The problem is that American Tabloid already pushed this type of storytelling to its limit. The Cold Six-Thousand crosses the line. It’s bloated, over-the-top even by Ellroy’s standards, and directionless.
Following from the immediate aftermath of the first book, The Cold Six-Thousand follows series newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr. and returning characters Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. Ellroy’s signature machine gun prose still puts the book at a breakneck pace as we follow their journey from the fallout of JFK’s assassination in 1963 up to MLK and RFK in 1968. But while the pace of the prose is dizzying, the actual plot is a frustrating combination of agonizingly slow sections where multiple chapters span the course of a day to months of time flying by in less than five pages. At nearly 700 pages, this is the longest book between the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy by a significant margin, and it really, really did not need to be this long. Trying to capture everything that was happening in the 5 year timespan this book takes place in was a huge mistake and doesn’t give a clear climactic point that everything is building towards like American Tabloid. The coverup of JFK’s assassination and the characters’ involvement doesn’t flow well into the heroin trade out of Vietnam to fuel gun runs to Cuba and push drugs on the black population of Las Vegas, which I still don’t really understand how this worked for Howard Hughes’ purchase of Vegas Casinos and what the organized crime rings were getting out of it, and almost none of this really had anything to do with MLK and RFK’s assassinations. In fact, the main characters had so little connection with the assassinations that the majority of the setup was done via recorded conversations exclusively between side characters and news headlines.
The arcs for the three POV characters are just not all that satisfying to follow either. Wayne’s descent into being a super racist like his father stems entirely from the brutal murder of his wife by a black man that he let live in Dallas, who had no reason to even come back to kill his wife in Vegas, and Wayne’s relationship with her was already shown to be something he doesn’t really care about anyway with the way he voyeurs after his stepmother and ignores her for the entire time she’s on the page. Ward’s pathetic attempt at redemption was muddled with how much time he spent just going through the motions of managing all of the schemes of everyone he’s involved with. And Pete’s just kinda there.
James Ellroy always soaked the language of his books in the era of history they take place in. Racism, homophobia, and violent disdain for anyone remotely left of Nazi has always been commonplace. But Ellroy gets really enthusiastic about it here, making puns out of racial slurs and replacing c with k in reference to the KKK. Sometimes it feels like it’s an insight into the personality of the POV characters, but oftentimes it just feels like Ellroy really wants to be Quentin Tarantino and just drop n-bombs twenty times in a paragraph for the sake of it.
Reading this book was frustrating. A lot of what made the previous books in this criminal underworld series so good is still here. Real historical figures and events are woven in with the fictional characters that I had to google some names just to make sure I knew what was real or not. Each POV character had a pretty distinct personality that was conveyed through the prose, and little phrases would sometimes show up in other POV’s chapters as a way of showing how they influence each other. The unapologetic bluntness of the descriptions of hatred and violence are so sickeningly believable. But these elements without a compelling plot and characters to bind them ring hollow.