James Ellroy

Demon Dog of Crime Fiction

Steven Powell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349564279, 9781137490827
• eBook ISBN: 9781137490834
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is a study of all of Ellroy's key works, from his debut novel Brown's Requiem to the epic Underworld USA trilogy. This book traces the development of Ellroy's writing style and the importance of his Demon Dog persona to carving out his unique place in American crime fiction.

1

Lee Earle Ellroy and the Avon Novels

‘James Ellroy’ came into being with the publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981. Before that, Ellroy was known by his name at birth, Lee Earle Ellroy. The name change marked a significant moment in his long transition from alcohol- and drug-addicted vagrant to author. Yet despite this remarkable metamorphosis, and Ellroy’s strong and powerful writing in his early novels, much of his early literary career was plagued by missed opportunities and messy compromises. Ellroy was able to find a publisher for his first novel remarkably quickly, bypassing the often long struggle aspiring writers face getting their work published. Yet he was unsatisfied in his ambitions: he had hoped he would achieve a new crime-fiction style with his early work.

Part of Ellroy’s frustration lay in his sometimes difficult relationship with his first publisher, Avon. Against his better judgement, Ellroy was pushed into several editorial decisions, mostly concerning how the novels should comply with the conventions of the crime fiction genre. Avon published Ellroy’s first two novels, Brown’s Requiem and Clandestine (1982), before rejecting his third novel. After a short crisis in his career when he was unable to find a publisher, Ellroy began his professional relationship with the Mysterious Press, who published the Lloyd Hopkins novels. Ellroy returned to Avon to write his sixth novel Killer on the Road (1986). One of his most bizarre works, it would also be the last novel Ellroy would write for the publisher.

The lack of recognition Ellroy received as a newly published author drove him to constantly reinvent and refine his writing style during this period. The three Avon novels have been critically overlooked despite the fact that as Ellroy’s only stand-alone, non-series novels, there is a greater capacity for stylistic experimentation between each novel than in his later work. Ellroy would draw on his past, often harrowing, experiences as Lee Earle Ellroy for material in the Avon novels. The narratives are suffused with elements of his personal history. However, it would be a mistake to think of the Avon novels as merely a form of fictional autobiography.

They also reflect how Ellroy, even during periods of homelessness and recidivism, had developed a sophisticated understanding of the complex history of the genre, and here lies the genesis of his Demon Dog persona. The other side to Lee Earle Ellroy, less apparent than the drug addict, alcoholic, voyeur-burglar and periodically homeless criminal (but in a curious sense dependent on it) was the aspiring author: ‘I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing or peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in a library with a bottle of wine and read books’ (Rich 2008: 181).

The last days of Lee Earle Ellroy

Although they were never close, the death of Ellroy’s father, Armand Lee Ellroy, in 1965 precipitated Ellroy’s decline into addiction, homelessness and crime which lasted until the mid-1970s. Years later, when his literary reputation was rising, the manic, aggressive performances Ellroy would give in interviews and book readings were drawn from the knowledge that his unusual early life could be adapted to suit his identity as a crime writer, an identity that would eventually make him a key figure in the history of the genre.

Before the age of seventeen, Ellroy had endured the trauma of his mother’s unsolved murder, was expelled from the predominately Jewish Fairfax High School for fighting and truancy, volunteered for the US Army and then faked a nervous breakdown in order to secure a quick discharge, and had even briefly been a member of the American Nazi Party. Ellroy became an alcohol and substance abuser, drinking gin, Romilar CF cough syrup and using amphetamines and Benzedrix inhalers. In his interviews and memoirs, Ellroy candidly describes his attempt to recast himself as an eccentric LA character, sleeping rough in parks and (by his own account) carrying around a bust of Beethoven for company. This striking juxtaposition revels in both low life and high culture, which Ellroy would attempt to merge throughout his career. By the late 1960s, Ellroy’s criminality was fuelled by his sexual voyeurism. He would break into the houses of wealthy families who lived in Hancock Park, taking food and drink from their kitchens, rifling through drawers and sniffing women’s panties, ‘circumspectly, very, very cautiously, [and with] great concern to cover my tracks’ (Powell 2009: 196). Even in breaking the law, Ellroy finds room to deviate from and thus rewrite the criminal type, and his moderate ‘circumspect’ approach to criminality seems out of keeping with the fervour he invested in almost every other pursuit. Yet the voyeurism that he developed in these early years would be a continual motif in his works.

As he was learning about crime by indulging in it, Ellroy was also nurturing another obsession which would come to define him in later years, an obsession that had the potential to help him give up his criminality and imbue it with a sense of narrative meaning:

I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist. I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. (Rich 2008: 181)

Ellroy offers an image of himself as a wild man and then undermines it. By distancing himself from his earlier disclosures, the more extreme aspects of his life that he capitalized on to promote his novels are debunked in his desire to be viewed predominantly as an aspiring author rather than a criminal. The two identities would merge in the gradual formulation of his literary persona. Ellroy has crafted an image of his younger self as ambiguous and undefinable, neither fully a criminal nor an author. From its inception, the Demon Dog persona was always subversive, and not subservient, to Ellroy’s ‘creative duty’ to realism. Against the odds, crime fiction would be Ellroy’s conduit into becoming a ‘literary writer’, but his ultimate ambition was to both embrace and transcend the crime fiction genre.

None of Ellroy’s difficulties, even his criminal record and jail time, deterred him in his ambition to become a writer. Quite the contrary: ‘Booze and drugs … are powerful inducers of fantasy’ (Meeks 1990: 21). Yet although these fantasies and obsessions drove him, he always maintained an objective distance as an observer and outsider. Speaking about his time in jail, Ellroy explained, ‘I always had some germ of circumspection that said, “White boy, don’t open your mouth.” I think I should’ve been in grad school somewhere’ (Kihn 1992: 30). Ellroy’s humour is rooted in his self-embodiment of high and low culture: he mimics the language of the streets, which is demeaning to him, ‘white boy’, and pairs it with a reference to ‘grad school’ that makes him sound snobbish. The internal dialogue implies the author sees his past self as a character, and all characters, even real-life ones, are there, in Ellroy’s words, ‘to be manipulated’, an important point when approaching Ellroy’s countless autobiographical admissions (Duncan 1996: 81). Ellroy’s ambition was to tease out the circumspection which was blocking his complete assumption of a criminal life, and yet still apply some of his criminal experiences to narrative. In 1977, Ellroy started attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and the following year he began making notes for a novel that had been ‘churning in his subconscious for years’ (Kihn 1992: 31). He had been aware, even during his darkest periods, that his experiences contained the potential for narrative.

Ellroy found his first regular job caddying, although it did not begin smoothly as he was fired from the Hillcrest Country Club for fighting with another caddy. He then began to work for the Bel-Air Country Club where the clientele included several Hollywood celebrities (Milward 1997). It was at this time that he began outlining his first novel, but panic quickly set in: ‘I stopped because I was afraid I might write the book and not sell it; I was afraid that I might fail in general’ (Kihn 1992: 31). It was an act of faith that persuaded Ellroy to start writing: ‘on January 26, 1979, he went out onto the green, stared up at the sky, and prayed: “Please, God, let me start this book tonight”’ (Kihn 1992: 31). In other sources, Ellroy has given this anecdote a hint of irreverence: ‘I was on the golf course. And I actually sent up a prayer to my seldom sought, blandly Protestant God. “God,” I said, “would you please let me start this fucking book tonight?”’ (Meeks 1990: 22). Ellroy’s profane supplication to a ‘Protestant God’ makes his faith, such as it is, a subversive and creative act. Ellroy is both iconoclastic and traditional, and his approach to writing has been to bring the two into direct conflict.

Brown’s Requiem: death and rebirth

Caddying combined some of the desperation of Ellroy’s earlier life with a new insight into how the underbelly of society services the elite: ‘95 percent of most country club caddies … are alcoholics, drug addicts, and compulsive gamblers’ (Swaim 1987: 16). His experiences as a caddy were to be an integral part of Brown’s Requiem, but a brief unsuccessful interim in detective work was also an influence: ‘I had quit caddying for a spell, to work for an attorney service. Basically I was a processor server, but I couldn’t make any money at it, because it was contingency work, and I wasn’t very good at finding people’ (Silet 1995: 42). Ellroy’s emotional investment in failed men would help form the characters of would-be private detective Fritz Brown and his deranged client Freddy ‘Fat Dog’ Baker.

Fritz Brown is an ex-policeman turned repossession agent, ‘Repo-man’, who has officially registered as a private investigator merely as a tax front. ‘Fat Dog’ Baker, a corpulent golf caddy, hires Brown to investigate the middle-aged Jewish businessman Sol Kupferman. Kupferman is paying for the music lessons of Baker’s sister Jane, a cellist, and the anti-Semitic Fat Dog fears he may have designs on her. Brown finds himself attracted to Jane, and they become lovers, but disturbed by what Jane tells him of her brother, Brown begins to investigate Fat Dog. Brown learns that Fat Dog was implicated in a nightclub firebombing case which killed six people but was shielded from prosecution by corrupt LAPD Lieutenant Haywood Cathcart, who has been using Fat Dog as an enforcer. Events appear to be heading towards a showdown between Brown and Fat Dog, but Ellroy unexpectedly closes down this storyline halfway through the novel with the sudden death of Fat Dog, and gradually pivots events so that the climax is a deadly confrontation between Brown and Cathcart.

Ellroy has repeatedly stressed the autobiographical side to the narrative: ‘Here’s a guy [Brown] who looks exactly like me, has a German-American background, likes classical music, came from my old neighborhood, gets involved with a bunch of caddies. All that’s me’ (Duncan 1996: 64). But what Ellroy has not explicitly stated is that both the protagonist and the antagonist were based on aspects of his own personality. Fat Dog is a caddy who sleeps rough on golf courses. Ellroy was caddying at the time of writing the novel and, years earlier, spent time sleeping in LA parks. The criminal, shambolic and anti-social Fat Dog might seem like the more natural parallel with Lee Earle Ellroy than Brown who, despite the occasional moral lapse, is a former policeman turned moderately successful businessman. Ellroy, however, has insisted on distancing himself from Fat Dog: ‘I invented a nice Arsonist … I knew a caddy who was called Fat Dog who slept on golf courses’ (Rich 2008: 182). Fat Dog’s nickname foreshadows Ellroy’s Demon Dog persona; however, Fat Dog’s name is rather ironic as although he dreams of owning racing dogs, he enjoys torturing animals. Ellroy, however, is a dog lover. Indeed, Fat Dog is Ellroy’s nemesis as much as he is Ellroy’s former self, as his anti-Semitism and voyeurism connect directly with Ellroy’s own containable, but nonetheless questionable, obsessions. Fat Dog’s anti-Semitism extends towards an adulation of Nazism, but Ellroy was never a Nazi ideologue, using it instead as a prod ‘to infuriate and sicken his peers and teachers’ (Rowston 2012). However, his brief association with the party was a source of guilt. He began a relationship ‘five months into my first book’ with a woman named Penny in June 1979: ‘She was Jewish. That appealed to me. It would force me to atone for prior anti-Semitism’ (Ellroy 2010: 57). Redemption and rebirth are major themes of the novel as Ellroy was compelled to make Jane Baker and Fat Dog partly Jewish, and it is later revealed they are the illegitimate children of Kupferman. That Fat Dog’s father was Jewish and his adoptive parents were Russian Jews who anglicized their name is Ellroy’s way of mocking the dead man, rendering his racism ludicrous, and by extension, further atoning for his own past bigotry.

Despite his dislike of Fat Dog, Brown sympathizes with him and recognizes how their different upbringing pushed Fat Dog to his fate: ‘[I] was tempered with some love and gentleness. … All he knew was anger, hatred, and meanness. … He deserved better’ (Ellroy 1981: 121–2). Brown’s ambivalent relationship with Fat Dog mirrors Ellroy’s identification with him. Peter Wolfe argues Ellroy has an ‘urge to be fair … he will safeguard the integrity of his books against his evil side. One familiar countercheck is his tactic of identifying with scurvy characters’ (Wolfe 2005: 15–6). Brown’s sympathy, which places him in Fat Dog’s shoes, is extended through their names: Brown and Fat Dog share the same initials, FB.

Ellroy’s personal experiences also inform the romantic sub-plot of the novel. Brown and Jane’s relationship reflected Ellroy’s sexual frustration following his recovery from drug addiction: ‘I wanted sex. I wanted all that stuff and I wasn’t getting any, and that’s what really informs that book [Brown’s Requiem]’ (Duncan 1996: 64). As with his voyeuristically motivated housebreaking, Ellroy’s obsession with what he could not have spurred him to follow female musicians around LA:

Symphony concerts ended around 10 p.m. Women with violins and cellos scooted out rear exits. I was a tongue-tied stage-door Johnny. Most of the women met their husbands and boyfriends. They wore tight black orchestra gowns with cinched waists and plunging necklines. They looked anxious to shuck their work duds, belt a few and talk music. Single women walked out, lugging heavy instruments. I offered to help several of them. They all said no. (Ellroy 2010: 49)

Ellroy has never been afraid to cast himself in a bad light, yet his dubious behaviour around female musicians and involuntary abstinence is not transplanted onto Brown, whose sexual relationship with Jane begins fairly soon after their first meeting, making him more of a fantasy version of Ellroy than a direct portrayal. This is apparent in Brown’s somewhat laughable boasting. After inviting Jane back to his apartment on the pretext of listening to chamber music, he reports ‘in the end we didn’t listen to chamber music, we made our own’ (Ellroy 1981: 90). By contrast, Fat Dog, unkempt and ugly, ‘looked like a refugee from the Lincoln Heights drunk tank’, and appears at first to be sexless (Ellroy 1981: 12). However, his sexual tastes are animalistic, as Brown discovers Fat Dog owns a collection of extreme pornography. Fat Dog is unable to separate sex from perversion, anger from sadism.

Ellroy’s voyeuristic obsession with classical musicians is suggestive of his striving for critical superiority. The novel’s original title, ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, eventually became the title of the fifth and final section of the novel (Ellroy 1980). The title was changed to Brown’s Requiem, which suggests both music and death, at Avon’s insistence. The publisher wanted a novel grounded in the genre, whereas Ellroy desired to rise above crime fiction: ‘At the time I was reading some recent crime fiction and rereading some of my old favorites, and I had this sneaking suspicion that I could do better’ (Silet 1995: 42). Ellroy was fiercely ambitious and fantasized about surpassing established authors in the genre. Yet because Ellroy did not have full creative control of Brown’s Requiem, he felt thwarted in his creative ambitions. Unable to discard the private eye model, he attempted to visually distance his work from it by suggesting the front cover depict a woman holding a cello: he was again overruled (Ellroy 2010: 49).

Despite his desire to escape the confines of crime fiction through classical music, Brown’s Requiem also pays homage to Raymond Chandler, and it reflects the style and conventions that Chandler had developed and Ellroy had learned to imitate through his wide reading of the genre. When Brown walks into the Westwood hotel, his first-person narration directly references Chandler:

Walking into the hotel was like walking into another era. The flat finished white stucco walls, ratty Persian carpets in the hallway and mahogany doors almost had me convinced it was 1938 and that my fictional predecessor Philip Marlowe was about to confront me with a wisecrack. (Ellroy 1981: 193)

Despite Ellroy’s meta-fictional reference to Chandler’s influence, with Brown describing Philip Marlowe as his fictional predecessor, Ellroy’s Brown is an errant offspring of Marlowe. Ellroy liberally imitates, hyperbolizes, and somewhat mocks Chandler’s style in his use of colourful first-person prose and unusual similes: ‘I was never a child. I came out of my mother’s womb full-grown, clutching a biography of Beethoven and an empty glass. My first words were “Where’s the booze?”’ (Ellroy 1981: 129). The first section of the novel is titled ‘I, Private Eye’, which acts as a form of introduction to Brown’s first-person prose. The title is a doubling of Brown, separate from his parallels with Fat Dog, which refers to the distinction between the image and reality of the character as a private detective. Dennis Porter has identified the characteristics of Marlowe’s witticisms: ‘The quintessence of Chandler’s style is what came to be known as a “Chandlerism”. That is, in the finality of his one- or two-liners that elevates the wise-crack of an American, urban folk tradition to the level of a hardboiled conceit.’ (Porter 2003: 105) Rather than ‘elevate the wise-crack’, Brown’s one-liners veer towards parody in their homage to Marlowe. Ellroy’s overt Chandler references imbue Brown with what Porter dubs a ‘finality’ as a character, as though he cannot break free from the pastiche. The references are an oppositional movement to the classical music theme which seeks to raise the narrative out of the genre. The location also blurs the lines between author and fiction, as the Westwood hotel, which reminds Brown of Chandler in its furnishings, was the location where Ellroy was living in LA, in a $25-a-week room, when he outlined and drafted the novel (Meeks 1990: 21).

The death of Fat Dog half way through the novel throws Brown and the narrative into a flux, and Ellroy breaks from the Chandler model here at least in terms of plotting. Instead of a violent showdown with Fat Dog, Brown is forced to confront Haywood Cathcart, the crime...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Lee Earle Ellroy and the Avon Novels
• 2 The Lloyd Hopkins Novels: Ellroy’s Displaced Romantic
• 3 James Ellroy, Jean Ellroy and Elizabeth Short: The Demon Dog and Transmogrification in The Black Dahlia
• 4 Developing Noir: The Los Angeles Quartet
• 5 The Narrative of Secret Histories in the Underworld USA Trilogy
• Bibliography
• Index