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moreadsbooks's review against another edition
2.0
"Western Avenue between Beverly and Willshire and the blocks surrounding it constitute the old neighborhood. Situated two miles west of downtown L.A. and a mile south of Hollywood, there is nothing exceptional about it. The prosaic thrust of the ordinary lives lived there produced nothing during my formative years but an inordinate amount of male children, a good portion of whom assumed roles emblematic of the tortured 60s: Vietnam veteran, drug addict, college activist, burned-out corpse. The neighborhood has changed slightly, topographically: Ralph's market is now a Korean church, old gas stations and parking lots have been replaced by ugly pocket shopping centers. The human core of the neighborhood, the people who were in early middle-age when I was a child, are elderly now, with resentments and fears borne out of twenty years of incomprehensible history."
How James Ellroy can spool out fine writing like that and then clutter it up with so much endless, needless, and tedious racism and misogyny. This could have been the former bad cop turned deadbeat PI, driving-around-town + a slightly sketchy dame noir novel of my dreams, but even for the genre & the author it's heavy on the epithets and features a really charming bit about the culpability of child prostitutes.
How James Ellroy can spool out fine writing like that and then clutter it up with so much endless, needless, and tedious racism and misogyny. This could have been the former bad cop turned deadbeat PI, driving-around-town + a slightly sketchy dame noir novel of my dreams, but even for the genre & the author it's heavy on the epithets and features a really charming bit about the culpability of child prostitutes.
ericwelch's review
4.0
Two weeks before the Utopia Club was consumed by an arsonist's torch, private investigator and car repossessor Fritz Brown was having a drink there when the man next to him spilled his drink in Fritz's lap. The man immediately apologized. Re cognition of that man was to be the key unraveling a mystery almost ten years later.
Fritz Brown is James Ellroy's first creation and a worthy successor to Philip Marlowe. Brown is an ex-cop, dismissed from the L.A.P.D. for having broken the legs of the Vice Department's favorite snitch. Brown was incensed that the department continued to support the informer, even after learning of the man's pedophilic practices.
Brown is hired by a sadist to dig up dirt on his sister's "boyfriend." Soon he is mired in murder, arson, swindles, police corruption, and enough perversion to keep an entire squad of detectives busy. Brown has to face his own demons before resolving the crime in his own extra-legal fashion.
I recommend listening to Mahler's Second Symphony while reading this fast-paced novel. It's not called the Resurrection Symphony for nothing.
Fritz Brown is James Ellroy's first creation and a worthy successor to Philip Marlowe. Brown is an ex-cop, dismissed from the L.A.P.D. for having broken the legs of the Vice Department's favorite snitch. Brown was incensed that the department continued to support the informer, even after learning of the man's pedophilic practices.
Brown is hired by a sadist to dig up dirt on his sister's "boyfriend." Soon he is mired in murder, arson, swindles, police corruption, and enough perversion to keep an entire squad of detectives busy. Brown has to face his own demons before resolving the crime in his own extra-legal fashion.
I recommend listening to Mahler's Second Symphony while reading this fast-paced novel. It's not called the Resurrection Symphony for nothing.
jeb1945's review against another edition
1.0
Improbable characters with no depth, unbelievable plot, stilted cliched writing, perhaps his other books are better
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