A review by moreadsbooks
Brown's Requiem by James Ellroy

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has changed slightly, topographically: Ralph's market is now a Korean church, old gas stations and parking lots have been replaced by ugly pocket shopping centers.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.