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A review by nigellicus
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
5.0
With Spring busily springing and the ice gradually thawing from our hair and the feeling coming back to our fingers and toes, it would, perhaps, behoove us to recommend something of a bright and cheerful nature to our readers, something warm and sparkly and happy and such. Well, maybe next time.
Blood’s A Rover is the third book in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, which has charted the dark and murky underbelly of American history, from JFK to Nixon. The current volume brings us up to the seventies on a wave of drugs, racism, violence and corruption on a massive scale. Ellroy pulls no punches and spares no sacred cows. Everyone’s dirty, everyone’s scamming and nobody’s innocent.
Dwight Holly, Wayne Tedrow Jnr and Don Crutchfield are Ellroy’s damaged, morally compromised antiheroes, charting a course between the depraved paranoia of J Edgar Hoover, the insane profligacy of Howard Hughes and the scheming unctuousness of Richard Nixon. While working to build mob-financed casinos in the Dominican Republic, the must also engage in a clandestine race war, targeting black power organisations in Los Angeles. They find themselves drawn to women on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and these obsessions spell their doom.
Epic in scope, relentlessly paced and written in terse, pared down, hard-boiled staccato sentences, this is a hyped-up, pumped-up journey through a vision of social and personal damnation, which will be immensely satisfying to readers of previous volumes. New readers may want to go back to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, though be aware that the middle volume is also the weakest of the three.
So yes, it’s grim and violent and straddles the line between unflinching realism and outright voyeurism, but
it’s also a hell of a thriller that will glue itself to your eyeballs.
Blood’s A Rover is the third book in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, which has charted the dark and murky underbelly of American history, from JFK to Nixon. The current volume brings us up to the seventies on a wave of drugs, racism, violence and corruption on a massive scale. Ellroy pulls no punches and spares no sacred cows. Everyone’s dirty, everyone’s scamming and nobody’s innocent.
Dwight Holly, Wayne Tedrow Jnr and Don Crutchfield are Ellroy’s damaged, morally compromised antiheroes, charting a course between the depraved paranoia of J Edgar Hoover, the insane profligacy of Howard Hughes and the scheming unctuousness of Richard Nixon. While working to build mob-financed casinos in the Dominican Republic, the must also engage in a clandestine race war, targeting black power organisations in Los Angeles. They find themselves drawn to women on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and these obsessions spell their doom.
Epic in scope, relentlessly paced and written in terse, pared down, hard-boiled staccato sentences, this is a hyped-up, pumped-up journey through a vision of social and personal damnation, which will be immensely satisfying to readers of previous volumes. New readers may want to go back to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, though be aware that the middle volume is also the weakest of the three.
So yes, it’s grim and violent and straddles the line between unflinching realism and outright voyeurism, but
it’s also a hell of a thriller that will glue itself to your eyeballs.