ORDER THE U.S. SOFTCOVER EDITION OF DESTINATION: MORGUE
ORDER THE U.K. HARDCOVER EDITION OF DESTINATION: MORGUE
ORDER THE U.S. SOFTCOVER EDITION OF DESTINATION: MORGUE
ORDER THE U.K. HARDCOVER EDITION OF DESTINATION: MORGUE
We last caught up with James Ellroy in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May 2001. The second volume of his "Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy," The Cold Six Thousand, had just become the first of the author’s hardcovers to crack the NYT best-seller list.
A few months later it was suddenly September 11 and the world turned upside down.
Ellroy’s world changed in another way, too — his long-standing gig with GQ abruptly ended when he and a host of other authors were booted following the ouster of revered editor Art Cooper.
Most of the remaining GQ articles have now been gathered in Ellroy’s new book, Destination: Morgue! L.A. Tales.
The new volume contains nonfiction and three new novellas featuring L.A. homicide detective "Rhino" Rick Jenson and his alliterative inamorata Donna Donahue — a thinly disguised version of actress Dana Delaney.
Jenson is obsessed by the unsolved murder of Stephanie Gorman — a particularly nasty sex crime that also receives nonfiction treatment in the new Ellroy book.
James Ellroy has resettled in California where he is working on the third and final volume of the "Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy."
He recently made news when he penned an introduction for the book Black Dahlia Avenger in which retired LAPD detective Steve Hodel claims his own father, George Hodel, killed Elizabeth Short — the woman at the center of Ellroy’s breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia.
While Ellroy questions the case as laid out by Hodel, he thinks his solution might be the correct one.
Ellroy has also taken a more active role in a different medium, serving as executive producer of the documentary Bazaar Bizarre about now-dead Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella.
James Ellroy spoke with interviewer Craig McDonald from his home in California in October 2004.
McDonald: Do you miss the outlet/platform of GQ? I had the sense you had great latitude in terms of subject matter and the topics you focused on.
Ellroy: Great question. Wonderful introductory question. The answer is yeah, I do. A bunch of events interceded last year in June of ’03. They fired Art Cooper – a legendary magazine editor, inducted in the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. They brought in a fella who wanted to reshape the magazine. Astonishingly, I got the boot. Odd.
McDonald: Given the fact that you’d won, at least twice I think, the GQ novelist of the year award, yeah.
Ellroy: Their award for literature, yeah. And, you know, I’m a man in my fifties. They fired all the mature guys.
McDonald: I noticed there are some pieces that you wrote for GQ after Crime Wave (the first GQ collection) appeared, that aren’t in Destination: Morgue!. Any particular significance to that? I know there was the last piece on Anne Sexton and Dana Delaney … something on 9/11, that was very short.
Ellroy: It was a short piece that was part of a larger piece on the terrorist bombings.
McDonald: And the presidential piece, on the 2000 Bush/Gore race isn’t here.
Ellroy: The presidential piece, which was a hilarious piece, didn’t make it. It wasn’t timely. Sonny Mehta thought it wasn’t timely. And my piece on Bill O’Reilly isn’t there. They wanted to keep it to crime and keep it to L.A.
McDonald: Anything happen recently that you’d particularly like to have sunk your teeth into as a journalist or essayist?
Ellroy: Actually no. I don’t follow politics. I don’t watch news. I went to Vegas for a couple of fights and I didn’t find them moving or explicative in any way. What I love about this book here, is that it is a such a primer on me — on my obsessions … on my interests … on my fixations. And then those three wild-ass novellas at the end.
McDonald: Let’s jump ahead to those. I remember in your last piece for GQ, you were talking about maybe writing some things with actress Dana Delaney as a protagonist. And you have a "Donna Donahue" here, and they are, for the most part, a contemporary set of stories, so I’m wondering, is it OK to read anything in there?
Ellroy: Well, you certainly can. Dana and I are friends. I wanted a thinly disguised Dana Delaney. I wanted a Dana Delaney stand-in. Did you enjoy the novellas?
McDonald: I liked the last one (Jungletown Jihad) the best. And in a way, it’s funny, I wish that one had been first, because it kind of contextualizes the other two.
Ellroy: Well, keep in mind, there’s chronology there. The first one where Donna and Rick meet, it’s ’83. Then you go to ’04 and to ’05.
McDonald: And you go way out into the future.
Ellroy: Oh yeah, because Rhino Rick narrates this from heaven.
McDonald: You’ve made some statements about the "crime novel" being "dead" or moving away from crime fiction. I really thought after the Lloyd Hopkins books you probably wouldn’t write another contemporary cop and I think you had even indicated that that was the case. And here we are.
Ellroy: These are novellas, keep in mind. And keep in mind these are also deliberately comic. They are comic novellas. This is as dark as humor gets, I think, in many ways. You look at the last one — it’s a comedy about Arab terrorists, you know. Half of whom want to blow up buildings and half of whom want to go to lap dance layers and get blowjobs.
McDonald: All factually accurate, if I remember the facts surrounding Atta and company prior to Sept 11, 2001.
Ellroy: All factually accurate. And each of the three stories ties to a sex killer from the 1950s L.A. scene.
McDonald: Right. In the novellas, you use something you write about elsewhere in the collection in nonfiction form — the murder of Stephanie Gorman. That’s an obsessive case for your detective in the novellas, Rick Jenson. What is it about that case, particularly, that keeps bringing you back around to it in this book? I guess in terms of age, she’d have been roughly a peer of yours….
Ellroy: She was one year and three months younger than me. We grew up four-and-a-half or five miles apart. She grew up more affluently than I did. We went to adjoining high schools. I recall the case very very dimly from "freedom summer" for me, 1965 — the year that my father died and I got kicked out of high school … got kicked out of the Army. It’s a particularly horrible crime that should have been a signature L.A. crime had the Watts Riots not intersected. Also, it’s a one-off sex crime. They were never able — and I read the file, many times — they were never able to link that killer to any other existing crime, pre- or post-.
McDonald: That’s a little like your mother’s murder in that sense, too.
Ellroy: Yeah, but this was a deliberate, planned sex crime. My mother was a date rape that went bad.
McDonald: You wrote an introduction recently for the book Black Dahlia Avenger. You don’t necessarily really endorse its author’s theory, but you seem to accept it as a real possibility.
Ellroy: I think it’s more than that. I think he did it. I say that with some reluctance. I think a lot of the underpinnings of the story don’t work. He posited a great and far-reaching L.A.P.D. cover-up and conspiracy and can’t prove any of it. Here’s the thing that gets me about it: When I read the book in hardcover I wasn’t convinced.
McDonald: The alleged pictures of Elizabeth Short, alone, threw me. Those clearly were not pictures of Elizabeth Short.
Ellroy: Well, here’s the thing: Here’s what you have to believe — this is the jump between hardcover and paperback — at the very least, George Hodel was a psychopathic libertine. He was tried for incest with his 14-year-old daughter. A very bad guy. He had 11 kids by various women. One kid grew up to be a homicide detective in L.A.P.D. Odd, in itself. Okay, dad dies. Steve Hodel sees his personal effects and comes to the conclusion, erroneously, I think, that those pictures are of Elizabeth Short. He becomes convinced and posits in a very well-layered, circumstantial case, his theory that his father killed Elizabeth Short. I’m unconvinced.
In the lag-time between the hardcover and paperback publications, an L.A. Times reporter named Steve Lopez unearths the D.A.’s bureau file on the Short case. George Hodel, Steve Hodel’s father, was the number one suspect. They had bugged and hot-wired all his telephones and his house. They have him on tape in a certified transcript from February of 1950 saying, "So what if I killed the Black Dahlia? They can’t prove it. The only one who knows it is my secretary and she’s dead."
So, reluctantly, given that, I’ll buy that. This feels to me, almost, like divine intervention. If indeed, as I suspect, that those pictures are not of Elizabeth Short, but he (Steve Hodel) investigates the case at great length, puts together a finally unconvincing case, but it turns out his old man was the number one suspect and admitted it on a tape. That’s enough.
McDonald: Have you had any feelers about replacing the GQ gig, at all? I seem to remember Vanity Fair courting you at some point.
Ellroy: They came around while I was working for GQ six or seven years ago. You know, what I do is very specific, and Art Cooper was behind it one-hundred-percent of the time. I’m more or less convinced that the magazines that are out there right now have other agendas. I don’t know American culture very well. I’m uninterested in the war on terrorism. I write about a very specific number of things. I have a very limited imagination. I think prudent magazine editors know that.
McDonald: You moved back to California — has that sparked anything in terms of wanting to write about L.A. again?
Ellroy: Naw. I just like the central coast here. It’s amenable. It’s very rarely hot.
McDonald: It beats a Kansas City summer?
Ellroy: Boy….
McDonald: The Robert Blake case is addressed in one of the pieces in Destination: Morgue! Have you had any more thoughts about that case since your treatment first appeared in GQ?
Ellroy: I don’t know. I haven’t followed it at all. The murder occurred in May of ’01. We’re in October of ’04. That’s three-and-a-half years.
McDonald: Any loud, current crimes you’d like a crack at or are tracking?
Ellroy: No, none. I retain very strong friendships in L.A.P.D. I’d bet you could cut me loose — I have several friends on the L.A.P.D Cold Case unit — I would love to just take a walk through … to read some old files. I’m sure I could make it happen. But then of course I’d get obsessed like I did with Gorman. My life would get disrupted again and I can’t afford that right now.
McDonald: It really became that big an investment of your time working on that piece?
Ellroy: Yeah, yeah. There were five boxes of files and memorabilia and miscellany to read through. And you better read through ’em all. In a way you have probably eight pages of reconstruction down to the most minute detail in essential chronological order (in "Stephanie"). In order to get that, I had to read five file boxes and take notes.
McDonald: That’s a bigger investigative record than you went through for your entire book-length account of your mother’s murder for My Dark Places, isn’t it?
Ellroy: Yes.
McDonald: I recently watched a screener of Bazaar Bizarre, about Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella. You’re executive producer for that film. Did you know much about that case before the documentary?
Ellroy: No. No (director) Ben Meade is a good friend of mine and I was presented with material by Ben. You know, we’re doing a Destination: Morgue! documentary together later in the year. Regarding Berdella, Ben presented me with specific pieces of film to view and then I commented on them. I haven’t seen the movie, but apparently, a lot of my comments are hilarious.
McDonald: You haven’t seen it?
Ellroy: No. But he’s a good filmmaker. We’re going to do that documentary, called Destination: Morgue! later in the year. It will be dramatized sequences from the book — not the fiction but the nonfiction. Dramatized pieces, my voice, to camera narration — interviews with Steve Cooley, district attorney of Los Angeles County and maybe even another dinner with my policemen friends focused on some crime. Then we’re going to do a nonfiction segment on those three killers — (Stephen) Nash, (Donald Keith) Bashor, (Harvey) Glatman — who inform the text of the three novellas.
McDonald: Now that you don’t have that GQ outlet, I just wonder what you do when you’re not working on a novel. Do you continue to write short stories and novellas?
Ellroy: No. I do film and TV work to earn money, and to bide my time between writing the novels, which is all-consuming.
McDonald: There’s a lot of pressure on people these days to write a book a year. Usually to pretty poor effect. You’ve resisted that and actually gone the other route. Are you under any pressure to put more out there?
Ellroy: No. I’m 56-years-old and healthy. I have seven more novels that I want to write in my lifetime and I’ll probably write more.
McDonald: But you do have seven in mind? I know you were talking about a Warren Harding book.
Ellroy: Oh yeah, Warren Harding is right after this book (volume three of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy). I’ve got a book about Wisconsin — a generational novel about Wisconsin.
McDonald: About a family of patrolmen, right?
Ellroy: I’m not sure yet. But, after that point, more will be revealed. Yeah. You cannot write a great book — I think I write a great book — and they’re huge. And that’s the kind of book I like to read. I don’t want some shit fucking generic motherfucker toadstool of a book. Oh, I can’t wait for the latest, you know?
McDonald: How is that going? Are you fairly deep into the writing of volume three now?
Ellroy: Yeah, yeah. I’m deep into it. I’m not promising a delivery date but you know, it’s huge. It’s bigger than The Cold Six Thousand.
McDonald: I know you’ve said you want the three novels, literally, to be successively larger. I’m wondering how you sustain your concentration and your interest across this many years.
Ellroy: The interest is easy. The concentration … you need a very very strong superstructure. And you need the outlines that you and I discussed when we were in Ann Arbor that day (May 2001). You know, you need a big big super structure and the determination to make it work. Now, one of the big revelations for me, early on as a writer when I was into writing The Big Nowhere, was that I realized I could execute whatever I could conceive of.
McDonald: That’s … amazing. That’s stunning. That puts pressure on you, though. If you have that ability, you’ve got to use it … not lay back.
Ellroy: Yeah.
McDonald: Do you read a lot of poetry? You drop these lines of poetry into interviews, articles … and I’ve seen you do it across a number of years. Auden, particularly.
Ellroy: You know, I’ve read through Auden. A lot of the shit I don’t understand, and I don’t like and I don’t get.
McDonald: I know you read Anne Sexton.
Ellroy: Ohhh baby! Oh man!
McDonald: Hot but doomed.
Ellroy: Craig, you’re brilliant. You’ve just defined, Anne Sexton: hot but doomed. You’d do her, wouldn’t you?
McDonald: Well yeah, based on the photos I’ve seen of her in her prime … yeah.
Ellroy: Hah!
McDonald: Have you written any poetry of your own?
Ellroy: Naw. But I do love Sexton. "Hot but doomed."
McDonald: I know you say you don’t read a lot of crime fiction, but have you read anything recently? And if so, what was it?
Ellroy: No. No. People tell me there are Ellroy manqués out there. I don’t know who they are. I’m always getting some fucking 1950s-noir pastiche in the mail.
McDonald: I’m sure. I’ve heard of a couple and I’ve picked up one or two to look at, but other than milieu, it’s not doing what you do. Although I did run across a song recently by L.A.-born, Texas-based songwriter Tom Russell ("Tijuana Bible") about Johnny Stompanato that had to have been cribbed from the L.A. Quartet….
Ellroy: Did you see the movie Collateral?
McDonald: Nope.
Ellroy: Well it stinks. But there is a scene where Jamie Fox and Tom Cruise were running around doing stupid riffs on life and death and Jamie Fox throws out the phrase, "The Big Ass Nowhere."
McDonald: Do you go back and reread your older stuff now?
Ellroy: No.
McDonald: Don’t look back?
Ellroy: No. I concentrate on what I’ve got in front of me.
McDonald: You once started and never finished a novel, I think it was called The Confessions of Bugsy Seigel.
Ellroy: Yeah. It was a dog.
McDonald: It’s a dog?
Ellroy: Yeah, it’s in my archives at the University of South Carolina.
McDonald: I suppose there’s no possibility we’d ever get The Confessions of Dudley Smith, As Told to Dave Klein?
Ellroy: Hah! No.
McDonald: It’s over?
Ellroy: Dudley is, let’s see, he’s right at a 100 … no, he’s 102, or something. He’s still alive. I’m the guy who created him, so I can say when he’s dead. Twenty years from now: "Alright he’s fuckin’ dead!" Evil dies with him.
McDonald: Is there anything on your mind that you’d particularly like to get out?
Ellroy: I like this book a lot. I like the illustrations. Kaya Christian (Playboy Playmate November 1967): To go back and write about having the hots for Kaya Christian, and have a picture of Kaya Christian in there….
McDonald: This is a big improvement over Crime Wave because one of the things I like about the original GQ articles, you did get the photos, you did get the illustrations, but in Crime Wave, the first GQ collection, you didn’t. Some of the art and illustration in GQ was so nicely done.
Ellroy: Yeah. You know what? I miss GQ. God bless ’em. I miss Art Cooper, you know? I had wonderful editors there. I had Paul Scanlon, Ilena Silverman and Michael Hainey. I had wonderful friends there.
McDonald: I wish you luck with the tour — it looks like another big one. I guess you’ve done Europe already?
Ellroy: You know what, I did France.
McDonald: You’re huge in France. What’s the appeal of your stuff there?
Ellroy: Well, you know, they were the early discoverers of the roman noir.
McDonald: Mr. Ellroy, I thank you for taking the time.
Ellroy: Listen, it was a blast.
— © Craig McDonald, October 2004