JAMES ELLROY:
SUMMARY:The final volume of "The L.A. Quartet," — Ellroy's fictional alternative history of the City of Angels circa the 1940s and '50s. The novel sees a return to first-person narration — this time by corrupt L.A.P.D. Detective Dave Klein. "White Jazz" takes the stripped-down prose of "L.A. Confidential" to its furthest extreme: some found the novel difficult to read. Ellroy himself has said it is crucial to read the book in stretches of 100 or more pages in order to adjust to the radically different prose-style.
"White Jazz also introduces the character Pete Bondurant, a central player in "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand" (published May 2001).
A film adaptation of "White Jazz" has also been announced.
PUBLISHER'S TEASER:"Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns — it's all in a day's work for Lieutenant Dave Klein, Los Angeles Police Department. Trained as a lawyer in school, schooled as a strongarm on the street, bought and paid for by the mob, there's nothing he's not into and nobody's better at any of it. But in the fall of 1958, when the Feds announce a full-out investigation into police corruption, everything goes haywire.
"Suddenly, the game Klein thought he was running has a new set of rules — and they're not his. He's been hung out as bait, 'a bad cop to draw the heat,' and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins — all of them hell-bent on keeping their own dirty secrets hidden. For Klein, 'forty-two and going on dead,' it's dues time.
"And it's Klein who tells his own story — his voice clipped and sharp and as brutal as the events he's describing — taking us with him on a hellish journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, greed, and perversion. It's a world he helped create, and now he'll do anything to get out of it alive...
"Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor-edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering, and the most explosive novel yet from James Ellroy."
—© Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
POINTS:The novel was first published by Century in the U.K. (ISBN: 0-7126-3412-6) in 1992 (pictured above, on right). The U.S. edition was printed by Knopf (Ellroy's first novel for the publisher) on Sept. 10, 1992 (ISBN: 0-679-41449-5) and runs 349 pages.
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