Old men and their books: Red Sheet

Red Sheet
By James Elloy

I never know what the hell is going on in James Ellroy books. It's always a huge, convoluted mess of reprehensible people - a volatile cocktail of racism, lust, power and political ideologies running rampant, as communists and Christians alike commit horrific killings in post-war LA. 

The big picture is always easy enough to follow - there are hard twists in his stories, sudden revelations that burn into the page - but it's the details that really matter. You can't skim read Ellroy books, you'll miss something vital, especially with such a sprawling cast of characters, although some important points get hammered over and over again in macabre rhythm. There's just so much to keep track of, you need to mind photograph it all like the fictional Nazi detective Hans Maslick advises.

It's page after page of surveillances and break-ins and putting details together, before exploding into sudden violence. The action scenes are also hard and fast and brutal - evil men don't get socked in the jaw, they get their noses bitten off, or their feet set on fire.

Red Sheet has all of this usual Ellroy malarky, as well as a brilliant mystery - who are the four evil motherfuckers who murdered priests and raped nuns in the Spanish Civil War and have been running discreet death squads on the American west coast for decades, and how much do these feverish 20rh century ideologies tarnish the entire world?

The Freddie Otash books are more focused than the second LA Quartet he has also been working in for the past decade or so, with that first person narration, is all coming through Freddie's head, and full of the analysis he puts on scenes of atrocity.

His brain takes in all the incredible details, I still love the way his characters toss a room, and I really like the sound of the Cure, when powerful men get too strung out on speed or booze of women, and they hole up in the back of a Chinese restaurant, get hooked up to a glucose and morphine drip, get some full blood transfusions, eat a fucking shitload of chop suey and come out feeling like Superman. That sounds like fun.

I always deeply enjoy the Ellroy books and never recommend them to anybody because these stories of psychos and stone cold killers are most definitely not for everybody. And his style is extremely idiosyncratic, - it was getting more abstract in the later American Tabloid books, but has been pared back a little by Freddie's narration. It's easier to follow, but also packed and bopping and machine gun delivery. 

It remains incredibly hard to write about his books without imitating that style, but nobody could capture words like James Ellroy does, even when they are put together for the most appalling crimes.