BLOOD’S A ROVER by James Ellroy (2009)

reviewed by Mike Dennis

As every fan of James Ellroy knows by now, the third and final installment of his Underworld USA Trilogy is now available.  Through its 640 pages, Blood’s A Rover is a rollercoaster wrap-up of Ellroy’s hellish vision of America in the sixties, seen through the eyes of three principal characters.

1. Wayne Tedrow, former Las Vegas cop and heroin dealer, whose father had intimate knowledge of the JFK assassination plot. Now working with the mob to open casinos in the Dominican Republic.

2. Dwight Holly, previously engineered the Martin Luther King assassination while setting up James Earl Ray as the fall guy (all at the behest of J Edgar Hoover). Now turns his attention to disrupting West Coast black militant groups.

3. Don Crutchfield, LA private investigator with a fondness for peeping through windows at night. Lands a job finding a woman who stole money from his client.  Through this, he’s drawn in to a dizzying array of political intrigue, hate-group conspiracies, and Mafia dreams for the future.

At the center of Blood’s A Rover is the shadowy leftist Joan Klein, known as the Red Goddess, along with a mysterious cache of emeralds stolen from an armored truck years earlier.  All three of the principal characters eventually become obsessed with finding Joan, and the book seems to take a subtle turn once she walks into the story, as she slowly becomes the focus of the novel.

Ellroy has expanded his vision well beyond Los Angeles, taking the reader across America from black militant storefronts in LA to Howard Hughes’ Las Vegas hotel suite all the way to the Oval Office.  He spends a good deal of time deep in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where voodoo potions are the order of the day.

The many, many characters, who appear and disappear with blinding speed, are given to similar-sounding voices, so it’s not always easy to tell who’s speaking.  Their collective voices are, in fact, Ellroy’s own voice, giving him a personal stake in the proceedings.  This is one of the reasons that Ellroy is a tough read.  You have to accept the fact that he resides, to one degree or another, in all of his characters.

The trilogy, spanning from 1958-1972, is a sweeping look at the ugly underbelly of America during that turbulent period, at the precise point where byzantine political plots, racial paranoia, and organized crime collide.  He has said that one could read Blood’s A Rover and glean from its opening the back story of the first two books.  I wouldn’t recommend it.  American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are necessary steps to arriving at this fitting finish to a cold-blooded epic story.

His last effort, The Cold Six Thousand, was the second installment in his current trilogy.  The first, American Tabloid, was, in my opinion, a masterpiece.  It stood to reason that Six Thousand, which began literally on the very day of the finale of Tabloid, would carry me through more wonderful reading sessions.  I saw myself being enveloped in Ellroy’s machine-gun writing style, swiftly transported into his cynical world of killers, drug dealers, hookers, and high-level political intrigue.

All those elements were there, all right, but about halfway through the 600+ page book, I started to lose interest.  The characters started to repeat themselves, the story bogged down in its own multiplicity of plots, and worst of all, I knew where it was all headed. Nevertheless, I plowed on, turning page after page, hoping the whole thing would resuscitate itself.  It never did, and so, I did something I have never done in all my reading life.

I put the book down seven pages before the end.

Wracked with guilt, I stuck the book in a drawer and never looked at it again until I moved a few years ago, at which time I donated it, along with many other books, to the local library.

I might add at this point that I’ve never spoken to anyone about this, and in the years since, have heard only outstanding things about The Cold Six Thousand.

Without question, I’m going to read Blood’s A Rover as though none of the above had ever happened.  I’m sure it will pick up precisely where Six Thousand left off, and I know I’m going to love it.

Aren’t I?

I’m a crime fiction writer, living in Las Vegas, who’s been toiling in the vineyards for years until L&L Dreamspell Publishing picked up one of my novels, The Take.  It’s a fast-paced little noir effort that will be out sometime in 2010.   Thanks go to Morgan St James for her energetic efforts in helping me with the preliminary editing.  You can read an excerpt of it here on this site. 

I’ve always admired the best of the crime novelists.  I’m talking about hardboiled fiction guys like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and Raymond Chandler, among others, who between them, managed to kick the door open a crack or two, all the while operating under the stigma of  “pulp” writer.  They made it ”respectable” to write crime fiction, elitist public opinion notwithstanding.  Later, you had Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and so many others who shoved the door all the way open so guys like me could just walk right through it.  Speaking only for myself, I owe these men a serious debt of gratitude.