The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

I read The Cold Six Thousand hoping to answer a question, which was whether James Ellroy was developing from the writer of breakneck but clunkily plotted pulp crime novels to something bigger. As often happens when you look to literature for answers to a question, I only got more questions. I still don't know if Ellroy is developing from something good to something great. He has developed a style of writing immediately recognisable and unintimable. He has secured himself a place in American crime writing that is unassailable. Whether he's going to move beyond that into the world of really great writing, is unclear.

My previous form: the Dudley Smith Trio (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz). American Tabloid. And now The Cold Six Thousand. Each one of these novels follows a very similar trajectory. They start brilliantly, sweep you through first half of the novel at a breakneck pace that may even leave fainthearted souls with heightened pulse rates, before reaching a conclusion that is somehow unsatisfying and questionable. Of them all, American Tabloid is the best, in that it sustains it's berserk pace to the end and its plot lacks the sense of doubt that weakened the Dudley Smith novels.

The Cold Six Thousand is a sequel to it, literally picking up just a few staggering minutes after Tabloid left off. The opening chapters are Ellroy at his brutal, electric best. Here's a sample:

1:50 p.m.
They touched down. Wayne got off first. Wayne stamped blood back into his legs.
He walked to the terminal. Schoolgirls blocked the gate. One girl cried. One girl fucked with prayer beads.
He stepped around them. He followed baggage signs. People walked past him. They looked sucker-punched.
Red eyes. Boo-hoo. Women with Kleenex.
Wayne stopped at baggage claim. Kids whizzed by. They shot cap pistols. They laughed.
A man walked up - Joe Redneck - tall and fat. He wore a Stetson. He wore big boots. he wore a mother-of-pearl .45.
"If you're sargeant Tedrow, I'm officer Maynard D. Moore of the Dalalas Police Department."
They shook hands. Moore chewed tobacco. More wore cheap cologne. A woman walked by - boo-hoo-hoo - one big red nose.
Wayne said, "What's wrong?"
Moore smiled. "Some kook shot the President."

Ellroy's style is immediately identifiable, like a (bloody) fingerprint. No-one else writes like this. It turns some people off. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you then don't read James Ellroy. The Cold Six Thousand is seven hundred pages long, and - apart from a few 'document inserts' (letters and telephone conversation transcripts) - it is all like that.

The novel picks up the story of American Tabloid immediately after that novel's culmination - the assasination of JFK. Wayne Tedrow arrives in Dallas to do a hit. At the same time, JFK is assasinated. The first part of the novel deals with the aftermath of the killing - the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, the subsequent killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, various unpleasant actons taken by various characters to disguise The Truth - for this is conspiracy theory heaven, kids - while Tedrow botches the job he was sent to Dallas to carry out. Scene shift to Las Vagas. Howard Hughes wants to own it. The mob want to bilk Hughes. Pete Bondurant and Ward Littel - characters from American Tabloid - are involved in various dealings and operations. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of people get dead, rarely from natural causes. The first half is brilliant. Vicious, cruel, blood soaked, racist, misogynist, preposterous, but brilliant.

There are, however, problems. The first is one of scale. Ellroy decided to bookend his novel with the murders of the Kennedy brothers - JFK at one end, RFK at the other, with Martin Luther King thrown in as a 'Whack two, get one free' bonus. This means the novel is covering a period of about five years, with a long hiatus in the middle. Ellroy's compulsion to have three main characters - every book of his that I've read features three major characters - exacerbates the problem, as it means there are a lot of character hours to be filled. So he thinks about what else is going on in the 1960s, and packs his characters off to Vietnam in the novel's major mis-step. Yeah, it fills up a couple of hundred pages and a few inconvenient years in the middle. And yeah, it lets Ellroy tick off a few boxes on his list of Things That Need To Be Included In The Definitive Novel Of The 1960s - Vietnam, tick, CIA, tick, Heroin trafficking, tick - but it doesn't add to the story proper, it just kills time.

And then at the end, it is Kill Time again - MLK and RFK get bumped mighty quickly, plus a couple of other bonus deaths. It should be a stormer of an ending, but it feels a bit disappointing. The victims don't mean much within the confines of the novel - none of the main characters are emotionally invested in them, and Ellroy's attempts to convince us that Ward Littell cares, don't convince - so in the end it is just another couple of high profile tap jobs, and the main characters aren't directly involved. It leaves the conclusion feeling curiously underpowered, like you've started a race in a Ferrari, and ended it on a bicycle.

Another problem is that the novel relies heavily on coincidence at key moments. Some of this is just lazy on Ellroy's part - it is coincidence that Littel fails to spot a crucial tail, it is coincidence he sees a revealing photograph - and the feverish police work that made parts of The Big Nowhere exhilerating is replaced by vague freferences to various minions doing the hard work of actually finding and doing, for the main. The much sought Wendell Dufree isn't tracked down by vengance-ridden Wayne's detective work, but by a tip from some off-stage characters.

Even then, there is a power in Ellroy's crazy vision of America in the 1960s that's hard to resist. At the risk of sounding repetitive, Ellroy writes like no-one else, and no-one else writes like Ellroy. Every page contains almost random moments of technical brilliance. Randomly, from page 488:

Truce.
They split the Stardust. They moved into the Cavern. They bought a new TV. Barb sulked and judged. He ran the biz. He ran dope. He ran guns.
Barb worked the Cavern. Barb wore go-go gowns. Barb showed off skin-plus. Dig it: No pinholes/no bruises/no tracks.
Truce.
They lived. They made love. He travelled. Barb flew then. He knew it. Barb flew white powder air.
They lived the truce. He nailed the Shit Clause:
Barb was right - the war was fucked - we couln't win. Barb was right - they had big love - they'd stick and win. Barb was wrong - white horse had teeth- white horse bit to win.
White flag/ceasefire/truce.
He conceded points. He owed Barb. He brought her to Dallas. The truce held. The clause held. The ink ran.

There aren't many current authors who could write a passage like that. Technical experimentation is considered to be dead, rejected by readers and writers alike as Too Hard. Too Hard to write, Too Hard to read. Instead, we get anti-literary sludge about ideas and feelings, identity fiction written in comfort zone prose. But Ellroy's managed to make a lot of people read his technically demanding, anti-comfort zone, Too Hard prose - which shows that failure isn't on the part of the readers as much as the writers. There are people out there who will read stuff that stretches their ability to understand, that doesn't make it easy. For proving this, if nothing else, Ellroy's a significant writer.

Perhaps Ellroy tries to hard. Perhaps 800 pages is 300 too many. Perhaps Vietnam was too big to be worked into The Cold Six Thousand as a diversion. Perhaps it deserves its own distinct treatment by Ellroy. He isn't perfect. He might not even be great. But he is important.