The four-page intro has more acts of violence than hours of prime-time TV. The first word of the first chapter is “heroin.” Yes, crime novelist Ellroy is back with a new novel.
The scene: downtown Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, circa 1968. The hippies are restless and disrupting the Chicago Democratic convention, the Panthers are on the loose, and COINTELPRO and J. Edgar Hoover are watching. Racial tension? You could cut it with a knife.
The sprawling story revolves around a mysterious cold case — a jewel heist gone wrong.
Dwight Holly is a hardboiled, nerve-wracked FBI agent tasked with planting a mole in several black-power groups and creating tension, hopefully enough to discredit the movement. Wayne Tedrow is a cop known for gunning down black men exclusively. Marsh is a closeted black cop-turned-informant who witnessed the jewel heist when he was a teen and has been obsessed with it ever since. Crutch is a cub private investigator and peeping tom.
They’re all following the trail of emeralds, leaving dead bodies in their wake, and all clues keep coming back to a mysterious lefty activist named Joan, who has a gray streak in her hair and a knife scar on her arm. But who is she? The mystery of the jewel heist won’t be solved until they find her and figure out what makes her tick.
If this sounds confusing, it’s also classic noir, which isn’t about plot so much as drawing the reader into an entire world—from Communist Cuba to the seedy underbelly of Vegas. To get bogged in the dense thicket of twists which make up the sometimes overcooked plot is to miss the point. Raymond Chandler, the founding father of hardboiled noir and one of Ellroy’s heroes, would have agreed with this approach. While directing Chandler’s the Big Sleep, film director Howard Hawks asked him who killed one of his characters. “Hell if I know,” Chandler famously responded. The same could be said about parts of Ellroy’s story and that, oddly enough, is part of the fun.
Blood’s a Rover
By James Ellroy
Knopf