A police-department Christmas party gone wrong sets up the dynamic of James Ellroy’s L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, which shakes three cops like dice over a map of Los Angeles. Jack Vincennes brought the booze, Ed Exley ends up locked in a closet and Bud White lets his temper get away with him, but when the smoke clears that skirmish (based on a real-life incident of police brutality) is just an establishing shot to where the three men are headed in pursuit of the perpetrators of a massacre. Meet your neo-noir if you dare.
The highly stylized language is your narrator as three officers, a pen-pusher, a short fuse and an addict, get wrapped up in the investigation of an April 1953 armed robbery at a coffee shop called the Nite Owl, originally believed to be the work of an African-American gang. The case is nearly closed and then under the weight of new evidence it swings open, and ruins their lives.
I finished this book more than a week ago and have been struggling with what to write about it, because it tested me. With its determination (I had earlier written “unwillingness”) not to leave out any element of the case, employing none as a red herring, it’s designed to frustrate, and when a dead end is hit it inspires a feeling of irritation that makes the same device used in
Richard Price’s LUSH LIFE look like a gnat against a swarm of mosquitoes.
Motivated by hate -- of themselves, of each other, of the mighty hand of Fate -- Exley, White and Vincennes work their own angles on the Nite Owl aided or blocked by the bureaucracy in which they operate. (Epistolary remnants which occasionally pop up between sections include departmental memos whose dryness I can only assume is original to the period.) Their approach to it is at times very journalistic, which was easier to buy when I was wondering how they had the time to separate from their open cases and chase down leads. It was never repetitious but as the staccato of the sentences pushed me forward, the plot pushed back. And at first, the language too felt like an impediment; there’s a consciousness to the argot that classic noir doesn’t have, the confetti of “K.A.”s and “NMI”s, the purposeful elimination of articles, that sings its own strange tune. The reconstruction o the case approaches and recedes with each cop’s discoveries and setbacks; as a reader, you have to be willing to exist to a certain extent in that quagmire until the ending, which (to be purposefully vague) I found completely exhilarating.
The complexity of the resolution rewards readers who manage to stick with L.A. CONFIDENTIAL until then, rejecting the common approach of the “twist” which leaves you feeling dim for not picking up on it earlier. It spools out over nearly a hundred pages of lead chasing and confrontations; at one point a character even lays out for the reader the exact gaps which exist in his reconstruction of the case, as if to remind (again) of the gulf that exists between suspicion and arraignment. I wanted to go back into it and poke around in the shot-up wreckage of the Nite Owl not to see what I’d missed the first time but just to experience the whole ride from the beginning.
That’s not how I felt at the conclusion of my previous (and first) Ellroy experience, with THE BLACK DAHLIA over two years ago. I felt the same adaptive curve in getting used to the language, but flew through the book only to be stopped cold at the ending. THE BLACK DAHLIA confirmed what I expected about the genre, that there could not be a satisfying conclusion in this open-ended world (how postmodern!); L.A. CONFIDENTIAL overturned that expectation completely.
Maybe it’s because of the way I read THE BLACK DAHLIA (over a long day of flight delays, when the escapist thrill was as necessary as air), that with L.A. CONFIDENTIAL I sabotaged my reading experience by chopping up its chapters over what turned out to be two months. But it’s worth remembering that both books are considered part of the same sequence of Ellroy novels, known as the “L.A. Quartet,” being the first and third volumes of it. I don’t question that either ending was less than intentional on Ellroy’s part, but my experience with the first clearly set me up for the next.
At one point one of the women in the book, whose representation is problematic enough to deserve its own post, says of her lover that he acts in bed "like he never wants it to end, because when it ends he will have to return to what he is." As much as the LAPD wants to close the Nite Owl case, the obsessive love for it does certain things for our protagonists (don’t call them heroes) -- getting Ed Exley attention from the top brass, Jack Vincennes something to think about besides drugs and his past, and letting Bud White imagine that he can be better than his erstwhile mentor and his reputation, "A DETECTIVE -- NOT A HEAD BASHER." At L.A. CONFIDENTIAL’s best I could smell the dusty files, took a breath before a door was kicked open. I’m not done reckoning with this book; for one thing, I’ve just watched the
1997 movie adaptation, whose acclaim (along with having read THE BLACK DAHLIA) prompted me to persevere.
