The Cold Six Thousand
James Ellroy Century, 672pp, £16.99
ISBN 0712648178
From LA to Washington and beyond, James Ellroy has always written on an epic scale - and canvases don't come much bigger than the underworld of 1960s America. His new novel, which has been years in the making and is the second in a trilogy, opens just five minutes after its predecessor, American Tabloid, ends - minutes during which the chaos surrounding JFK's death shook Dallas and the rest of the world. It closes five years later, shortly after the assassination of JFK's brother Bobby. Yet it is not a fictionalised account of the Kennedy killings or the conspiracy theories surrounding them. Nor is it a crime novel in any recognisable form (unless history is the crime and the implementers of public policy are the criminals). Instead, Ellroy has written an ambitious, extravagant book about history as obsession.
The Cold Six Thousand is built around a complex panoply of events, from the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and the troubles in Vietnam, through the covert war between Bobby Kennedy and the Mob, to the rise and fall of Martin Luther King. At its centre are three men: Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell, both veterans of the campaign to subvert the Kennedy administration, and Wayne Tedrow, a naive Vegas cop sent to Dallas to kill a drug-dealing pimp. As Tedrow is drawn further into the system of lies and violence that the other men represent, Ellroy's narrative becomes a maze of fact and fiction that blends his own creations with icons of the era such as Howard Hughes, J Edgar Hoover and President Johnson. This book lacks the vicious humour of American Tabloid, but Ellroy's love of celebrity sleaze is as great as ever, and there are numerous undesirable cameo roles for the likes of Sonny Liston, Sammy Davis Jr and Rock Hudson.
At times, plots become so multi-layered and allegiances change so swiftly that it is hard to keep pace; but Ellroy's attempt to demythologise Kennedy and show his assassination as just another death in a long series of violence is never less than gripping.
Ellroy's gift to the crime novel was always to find the parlance of the time, and the staccato prose of The Cold Six Thousand is perfect for the turbulent milieu in which it is set. Interspersed with FBI documents, recorded conversations and newspaper headlines, his apparently frenetic style is in fact rigidly structured: huge moments of history are conveyed in short, rhythmical blows.
The five years between 1963 and 1968 represented the last gasp of pre-public accountability America. Ellroy is not afraid to play the period for all its outrageousness; indeed, he revels in a world where everything is for sale, where every psychosis is noted and used, where men do things that they simply cannot live with. Nobody is innocent, nobody escapes unscathed, and the violence screams throughout the book - sometimes a little too loudly. Occasionally, the performer in Ellroy is allowed to cross the line.
But the excesses of this novel are more than balanced by Ellroy's compassion and the ways in which he shows how violence can be tempered by grace, and how political madness coheres into convincing personal redemption. Richer and darker than ever, this story of bad men getting older and coming to terms with their mortality reminds us how far ahead of his peers Ellroy really is.
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