Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Wallander links Harderberg to the art dealers who bought paintings from his father. Wallander Senior is another recurring character in the novels. He’s irascible, unpredictable, and suffering from some form of dementia. In his younger days he churned out kitsch landscape art and the dealers, described by Kurt as “silk knights,” would turn up in their silk suits and American cars to buy. As a child Kurt was attracted to these men for their money and their style, but he hated the way his father ingratiated himself with them, while obviously despising them.

  The climax to the novel is melodramatic and unlikely. Wallander gains entry to the castle despite its security, overpowers Harderberg’s bodyguards, and escapes just in time to prevent Harderberg from flying off in his private jet. But in each of Mankell’s novels the plot is the least important element, and we allow ourselves to be carried along by the improbable story because we care about Kurt Wallander, his team, and his ideas about justice.

  Wallander appears for the last time in The Troubled Man. He’ll be missed, but he should not be forgotten.

  Ann Cleeves grew up in North Devon and worked as a bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard, probation officer, and reader development officer before writing full-time. She has two series of traditional crime stories—one set in Shetland and one in Northumberland. The first Shetland novel, Raven Black, won the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger. The Northumberland books have been adapted for ITV and star Brenda Blethyn as Vera Stanhope. Her latest novel is The Glass Room. Visit her online at www.anncleeves.com.

  American Tabloid

  by James Ellroy (1995)

  STUART NEVILLE

  * * *

  Lee Earle “James” Ellroy (b. 1948) is one of the iconic figures in modern crime fiction, the self-described Demon Dog of the genre. Born in Los Angeles, his life and work have been shadowed by the murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, a case that remains unsolved but was explicitly explored in his nonfiction book My Dark Places (1996). His novels are densely plotted, bleakly moral, and have latterly been written in a telegraphic prose of short, unadorned sentences, a style that has not proved uncontroversial, with one critic comparing the experience of reading later Ellroy to being hit over the head with a small hammer for six hundred pages.

  * * *

  “America was never innocent.” Thus begins James Ellroy’s foreword to American Tabloid, and just shy of six hundred pages later, he’ll have you convinced.

  The first book of the American Underworld Trilogy centers on three men who orbit John F. Kennedy’s rise to power, his thousand days of presidency, and, ultimately, his assassination. These bad, bad men are satellites to a world of collusion, conspiracy, and corruption. Kemper Boyd, G-man and scion of a once-wealthy dynasty, is driven by vanity and avarice, hoping to shine in Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s reflected glory. Ward Littell, Boyd’s fellow FBI agent, is a weak man willing to sell his soul to prove otherwise. Pete Bondurant is a man-mountain, a vicious thug in the employ of Howard Hughes and Jimmy Hoffa, looking for the big money and happy to spill blood to get it.

  All three are drawn, like driftwood in a whirlpool, to the epicenter of JFK’s presidential campaign. They rally support from the CIA, the mob, and Cuban exiles by aligning them all against a common enemy: Fidel Castro, the Communist leader who has seized power just miles from Miami, the treacherous heel who shafted the Outfit by nationalizing their Havana casinos, the ruthless dictator who tortured and executed his Cuban countrymen. They’re all convinced Bad-Back Jack is the man to take the Beard down. And when he doesn’t deliver, all roads lead to Dallas.

  In American Tabloid, James Ellroy shifts his diamond-sharp gaze away from post-WWII Los Angeles and broadens his canvas to cover the entire United States and beyond. It’s the hard-as-nails bravura of The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz exploded to sully five years of American history. With an almost tangible glee, Ellroy drags the Kennedy clan through the mud, especially its patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. Along the way we meet a mind-boggling cast of historical figures: J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Ruby, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, and more. Even Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe make appearances. The sheer scale of this story is awe-inspiring, and it’s a Herculean feat of plotting and character development.

  Like spy novelist John le Carré, keeping up with Ellroy’s twists and turns is akin to listening to bebop jazz: if you try to follow every melody, chord, and beat, you’ll find yourself dizzy and disoriented. Instead, you must step back and take in the greater arcs, like finding the three-dimensional image in a Magic Eye picture by looking through it. But complexity is not the greatest challenge in reading James Ellroy; the biggest obstacle is your willingness, or otherwise, to follow the author’s dark paths.

  I first read American Tabloid just over a decade ago while I was in the process of deciding that Ellroy was my favorite author. This is the book that sealed the deal. More than that, it’s the book that made me realize the depths a skilled writer can plumb while holding on to our empathy for his less than noble characters. Note the choice of word there: “empathy,” not “sympathy.” Ellroy can bring you to the darkest reaches of the soul, force you to stare unblinkingly at the cruel perversions of which human beings are capable, and send you away with those images seared on your mind—and he has the skill and the courage to make you glad of the journey. That’s the key thing I took away from American Tabloid: an author’s courage can take you places you never wanted to be, with people you never wanted to meet, and in the process teach you something about the nature of mankind.

  Here’s just one example of that courage in action. In a world whose morals are repugnant to us, most authors will have the protagonist stand apart from the mire. If racism, homophobia, and misogyny are the order of the day, the protagonist will somehow be more enlightened than his fellow man. Not with Ellroy. For the most part, his three protagonists are every bit as bigoted and hate-filled as those around them. Ellroy, the self-proclaimed ‘Demon Dog’ of crime fiction, has no use for political correctness. His characters’ worldviews are as tainted as the money the fictionalized Kennedy dynasty was built on. In a novel where our heroes commit murder, peddle heroin, and plot the assassination of the leader of the free world, why should we expect them to be above such base prejudices? When you open an Ellroy novel, you make a pact with the devil to see how low a character can sink. If you haven’t the stomach to go all the way, you’d better just close the book and put it back on the shelf.

  It was this utter fearlessness that impacted most upon me, and my writing. The greatest thing I’ve gained from Ellroy is the will to take my characters farther and deeper into the dark places than I, or the reader, might be comfortable with. When I’m tempted to tone down a scene, throw some artificially sympathetic trait on a character, or generally chicken out, it’s American Tabloid I remember.

  In Ellroy’s America, everyone has blood under their nails, from the lowest of street thugs to the holder of the highest office in the land. That bleak and cynical outlook is carried through American Tabloid’s sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. But it’s not until Blood’s a Rover, the conclusion to the “Underworld USA” trilogy, that the saga’s moral core comes into focus: the human and social cost of the lust for power. Taken as a whole, the trilogy must be considered a landmark in American literature, whose political themes seem ever more prescient as time goes by, but American Tabloid can simply be appreciated for its most basic nature: a bloody good thriller by a writer at the top of his game.

  Northern Ireland author Stuart Neville’s debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (aka The Twelve), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller in 2010, the Spinetingler “New Voice” award, also in 2010, Le Prix Mystère de la Critique du Meilleur Roman Étranger, and the Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger. The novel was further nominated for the Dilys Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, and the Macavity Award. Neville’s second novel, Collusion (2010), w
as also short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller. His current offering is Stolen Souls (2011). Visit him online at www.stuartneville.com.

  The Big Blowdown

  by George Pelecanos (1996)

  DEClAN BURKE

  * * *

  The novels of George Pelecanos (b. 1957) are for the most part set in Washington DC, spanning a period of time from the 1930s (The Big Blowdown, 1996) to the present day (The Cut, 2011). He made his debut with A Firing Offense in 1992, the first of the Nick Stefanos trilogy. A second cycle of novels, the DC Quartet, began with The Big Blowdown and concluded with Shame the Devil (2000). A further series of four novels, featuring private eyes Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, began with Right as Rain in 2001; Pelecanos’s most recent novel, What It Was (2012), is a prequel to that series. Pelecanos has also served as a coproducer and writer on the TV series The Wire (2002–08), for which he has won Edgar, Emmy, and Writers Guild of America awards, and is currently coproducing and writing on Treme (2010–).

  * * *

  It was a wandering father job . . .

  The Big Blowdown was George Pelecanos’s fifth novel. The previous books—the Nick Stefanos trilogy of A Firing Offense (1992), Nick’s Trip (1993), and Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995), and the stand-alone Shoedog (1994)—had already established Pelecanos as a unique voice, and one of the finest exponents of the modern American crime novel alongside his contemporaries Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and James Sallis.

  First-generation Greek American, the son of a Spartan mother and father, Pelecanos invested his work with an outsider’s insight into American culture and society, in particular the urban badlands of inner-city Washington DC.

  I tell you all this, of course, with the 20/20 clarity of hindsight. When I first stumbled across George Pelecanos, courtesy of a magazine article I read in the kitchen of a grotty student flat in Galway to distract me from the worst of a hangover, all I knew about the contemporary American crime novel was that, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy apart, it was a pale and largely pointless imitation of demigods such as Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson.

  Anyway, the magazine—I believe it was Uncut—claimed that George Pelecanos was the best thing since a very large loaf of thickly sliced bread, and I, as a reader of discerning taste, should get in on the ground floor with his latest offering, King Suckerman.

  This was 1997, and had I been a reader of discerning taste I wouldn’t have needed any magazines to set me up with my next read. I wasn’t long out of college, working in a bar and writing part-time for a monthly magazine. I’d written a book-length story by then, a crime novel set in the Greek islands, but when I tell you that the story’s single violent death occurs with three short chapters to go, and that the remainder of the story concerns itself with how three guys avoid getting caught up in the consequences of that death, you’ll appreciate that I had, putting it gently, yet to develop a feel for the rhythm and pacing of a crime novel.

  Anyway, long story short, I read King Suckerman.

  Boom . . .

  Like all the great stuff that has stayed with me over the years—Raymond Chandler, Leonard Cohen, the Pixies, James Ellroy, Rollerskate Skinny, Elmore Leonard—my first reaction was, I didn’t know you were allowed to sound like that.

  Heady stuff. A good old-fashioned tale of revenge and redemption swaggering along with superfly cool, with a retro funk sound track that fairly pounded off the page.

  Naturally, I went looking for its predecessor, The Big Blowdown.

  The Big Blowdown had it all. It delivered on everything King Suckerman had promised, and more, with the bonus of the period setting of the 1930s and ’40s.

  Head-melting stuff, especially if you have aspirations to write.

  Of course, I missed the whole point. Such things are tough to quantify, but I’ll settle now for accepting that I missed it by a country mile. It’s fair to say that you read things differently in your midforties than you might have done in your midtwenties.

  Because on first reading, Pete Karras, the hero of The Big Blowdown, is a cool guy. He’s sharp, he’s hip, he’s dressed to impress. Pete Karras is the smartest guy in any room he walks into. Pete Karras is so cool he joins the Marines and goes off to war in the Pacific and even has the decency to hesitate before killing his first Jap:

  Peter Karras had the first man he ever killed in his sights for ten minutes before he managed to pull the trigger. The man was a sniper who had taken out a Marine in Karras’s unit . . .

  Pete Karras. What’s not to like?

  Well, on rereading the same book two decades later, Pete Karras likes himself a little too much. Pete Karras has bought into the myth of Pete Karras, believes he can do his own thing, thumb his nose at people who don’t like the nose-thumb schtick. And so Pete Karras winds up in a dark alleyway watching a lead-lined baseball bat swing down out of the night sky, and suddenly Pete Karras isn’t anywhere near as cool as he once thought he might be.

  Suddenly Pete Karras is a prematurely gray young man with a bad limp and a crappy job and a baby son and a wife with thickening ankles.

  He isn’t a bad man; he just isn’t a particularly good one. Even as he goes about the quasi-tragic business of eking out a tiny measure of dignity and redemption according to the street’s unforgiving code, Pete Karras finds himself locked outside what matters most, musing on a fundamental failure of character:

  Karras had a seat in the living room armchair, thinking: Now what do I do? . . . I’m just not cut out for this racket. Some guys can sit around with their families and get used to it and even like it, but I’m not built for it. Who the hell am I kidding? It’s just not right for me.

  What’s missing?

  A father. Or fathers plural, to be precise.

  Right from the start of The Big Blowdown we understand that the very young Pete Karras has no relationship with his father, a violent racist who beats Pete’s mother and considers his son puny, unmanly. One of the minor characters, Mike Florek, arrives in Washington DC in search of his missing sister, the man of his family despite his tender years. Pete Karras himself grows up to become a bad father, a womanizer estranged from his baby son. In the novel’s coda, the father figure toward whom Pete gravitates, the gruff restaurant owner Nick Stefanos, complains that his own son back in Greece has abdicated his responsibilities and foisted his own baby son on the aging Nick.

  It’s a perverse scenario. The immigrants we meet in The Big Blowdown—Greek for the most part, but Italian, Polish, and Irish, too—are fiercely self-defining in terms of their ethnic origins, and yet find themselves stumbling blindly to all points of the moral compass of their new world for the want of a caring, guiding hand on their shoulder.

  Pete Karras—and this is why he’s cool now, rereading him in my midforties with a child of my own sleeping downstairs in her cot—comes to realize that the best thing that a bad father can do is get out of a child’s way, especially if acting on that realization involves the ultimate in self-sacrifice, leaving only a faint, ghostly hand on the shoulder of his growing son.

  • • •

  Life moves on. Two decades after I first read The Big Blowdown, I’ve been lucky enough to have some crime novels of my own published. I’m also very fortunate in that my day job revolves around books and movies, around reviewing novels and interviewing writers.

  I interviewed George Pelecanos some months ago, on the publication of his most recent novel, What It Was. During the course of the conversation, I asked about a paragraph near the end of the book, when one of the characters speaks of his wartime experience:

  Vaughn lit a cigarette and pushed the lighter in front of Strange so that he could see the Okinawa inlay on the Zippo’s face. “First time I killed a man was on that island. I had him in the sights of my M-One for fifteen minutes before I squeezed the trigger. But I did it . . . ”

  I couldn’t help but ask about the significance of a tale so important that it wa
rranted telling twice, in novels over fifteen years apart.

  “You know,” Pelecanos said, “The Big Blowdown was an important book for me. Pete Karras, up until the war, is my father. He lived in a very poor slum in Chinatown [in DC], where all the poorest immigrants lived, and he ended up going to the Pacific and fighting as a Marine. And when he came home, he became a father and husband, and he worked hard for his living, yeah. It’s at that point that the characters diverge, but I did want to give my father his due in terms of his early life. Yeah, so that book is very important to me. A lot of people don’t know about that book, that it’s one of my favorite books.”

  From the 1930s setting of The Big Blowdown right through to What It Was, and in his work as a producer and writer on the TV series The Wire (2002–2008) and Treme (2010–), the best of George Pelecanos’s work has been characterized by a clear-eyed and unsentimental compassion for fatherless sons. An immigrant’s empathy, perhaps.

  I did want to give my father his due . . .

  “Just a story,” Derek Strange tells Nick Stefanos in the coda to What It Was.

  “It’s just a story,” Nick Stefanos tells his friend Costa at the end of The Big Blowdown.

  Well, yes. But then, all stories are just stories. It’s how you tell them that counts, and who you tell them to. What it is you’re handing on.