Interview: James Ellroy, novelist

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 13:48

IT'S MESMERISING watching James Ellroy eat. Boy, is the "demon dog" of American literature hungry. He's sitting there with a whole pepperoni pizza and a portion of pasta with meatballs.

• Portrait: Robert Perry

"Want some?" No thanks. Does he want peace to eat? No, he's happy. We're in a bowling alley in London. The red shaded lights are dim and he's sitting in the gloom, this man with the bald head and strange, intense eyes and rangy frame, his shoulders making angles under his British army-style jumper. His PR didn't know what he wanted so she brought a choice but it's all disappearing anyway in big, unselfconscious, wolfish mouthfuls: folded-over hunks of dough dripping pepperoni and cheese alternating with entire meatballs and fat rolls of pasta. Hiccup. Burp. "Pardon me." Hard to focus on what he's saying. Such complete lack of inhibition is riveting.

The author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential and now Blood's A Rover has never been a man to conceal his appetites. There is something about Ellroy that strips away social conventions and norms. He talks openly about the years before he became one of the biggest names in American crime fiction: years of being stoned, of being involved in crime in order to eat, of being sexually obsessed and breaking into girls' houses to sniff their underwear. Is he more weird than the average man or just more upfront about his weirdness? A meatball disappears. "Most men are guarded, self-protective. I have always been an exhibitionist and a show boat. At school I would do book reports on books that didn't exist just to get attention." Is that why he spouted lots of right-wing Nazi talk in his youth? "Yeah, that's what that was about. I was looking for attention."

The attention-seeking behaviour always comes back to one motivating factor: the redhead, the goddess, the woman he has searched for all his life; his mother, Geneva Hilliker, or Jean Ellroy as she became, who was murdered in El Monte, a white trash suburb of Los Angeles, in 1958. Ellroy was just ten when Jean was found dead in an ivy patch, dressed in a blue sleeveless dress with her overcoat spread over her lower body, one arm bent upward. A nylon stocking and a cotton cord were tightly knotted round her neck and her tongue was protruding from her bruised face.

His mother's murder has haunted his life, his relationships and his writing. Jean was there in The Black Dahlia. There in his memoir My Dark Places, in which he returned to El Monte with a former police officer to investigate the redhead's murder. He didn't find her killer but he found her. She's still there in Blood's A Rover, the concluding part of his Underworld USA trilogy which included American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand.

Set in the US between 1968 and 1972, Blood's A Rover intertwines real-life figures such as J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon with three violent, right-wing men: Dwight Holly, an FBI officer and Hoover's right-hand thug; Wayne Tedrow Junior, an ex-cop and talented chemist who murdered his own father; and Don "Crutch" Crutchfield, a young, inadequate voyeur with Ellroy's early peeping Tom tendencies who also just happens to be haunted by the disappearance of his mother. All three fall for a mysterious left-wing militant woman, Joan Klein, "The Red Goddess Joan", and the resulting clash of ideologies transforms each of them.

Ellroy's own relationships with women have been similarly complicated and transformative. Jean Ellroy connects them in an invisible spider's web. The truth is, ten-year-old Lee Earle Ellroy was glad she died. His parents were divorced. Jean looked after him during the week. At weekends, he went to his dad, Armand, and Jean lived her secret life. She drank. She went with men. Her ex-husband claimed she was a lush and a nympho. But despite her secrets – or maybe because of them – Jean was very strict. Armand, a weak and lazy man, was very permissive. There was no contest in a child's mind but later Ellroy's perspective would change. "My father had a lot of natural gifts and squandered them. I think I am as focused and driven and ambitious as I am because he wasted so much opportunity."

Ellroy remained dry-eyed when Jean was found in that ivy bush, only managing to squeeze out a few tears later in the day. It's a strange image of a bereaved ten-year-old boy but it gets stranger. He had growing sexual fantasies about his mother, searched constantly for redheads all his life. "When she died, I was a ten-year-old boy coming into puberty and sexually obsessed with her." Does that strike him as odd? "No, I think a lot of ten-year-old boys would be with a 42-year-old, good-looking woman."

He stretches in his chair, rearranges the angles of his frame. He's jetlagged. "I feel guilty about it," he continues. At the time of her death I very much wanted her out of my life and to be with my father exclusively so I got what I wanted at a horrible price."

Now 61, he has been married twice. The first was short-lived but he always said his second marriage, to writer and feminist Helen Knode in 1991, was very happy. Knode was only mentioned in passing in My Dark Places yet there was a strong sense of her influencing Ellroy's responses to his dead mother. But they divorced and Ellroy is currently in a relationship with writer Erika Schickel. He says he's more in love than he's ever been but that seems typical. The thing about Ellroy is that when he talks about women, and certainly when he writes about them, it comes across as obsession as much as love.

The Red Goddess in Blood's A Rover was based on a real woman with whom he had a relationship after his marriage split up. "Her name was Joan and I dedicate the book to her anonymously. I will never see her again." Why not? "It was a passionate relationship and we ended badly. I didn't behave well in some ways. I was in bad emotional shape all through it going on. So I saw that I could turn it to shit or turn it to something good." Like the clash between the fictitious Joan and her men, he and the real Joan were worlds apart. "I was older; she was younger. She was Jewish; I was gentile. She was left wing; I was right wing. She was an atheist; I was a believer. All these clashes of ideology and belief that you see in the book."

It's hard to know which of Ellroy's obsessions are real and which are marketing tools to sell his books. What about his mother's murder, for example? "It was always an obsession but I did market it," he agrees. "I did go out and exploit my mother's death with The Black Dahlia. I went back and tried to redress that with My Dark Places. She and I continue to have a very powerful unilateral relationship because she's dead and I'm alive."

He acknowledges that constant repetition of his story over the years means the truth of it shifts. "The emotional power of it waxes and wanes." But one constant has emerged. "We are more of a love story than a crime story."

His writing about Jean has concentrated on his feelings for her. But what would she make of what the ten-year-old boy she left behind has done with his life? "I think she might not have approved of everything that I have written about her but she would approve of the passion with which I have addressed her." Would he have become a writer if she hadn't been murdered? "I never think hypothetically," he says. A strange claim for a novelist. "It played out because it had to. It could only have happened that way." There's a related hypothetical, of course. If his gift as a writer is a direct result of his mother's murder, would he give it back if it could change what happened to her? "No," he says instantly. "No." He adds: "Because I can't." Then he dives for cover. "It's the book I want to talk about."

ISOLATION. Lying in a darkened room, just thinking. He likes to be alone. Not surprising. Ellroy talks like someone who converses mainly with himself. As though the answers all lie inside his own head. Thoughts polished to rock-like certainties in the comforting tides of his own mind. The eyes bore darkly. "I live an internal life." Then the giveaway phrase. "I talk about this a lot on this tour." The marketing line. He promotes his books "assiduously". "I don't have a cell phone. I don't have a computer (he writes longhand). I like to think. I brood a lot. I isolate my curiosities to the time I write about, 1968-1972 America." That's convenient. The period he writes about is all that consumes him. The period which he admits he can't remember first time round because he was too stoned.

He has claimed to be the greatest living crime novelist. "I used to say that but now I just say the greatest novelist." Or maybe he's just the greatest self-publicist? He does not react. "I shoot my mouth off," he admits, "but I am growing up." His characters all have a hole at the heart of them. Does he just write about himself? "I write about isolated men haunted by women and there's a lot of that in me, yeah." The men are racist. Violent. They talk of shooting niggers and the blood of dead men seeps through his pages, warm and sticky. Does he ever tire of the ugliness of his internal world? "I don't see it as ugly. I see only the goodness in my characters. My guys always end up meeting some swingin' woman and falling in love and changing their lives."

I tell him about the controversy here over the journalist AA Gill who shot a baboon in Tanzania because he wanted to know "what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger". Does Ellroy understand that curiosity? "No, I'm not a violent person. I can be short-tempered, intemperate." But he's romantic. "For me, it's the big idea, the big love, the big sacrifice, the big risk. I would rather make the big gesture than no gesture. That's the way I feel closest to God." He believes? "I have felt the personal presence of God in my life on many occasions."

Blood's A Rover itself is romantic, he insists. It feels a bit like saying The Godfather is romantic because the mafia come home and kiss their wives after work. And yet … it's true that the only tenderness, the only redemption, is in the relationships his violent men have with women. FBI agent Dwight Holly is fixated by the Red Goddess Joan but is also having an affair with Karen, a married woman with children. Ellroy did that too when he was with his Red Goddess. But all these fictitious relationships are flawed and obsessive. Does Ellroy actually like women? "I adore women, yeah." In fact, when asked about levels of violence against women in crime fiction, he says he understands those who are uncomfortable with it. "I wrote a lot of serial killer stuff and outgrew it. There will be no more psychosexual crime in my books. There's a little bit in Blood's A Rover but not much."

Why, then, did he write in My Dark Places: "All men hate all women for reasons that are tried and tested"? "I wasn't writing about myself." All men? "I wasn't writing about myself." So why did he say "all"? "Because it's dramatic." Sometimes he's accused of misogyny. "That's bullshit. I'm the guy who was formed by traumatic misogynistic violence." Then – with a leap I don't understand – he says he is opposed to gay marriage but that doesn't mean he hates gays. He wants to restrict abortion … but that doesn't mean he hates women. It's a strange side alley, one he instantly regrets. Why is he opposed to gay marriage? The question makes him angry. "This is too far afield," he snaps. Too far afield of what? "Of me. Of this book of mine. I've made up my mind and you're taking me away from this. You're taking me away from talking about my book. 1968-1972 America."

He's a big guy, quite intimidating though I doubt he means to be. Long limbs shifting in his seat. Angles and shadows. Hard eyes and tension. "I have no opinion on anything today," he insists. How can a novelist not have any opinion on anything contemporary – unless it's because he's trying to market a book about 1960s America? "I made up my mind and journalists keep trying to pull me into this trap." There's no trap. "Just assume I don't think about the world today." How could anyone believe that? How can his book be taken in isolation? "Because I wrote it in isolation. It was very, very deliberate isolation."

Is he still right wing? "I don't talk about current politics. Because I wrote this book about a bunch of right-wing guys who go left wing, I don't want people to make assumptions about my political beliefs. Just because the three men fall in love with Joan Klein, and just because I fell in love with a left-wing woman, people shouldn't assume I was converted." No, Ellroy's boundaries, his inhibitions, are not conventional. He tells you about sniffing strangers' stolen panties but doesn't want to talk about corruption in any political era except 1968-72. What's for effect? Even his literary style is like a giant stylistic device. Short sentences. Staccato rhythms. Vocabulary that's hip, slick, down and dirty. Baaaad boys. Black-bag jobs. Five sentences in a row beginning with the same character's name. Wayne did this. Wayne did that. Boom, boom, boom, like literary techno music. You either love it and turn it full volume or it does your head in.

"I am very gifted," Ellroy says. No irony. Such self-belief. After his last book, Helen Knode told him he needed to go back and write from the heart more. He did. "I will never go to the stylistic excesses which marred the success of The Cold Six Thousand. I will adhere to a more traditional style of literature from here on in, yet still Ellrovian. I can only write like myself. Nobody writes like me. Nobody ever will."

FUNNY HOW LIFE WORKS out. Ellroy has been a regular over the years on Conan O'Brien's chat show in the US. Ellroy tailors his TV appearances depending on the time and audience. Affable – as he can get – for daytime. Kinda sleazy for late night. Sometimes the demon dog literally howls, acting out embarrassingly like some Tourette's victim. Wild eyes. Gratuitous sexual references. He opens an interview with O'Brien by saying: "How's the hammer hangin'?" Look on You Tube and you'll see O'Brien back in 1997 asking if Ellroy has ever wanted children. "Noooooooo!" Ellroy shouts. He and his wife hate the little bastards. The audience laughs uproariously. Wild applause.

But Ellroy once referred to himself as a "frail boy" and it's easily spotted beneath the ego. After the collapse of his marriage, he had a breakdown. (His description of Dwight Holly's breakdown in Blood's A Rover is almost a mirror image of his own.) How did he come out the other side of that? "Chastened, shaken, love-starved … anxious to start a family." A family? But he always said he didn't want children … "It hasn't played out. But it's not because I didn't try." When did he change his mind? "In my fifties. I just wanted a daughter." Lots of men say they want a son. Why a daughter? "It would be a way to make up for my mother. It would be a pure form of love and a testing, trying experience. I went at it rather obsessively but none of the women I was trying with were going for it."

He's reconciled to it, he says, not entirely convincingly. His new girlfriend has two step-daughters. Perhaps that will help? Yeah, he says. Would he consider marriage for a third time? "Sure. Absolutely." His other relationships haven't worked out because he can handle monogamy but not cohabitation. "I'm a solitary guy and they were strenuous relationships that required a lot of internal work that I wasn't willing to do at the time but I've changed." But he said earlier he was more solitary than he's ever been. That he has fewer friends. How can he manage a relationship when he craves solitude? "What we want to do is buy a duplex."

At the end of the interview he unfolds himself in the chair. "I was a little bit short-tempered," he says. "I'm sorry. I hadn't eaten and I'm exhausted." The eyes are softer. I smile. He stands up. For a second I think he's going to hug me. Sensing the movement, I almost move towards it. Something stops me. Something stops him. Inhibitions after all. Maybe he's not everything he seems. But certainly as obsessive as he seems. Next year, he publishes another memoir. It's about his relationship with women. It's called The Hilliker Curse. It always comes back to the redhead in the end.

Blood's A Rover is published by Century, 18.99