David Klein is a nightmare. He's a 42-year-old Los Angeles cop whose zeal for graft has taken him miles beyond any point of redemption. Trained as a lawyer, Klein takes money, performs hits for the mob and extorts for profit. It's 1958; within L.A.'s underworld, cops like Klein reign supreme. That is, until a federal probe into police corruption is announced with some fanfare and a bad cop is needed as a scapegoat. The man to be pushed over the cliff is Klein.
Evil, unrepentant protagonists like Klein are an Ellroy specialty. Through 10 dark novels (particularly the first three parts of his Los Angeles Quartet: The Black Dahlia, a paperback bestseller, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and now White Jazz) he has tracked men and women who flout rules, fight dirty and play for keeps. Dahlia—based on a real L.A. murder that bore some similarity to the 1958 strangulation of Ellroy's own alcoholic mother—launched his rep as a crime-fiction kamikaze, radical, corrosive, shocking. Now he ups the ante, sinking his low-life characters deeper into ugliness, stripping his condensed prose down to a brute shorthand.
The writing is staccato and choppy, a clipped version of human conversation. Here's Klein eyeing a dead drug dealer at a crime scene:
"Junior dead—fetal-curled on the floor.
"Junkie-tied—an arm tourniquet—rigor-locked teeth on a sash cord.
"A spike bent off a mainline; bulging eyes. Short sleeves—needle tracks and vein scars exposed.
"A bluesuit, gawking: 'I checked his pockets. He had a key to the front door on him.'
"A lab man: 'The janitor got here early and found him. Jesus, this kind of grief right in the middle of the fed thing.' "
While every page is well crafted, White Jazz is ultimately unsatisfying. There isn't a soul worth caring about anywhere. Klein lacks the courage to be a hero, the moral ambiguity to be an antihero. The clipped prose grows tiresome, the venality numbing. White Jazz should be applauded for its ambition and daring. But Ellroy hasn't reinvented the crime novel just yet. (Knopf, $22)
by Patricia Highsmith
Reading Highsmith's delightful odd duck of a mystery is in some ways like reading Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Both give you plenty of French village charm, jaunts to the boulangerie, chats with the gardener. But instead of hunting for truffles, these folks are searching for corpses.
Ripley Under Water marks Tom Ripley's fifth appearance as High-smith's unconventional hero. A transplanted American, married to the charming Héloïse and living like a squire in the French countryside, he's so courtly and suave, so fond of his dahlia and harpsichord lessons, that it's a shame he's such an amoral murdering rascal. But that's Tom for you. His latest adventure begins when an irksome American couple, the Pritchards, for some unexplained reason move into the village deliberately to bedevil Ripley. The pesky pair photograph his house and phone him pretending to be one of the many corpses in Tom's past. Pritchard is intent on exposing Tom for having dispatched the art dealer Murchison with a bottle of Margaux to the cranium. As Pritchard patiently drags the village canals for Murchison's bones, Tom feels a growing desire to do him in, too.
Will Tom have to bloody his hands again? Will Pritchard find the bones? It always feels as if something is about to happen (and sometimes it does). With its wonderfully vivid sense of place and character (especially delightful is the innocent Héloïse, always calling "Allo, Tome!" and bemoaning those nasty "Prik-shards"), Under Water is another of Highsmith's droll turnabouts in which you don't have to feel guilty about rooting for the bad guy. (Knopf, $21)"
by Michael Korda
The latest in a slew of Marilyn Monroe books, this engrossing docunovel from the author of Queenie and Curtain blends fact with fiction to recap the oft-told tale of the blond bombshell and her affairs with John F. and Robert Kennedy.
According to Korda, it's literally love at first sight for Sen. John Kennedy and Marilyn when they meet at a swank Hollywood party in the late '50s. Although both are married (he to Jackie, she to Joe DiMaggio), they begin a dangerous liaison and, despite the risks, continue it into his presidency. When the stakes get too high for JFK—Marilyn gets too demanding and possessive and the FBI, as well as the mob, have heard about the romance from strategically placed listening devices—he asks brother Bobby to break the news to Marilyn. Straitlaced Bobby not only obliges, he falls in love with the wild star himself. But when she gets pregnant and threatens to go public with her relationship to both brothers, the affair abruptly ends. Soon after, a dejected, heartbroken Marilyn takes her own life.
Although he endorses the L.A. County Coroner's official finding that Monroe killed herself, Korda exercises creative license to the limit, recounting one sexy between-the-sheets scene after another and playing up the Kennedys' reported dealing with the mob. Monroe buffs who subscribe to other theories may take issue with some of the chronology and the explanation of her death. The uninitiated—for whom the line between fact and fiction will be all but blurred—may simply tire of repetitive accounts of Marilyn popping pills and the FBI's bugging every room that Strawhead (Monroe's code name) visited. Still, despite the somewhat controversial interpretation of history, The Immortals makes fascinating, juicy reading and paints a visceral portrait of these larger-than-life people. (Poseidon Press, $20)
Edited by Jim McMullan and Dick Gautier
From an aesthetics standpoint, of course, Proctologists as Artists, Outside Linebackers as Artists or Avon Ladies as Artists would make as much sense. But it is fun to see the paintings and sculptures created by TV and movie actors. McMullan and Gautier, both actors themselves (McMullan was Senator Dowling on Dallas; Gautier was Robin Hood in Mel Brooks's series When Things Were Rotten) skew their sample toward older generations and in many cases dead generations (Lionel Barrymore, Henry Fonda, John Huston). The only person within paint-splattering range of 30 is Vanity, the Prince protégé, singer and actress.
That younger actors are apparently so cross-culturally uninvolved detracts from the book's appeal. So does McMullan and Gander's decision to ignore photography as an art form. Nor do they explain how they chose their subjects.
Some of the work stands out from the routinely amateurish, such as David Bowie's vaguely Van Goghian self-portrait; cowboy star George Montgomery's chaotic bronze, Custer's Last Moment: Candice Bergen's airy watercolor, Butterflies; Kim Novak's tragic portrait of her father, Fallen Monarch; and Anthony Quinn's liquid, Modiglianian portraits and sculptures.
Each artist's work is accompanied by a brief, usually vacuous, statement. Bergen's ingenuous comments include: "My friends have snapped up all of my paintings, even some oils I did of a couple of hamburgers last year." Phyllis Diller, represented by a spare ink and wash sketch of a woman, says, "To me art is therapy. It soothes the nerves and knits up the raveled sleeve of care." "The best part about painting," says Cliff (Murder Times Seven) Gorman, "is that you're the writer, director, audience and critic, so the reviews are always good." Burt Reynolds, creator of the nondescript charcoal Georgia Landscape, says, "Art is the only thing in the world I can enjoy without getting bored."
OK if you say so, folks. But keep your day jobs. (Tuttle, $40)
by Joyce Wadler
When Wadler discovered a lump in her breast in the shower one morning last year, her father had recently died of cancer, she had just broken up with her boyfriend, research on a book she was writing had proven grueling, and deadlines were looming in her job as a senior writer at PEOPLE. Then the lump proved malignant. What are the odds that a book written about her subsequent experience would prove to be not only calm, clear-sighted and informative but also wisecrackingly and just wisely funny?
My Breast could have been frantic and maudlin. Instead it is a remarkably frank and vivid account of a season of pain, uncertainty and finally triumph (after lumpectomy and chemotherapy Wadler is cancer free now). The reader gets to know a small, memorable cast of endearingly idiosyncratic characters, from Wadler's self-absorbed boyfriend to the author herself, who grew up in a Borscht Belt rooming house. Though the life at stake is her own, she proves a sharply capable reporter, detailing every appointment and procedure and the agonizing waits and uncertainties between. Her clarity, humor and pluck earn the reader's admiration as well as sympathy. (Addison-Wesley $16.95)
>James Ellroy
SEARCHING FOR THE DARKEST FEARS
WHY SAY IT? JAMES ELLROY IS ASKED. Instead of putting other crime novels down as "tepid compared to mine," and declaring, "I want to be the greatest crime novelist who ever breathed," why not just think it? Behind his little round specs, Ellroy's eyes blaze as he spitfires the answer: "I say it because it's what drives me."
There used to be a football player, Ted Hendricks of the L.A. Raiders, who was known as the Mad Stork. The name could fit Ellroy. At 6'2" and 190 lbs., he's bouncy and loose on the outside, coiled and steely on the inside. After his mother's murder when he was 10 and his father's death when he was 17, he spent years as a vagrant and alcoholic in his native L.A. before drying out, starting to write (he says he reads only boxing mags and hasn't cracked a crime novel since he started writing them) and making caffeine "my only drug."
In White Jazz, he's out to disprove "the tired notion that you need sympathetic characters to engender reader sympathy. The identification I would wish is at the level of darkly shared secrets. What is the reader's darkest fears? Will my reader connect on that level or be repelled? That is the risk I take. My goal is to redefine the language of hard-boiled crime fiction—the populist voice of American tragic realism. To be the greatest is the overweening desire of my life. I don't have outside interests. I'm hungry. At 44, after 10 books, it's not abating."
- Contributors:
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Carol Peace,
- Jill Rachlin,
- Ralph Novak,
- Eric Levin.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
