A decade's worth of carnage

BLOOD’S A ROVER By James Ellroy

Alfred A. Knopf

Available at the following National Book Store branches: Cubao, Glorietta 1, Shangri-La, SM MOA, Robinsons Galleria Bestsellers, Rockwell, Trinoma, Glorietta 5, SM North EDSA Bestseller.

The year is 1964. On one overcast morning in Los Angeles, a Wells Fargo armored truck is robbed, its operators brutally murdered and scorched by a trio of masked marauders. This grisly tableau sets the tone in James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, the thrilling and mammoth bookend to the author’s epic Underworld USA Trilogy that chronicles an intrigue-ridden America where “paranoia defines the Right and the Left… Everyone knows everyone else and suspects everyone else and needs everyone as well.”

JFK, RFK and MLK are dead. James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan are in the custody of the Feds. Following the aftermath of these assassinations, the novel picks up where The Cold Six Thousand left off, retelling the tale of the four tumultuous years leading up to Watergate through a cast of clandestine insurgents, political pooh-bahs, and duplicitous operatives who get embroiled in the social unrest.

Much of the history in this novel, as with that portrayed in cinematic thrillers like L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia, is recent and familiar. Richard Nixon is newly elected into his first term. The Mafia percolates a plot to run a drug ring in the Dominican Republic. Within stateside borders, Americans are still reeling from the aftershocks of the civil rights movement, spurring a proliferation of nationalist claques like “The Black Tribe Alliance” and “The Mau Mau Liberation Front.” J. Edgar Hoover, the pioneering director of the FBI, is portrayed as a Machiavellian operator who nefariously plays god with the novel’s motley members. Howard Hughes, an obsessive, polymath tycoon historically tied to Nixon and his clout, toys with the idea of owning Las Vegas in a shady tie with the Mob. 

These characterizations are typical in Ellroy’s novels, where distinctions are blurred between criminals, crime solvers and law enforcers by dressing everyone in morality’s infinite shades of gray. In vintage Ellroy though, darker gray is preferable — the more crooked, twisted and two-faced a character, the better they conform to the author’s design.  

And the more they frequent scenarios replete with violence, blood and gore (and drugs and booze and sex), the more powerfully is the author able to create his vision of a fragmented and disfigured America.

Wayne Tedrow Jr., a holdover from the trilogy’s second installation, is a former cop who “did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly, pushed high-line hate tracts, and rode the far-Right zeitgeist.” Three pages into the plot proper, he’s already killed his pop in an Oedipal accomplice with his cancer-whittled step mom. Wayne, one of heroes in this novel, is called to the task of sifting through the trail of a black chemist named Reggie Hazzard, who was potentially involved in the 1964 murder case. Don Crutchfield, a peeping Tom and a bottom feeder of an agent who hounds sleuthing assignments, snoops around the leftists by dovetailing the cases of elite agents Tedrow and Holly. 

Dwight Holly, a Yale graduate with affiliations to the Klan, works as an FBI agent while maintaining forbidden liaisons with a snitch from the underground. Marshall Bowen, an African American officer afflicted with “the Bent,” is rendered paranoid by his hidden homosexuality despite his prominence and seniority. Most of his reflections, unlike the vulgar ramblings of Ellroy’s expendable stunt doubles, are gracefully flourished in coherently written journal entries. Karen Sifakis, an itinerant college professor who preaches leftist ideology to her students, is a revolutionary whose targets are exclusively confined to structures and property. She’s also in love with Dwight Holly. Like Marsh Brown, she eloquently records her life in a journal — very much a welcome deviation from the telegraphic précis that dominates the novel.

Taking center stage in the fracas is a woman named Joan Rosen Klein — a hot, detached bisexual woman who fleshes out like a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford dame with an attitude and an agenda. “The Red Goddess Joan’s” revolutionary résumé is impressive: she’s pursued insurrections in all the trendy places like Algeria, Cuba, and the D.R. She’s rubbed shoulders with Commies, Trotskyists and anarchists. Unlike the distressed dolls in previous Ellroy novels, Joan isn’t the kind of skirt you’d want to mess around with. She has “a knife scar on one arm.” She smooches with babes and bobs. She attempts to unite white and black radical groups in retaliation against the Right. She’s also Dwight Holly’s other love interest.  

No wonder Ellroy dubbed her his “greatest female character”: Joan’s the only gal with the chutzpah to stay alive among the savages who tinker with fists, guns, and bombs. While the novel contains an even more extensive laundry list of characters, that just about rounds up the most interesting ones.

Ellroy’s latest conspiratorial whodunit employs once again that brand of prose marked by the clipped, metronomic tempos he debuted in L.A. Confidential. His zippy, staccato pace drives the novel quickly, the dialogue snappy like a Quentin Tarantino film crossed with a trans-continental Raymond Chandler mystery while interspersed with vibrantly recorded phone transcripts, police communiqués, and journal entries to add dimension to his spindly actors. 

The story, as with previous novels, is dense and intricate — meandering around a labyrinthine stock of characters and an unending catalog of seemingly repetitious subplots — but the pulsating adrenaline Ellroy injects into this thriller gratefully rends all complexities into an absorbing read. 

A reformed Crutchfield, one of the few who manage to stay alive by the end, nails the crux of the piece by labeling it as “one long mobile stakeout and kick-the-door-in shakedown” riddled with “scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content.” He’s Ellroy’s eyewitness, documenting a decade’s worth of carnage while prodding the reader to continue flipping through these bloodstained pages in revelation of the injustices perpetuated by this regime. At the end, he writes, “My unruly rover’s drive now veers toward the good. I look for lost loved ones and bring them home. I do it constantly and anonymously at my own cost.” Crutchfield’s character, though minor, is no doubt autobiographical, and in persisting to the present illustrates Ellroy’s intent to pose and answer the big political and social questions that continue to addle America.

Indeed, with this final installment, Ellroy’s triune opus finally completes a tapestry that maps and pessimistically parodies a country worn thin by fiscal fat cats and antagonistic power mongers who puppet her denizens and dissidents. Evil, though rampant, ultimately reveals itself as a human stain seeded by the corrupt honchos who pawn an entire nation for personal gain. Admittedly, this book requires a bit commitment to get through its sparely interpolated plot, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. While his vision is indeed unnerving and his prose disconcerting, Ellroy’s neurotic noir is perhaps the perfect medium, albeit the raw obscenities, to tell the story of a nation wounded and scarred by a tragic past.