All right, that’s enough of the dreadful James Ellroy impersonation. But if that opening paragraph managed to get on your nerves, you’d best stay away from the Mad Dog’s latest tome — a delirious dervish-dance through the chaos and confusion of 1960’s America — where he pummels you with 700 relentless pages of his machine-gun fire prose.

Although it isn’t absolutely necessary, readers would benefit from reading American Tabloid” the first installment of Ellroy’s Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, before taking on The Cold Six Thousand. This is because two of the central protagonists are carried over from the first book, and their actions, motivations and fates will not only make more sense, but carry greater weight.

Ex-FBI agent Ward Littell, lawyer for Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, and the Mob, and his best friend, ex-CIA operative Pete Bondurant, hit man and shakedown artist-extraordinaire, are this time joined by Vegas Wayne Tedrow, Jr., completing the male triumvirate that has become a narrative trademark of Ellroy’s novels.

The novel opens with Tedrow arriving in Dallas on an assignment to whack Wendell Durfee, a pimp who got marked for death when he knifed a casino dealer with Mob ties. It’s a police-sanctioned assignment, since the Vegas PD is controlled by the Mob. Tedrow’s payment for the hit: the eponymous "cold six thousand" dollars of the novel’s title.

The problem is that Tedrow is the flip side of a department’s black sheep. He’s the only scrupulous guy on the force, "considered incorruptible by Vegas standards." He doesn’t want to do the job, and, to make matters worse, the moment he arrives in Dallas he finds that all hell has broken loose: President Kennedy has just been shot.

With this as its starting point, The Cold Six Thousand connects the dots between the hit on JFK, church bombings in the deep South, the madness of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and, finally, the hit on Robert Kennedy. The result is a chilling scenario that strangles the notion that America was ever an innocent nation, or that its history is a storybook of noble deeds by honorable men.

Instead, according to Ellroy, history is more like a tabloid magazine populated by fiendishly corrupt men who abuse their power as a means of indulging their darkest obsessions. We witness the decorous sadism of J. Edgar Hoover and his scheme to undermine the Civil Rights movement; the dizzying neurosis of Howard Hughes and his manner of buying Vegas casinos like a bored housewife buys shoes; and the bloodthirsty vigilance of mob boss Carlos Marcello, who brutally punishes even the slightest transgression against his authority.

Ellroy makes no attempt to impose redeemable traits on his characters, but he does have a genius for getting us to care about his anti-heroes, who, by doing the bidding of monsters like Hoover and Marcello, come ever so close to becoming monsters themselves. Vividly conflicted, these are men at war with their own psyches as well as the world around them.

Tedrow, for example, is locked in an Oedipal struggle to create an identity for himself apart from that of his hate-mongering father, Wayne Tedrow, Sr., an influential union leader affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Pete Bondurant doesn’t think twice about putting a bullet through a slumbering man’s brain, but he lovingly dotes on his wife and cat and chivalrously refuses to harm women. Ward Littell is a haunting case study of what happens to a man’s soul when his work is at odds with his core, albeit repressed, ideals of social justice. But the very ambivalence of these men is further complicated by the fact that some of their convictions don’t always ring true; I never fully understood, for example, why Bondurant is so committed to the cause (or "La Causa" as he calls it) of "liberating" Cuba by ousting Fidel Castro.

A potentially large problem that readers will face in The Cold Six Thousand is, as usual, Ellroy’s style. A few critics — and more than a few readers — have declared his work unreadable even though a cursory glance at these pages makes it seem easy enough:

“Wayne Senior ditched Wayne’s mom. Wayne Senior wooed Janice. Wayne Senior brought Wayne along. Wayne was thirteen. Wayne was horny. Wayne dug on Janice.”

With its kindergarten language and mature content, a passage like this almost gives the perverse sensation of reading a dirty children’s book. But the simplicity is deceptive. Ellroy packs so much archaic language and underground slang into his minimalistic prose that even Webster’s Unabridged won’t do you much good. And unless you’re an Ellroy veteran and already know, or can deduce, what words like "white horse," "slopeheads," and "shiv" mean, you’re made to feel unworthy of roaming his grounds.

This insiderness, coupled with the labyrinthine plot twists — so many psychological chess games occur concurrently that it’s hard to tell who’s conning who — makes The Cold Six Thousand, at times, impenetrable.

Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, who built tension by clueing audiences into knowledge that his characters did not have, Ellroy seems to delight in leaving us out of some revelation shared only between his character and himself. One of the many recurring phrases is, "He got it," as in he understands, which often left me wondering, "Got what? What’s going on?" During these instances, however, the dialogue, mood and characterizations are gripping enough to sustain interest, even during the most confusing stretches.

Ellroy once stated in an interview that although he’s commonly known as a crime novelist, he thinks of himself more as a historical novelist. Indeed, his in-your-face approach may bear resemblance to the films of Oliver Stone, but his sensibility is more akin to that venerable old curmudgeon, Gore Vidal. Like Vidal, Ellroy is interested in dismantling some of this country’s most cherished myths. The connection between the two becomes all the more relevant in light of the fact that Vidal lowered the curtains on his American chronicle with The Golden Age, which ends in 1954 during Eisenhower’s administration, while Ellroy’s American Tabloid begins in 1957 with John F. Kennedy’s political ascendance.

Still, while Vidal prefers to hobnob with elected officials, Ellroy is more interested in hanging out with the guys who unofficially run things on the sidelines. And therein lies his service to American history: More important than the plausibility of his conspiracy theories, or the accuracy of his history, is the fact that he’s willing to bend over and peer at the nation’s underbelly — which generally offers a more fascinating view.

Enter the Pop Forum
Discuss books

Jun Kim is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who has written for such publications as KoreAm Journal, Monolid, and PopMatters.

To purchase The Cold Six Thousand, click here.