JAMES ELLROY

James Ellroy, the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction (DDoACF, pronounced dee-doacough), is responsible for a slew of bestselling novels, most notably The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, as well as the 1996 memoir My Dark Places in which he teams up with a retired LAPD Detective in an attempt to solve his mother's 1958 murder in El Monte, California. His new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, traces the shadow cast by his mom, Jean Hilliker's death over her son's life. It's the autobiography of a man whose life is guided and ruled by women, dead and alive, real and imagined. It's the story of a man who, like the book says, "was desperate to write stories and touch women for real."

I show up at the Knopf building to interview Ellroy just as he is describing a television show to Chip Kidd, the designer responsible for the best book jackets of the past 20 years (including many of Ellroy's), in which Ellroy solves crimes with the assistance of a talking cartoon dog. I have no idea whether or not they are joking with each other.

Vice: What's this about a talking dog?
James Ellroy: In this coming winter of '11, my television show, James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons debuts. I am the star. I am the on-camera interlocutor, interrogator, personality, and narrator. It features historical Los Angeles crimes as I tell the story. I write every word that I speak. I also have a sidekick, who is a computer-generated dog. His name is Barko. He's based on my real dog, Barko, the Bull Terrier, who I'll see on the other side. He is immortal. The show is inimitably me. It's deeply about Los Angeles. It is shamelessly self-promotional and autobiographical. It's a wonderful opportunity to present literature, autobiography, crime, Los Angeles, social commentary, and humor as pertains to all of the above on television.

Sounds great. So, The Hilliker Curse is your second memoir, after My Dark Places in which you investigated the unsolved murder of your mother. This one isn't so much about your mother's murder, though, as it is about the reverberations of her death throughout your life and relationships with women.
It's about the male romantic and the sexual urge and how it was, in my case, traumatically formed. It's deeply about romanticism and its antecedents going back to the greatest artist ever, Ludwig Von Beethoven. It's the story of my astonishingly detailed, varied, passionate search for love, and it is a memoir, certainly. It's also an autobiographical essay and it's the first one I've written in that it's all true, but as a memoirist and an essayist I am allowed to emphasize omit and retrospectively comment, so there are two narrative voices at work at all time. There is Ellroy the older man describing Ellroy the younger man, and editorializing upon it. It's also a treatise on the writing of fiction and how real life romance informs fiction, at least in my case. It's a treatise on someone who was a very ruthless and self-absorbed man, finding family later in life.

Can you describe what "the Curse" is?
On the occasion of my tenth birthday, March, 1958, my mother Jean Hilliker, a 43-year-old alcoholic, gave me the choice to live with my father or her. I chose my dad. She hit me. I fell off the couch. I gouged my head on the edge of a glass coffee table and called her a drunk and a whore. She hit me again. I wished her dead.

I had read a book pertaining to witchcraft and curses only a few months before, and have carried a deep sense of shame, self-loathing--a ridiculous sense of complicity which pertains to her death. I did not kill her. I did not arrange for her to be killed. I was a ten year-old child. Nevertheless, it was the defining moment of my life to date--the issue of the curse--just as much as her death was.

I was already girl-crazed and looking in windows before I knew formally what sex was. There was a joke from the 1950s, it's deeply ironic, and I think says it all. It goes "I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he's working on now." I live in that construct. I am that romantically fixated. I am religious. I am very conservative. I hang through the prism of God, and there is the sacred conjunction of men and women. I have never gotten over it. I have been looking for the mythical "her" for most of my lifetime, and I found her. Of course I would find her. I always get what I want. That's the point of The Hilliker Curse. It comes from slow to fast, but it always costs a great deal.

There haven't been too many explicit references to the mystic in your works prior to The Hilliker Curse. Really, the only one I can recall is from Because The Night, which features Detective Lloyd Hopkins tracking down a perverted guru who calls himself Dr. John The Night Tripper.
Well that's an interesting perception. Both Because The Night and The Hilliker Curse are books where a lot of things happen that I haven't contemplated in many, many years. It's the pre-Black Dahlia me. I have always been a mystic. You go back and you take a look at Blood's A Rover, it's entirely about belief. Entirely. Blood's A Rover, and this memoir are addresses of the stylistic access of cults. I made a conscious decision to write a more fulsomely romantic and emotional book with Blood's A Rover, and I got to the point in my life--this was in the fall preceding my first meeting with [girlfriend] Erika--when I was hooked up with a woman named Karen in an adulteress liaison. She was impervious to my pleas to leave her husband for me. I began to more consciously address what I had known unconsciously or semi-consciously for a long, long time. Which is that the key journey in my life is not crime, it's not my mother as a murder victim, but my mother as a founding spirit.

The Hilliker Curse suggests that each of your novels has a muse at the core of it.
As I became more conscious and my books became larger and more steeped in history, the theme emerged: bad men in love with strong women. It's there prevalently in L.A. Confidential, which Erika read just recently. It's a very, very complex, mystifying, bewildering, densely plotted book. Erika is not a big fan of crime fiction, so she went right to the three men and their tortured, ultimately transcendent relationships with the women. Women were muse, but I had never addressed the phenomenon as consciously as I was forced to after my marriage to Helen Knode exploded.

The concept of goddess emerged during my affair with a woman named Joan. I was very much in the depths of horrifying need and having no one, throwing myself at a woman who would prove inappropriate over time. She was a fine human being, but our war of beliefs precluded it from working, and I was in a very, very bad emotional state. She was sturdier than I was at that time and it took some severe drawbacks from me to tenuously come to emotional reason with Erika Schickel.

You met Joan at a bookstore appearance, and that scene from the book really hung with me. You describe the event as "the 6,000th public performance of my dead-mother act." There's a man in the audience who asks you how you stage vintage grief. You shut him down, saying, "She's my mother and I paid the price, and you know, I own this."
It's as if she's there, I'm here, and I can't touch her.

Is there any baggage that comes with writing and speaking about your mother and her murder repeatedly for so many years?
I have a very, very deep and proud will to be happy, and I am happy. I have never been depressed. I have no grievance. I am not possessed of much irony. I'm a straight-ahead, hard-charging, religious right-wing heterosexual American, out of another era. I do not think the world is going to blow up. I do not think America is a demon. I think America will prevail in the world of geopolitics. I'm a nationalist, a militarist, a capitalist, and a Christian. People find this shocking.

I feel no need to justify my opinions. I'm happy and obsession suits me. I have remained fixed on very few things in my lifetime and I've profited from it. I'm very good at turning shit into gold, and if you're handed a plate of shit you can bemoan it, you can sniff it or you can hold your nose and try to shape it into something that might profit you and benefit the world and I would always rather take that option.

It seems that a consequence of this book is that your speaking engagements will no longer be dominated by the subject of Jean Hilliker, but by your relationship with Erika Schickel. What's it like to put yourself out there telling the story of your relationship?
It's another gig. Erika attends some of the gigs. I will tell the story. I will do the readings. I will tell the truth and then I will be happy for it to go away so I can sit down and apply myself more consistently to a novel.

Do you mind if I ask for details about the new novel?
Los Angeles based. Earlier than any of my previous books.

The last film project of yours that you talked about was White Jazz.
White Jazz is defunct.

Oh. The thing I always thought would translate into a great film or television series is The Big Nowhere.
The Big Nowhere, among all my novels is the novel that would make the best motion picture. Three and a half hours in black and white, you're absolutely correct. And it's owned by an Italian film company, and it's defunct.

Ah. One reason I said The Big Nowhere is because the neuroses of LA in the early 50s as depicted in that novel feel like they're back again. It's a book about social paranoia and it hinges on three fears that are central to what's going on in America right now: fear of Mexicans, fear of homosexuals, and fear of communism/socialism. We've got Arizona. We've got militias.
Is this to curb illegal immigration?

Yes.
Well then it may be justified. It has to be judged on an ad-hoc basis, all that stuff. It's very easy to immediately jump to racial bias there. Racial profiling is really no more than the empirical knowledge that certain types of crimes are committed in subcategories of certain racial groups. It's street sense--if you were a police officer and you're out looking for crime, you'd react along those lines because that's what your instincts tell you. And if you were a police officer with that level of street smarts and a decent intelligence, you'd be right more often than not. Ideology often fails when confronted with issues like this and personally I feel no social obligation to take part in the world as it is today or to comment upon it. I'm grateful for the haven of history and I trust my instincts for historical period, time and place, characterization milieu. I will never add contemporaneously and entirely ignore the culture of today. I don't have a cell phone. I don't have a computer. I am computer illiterate. I have never been on the internet. A woman named Melissa Stafford who works for me has a computer that can order me a pair of shoes. There's an all right website now, James Ellroy dot net or whatever the fuck it is, I don't know, I never look at it. I'm glad it's there as a book-selling tool, but I don't care beyond that. All of these regimes of mine, these disciplines, enhance the solitude and the mental quiet I need to create the work that I write.

In a way, it's fitting that you're not on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
I was on Facebook for a while. Erika Schickel and I finally converged on Facebook. And it's only because I was enjoined to go on Facebook by Knopf. They thought it would be an effective book-selling tool. Erika was looking for me and I was looking for her. We were inevitable, she and I, and Facebook was the means, and now I've canned Facebook and now I've got a website.

So what do you write on? A typewriter?
No, I write by hand. And I gain from it because I'm anxious by nature. I gain peace of mind by knowing all this shit can wait till I get home. I've got a fucking answering machine, and that's a kick. Say I spend the night in Erika's bed. I come back. Well, who called while I was gone? You hear the messages. I got a fax machine. It's sufficient.

Do you still categorize yourself as a crime writer? This is not really a book motivated by crime or a search for justice.
The LA Quartet veers away from genre fiction and crime fiction to historical political fiction and it escalates. It becomes more and more and more about social history as we climb through the 1950s. Then it becomes something else entirely in the Underworld USA Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. So physically, they're historical novels, but I'll always be classified as a crime writer. It's dandy as long as it sells my books. And I've written three books of short stories in journalism and I've written two memoirs. So I have the most varied career, arguably the deepest, of anyone who originally put pen to paper to write mysteries and crime novels. I've upped the stakes, considerably.

There's a part where you single out noir as over-referenced and talk about how you never really identified with Raymond Chandler.
Chandler pre-dates film noir. Noir is entirely a construction of postwar America. It is postwar American and European art. It is a direct rebuttal of Nazism and the Holocaust. It was a subversive art form concurrent with being a conformist art form. The LA Quartet books; The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, were never intended to be noir. They were historical novels set in the film noir era. The most common misconception about the film L.A. Confidential and, the director Curtis Hanson would confirm this as well, is that it's film noir, and it's not. It's a historical film. It's a historical romance set in the film noir era.

You've pointed out Jim Thompson as another writer whose work is frequently filed under noir but is not really noir.
I read a few of Thompson's books and I didn't think much of them. I felt like they were written for 500 bucks in three weeks, because they were. And I have absolutely no patience for novels. None. The guy who got there first, who presaged noir more than Chandler, is James M. Cain with The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. And then there are suggestions of noir in Mildred Pierce and opera noir in Serenade. And Horace McCoy's book, They Shoot Horses, Don't They, they are 1930s short novels prescient to the post-war malaise, the Holocaust, World War II, millions of deaths, and noir. They got there first--McCoy secondarily and Cain primarily.

At some point very early on in my career two ideas hit me thusly: I'm an original, and I don't care what other writers are doing. That's why I don't review books. God bless them, I wish them well. I don't instigate or indulge literary feuds. I'm not part of any literary scene. There's me, James Ellroy, and there's everybody else. I don't want to be a part of a writers' community. I put aside reference. Why? Because it can't get me from point A to point B. It can't further my aims at all. Comparing me to Chandler, that's your job. You're a critic, and I'm not.

Both of these revelations pale before the biggest one. I was living in a basement apartment 25 years ago planning The Black Dahlia. I knew I was going to write The Big Nowhere next. I had the social thrust of it. I had the characters. I had some of the plot, but in a heartbeat L.A. Confidential came to me and I realized in the moment; whatever I conceive, I can execute. And that was the most startling revelation of all. Thus, I am morally and spiritually enjoined, to conceive in a grander and grander scale. I am devoid of sloth, devoid of laziness, I'm a very healthy 62, and I want to write a lot more great novels and never relent in my pursuit of perfection and scope. My hero in this, my spiritual guide, is Beethoven. The worse it got, the more total his deafness, the worse his health, the worse the level of privation in Vienna in the early 1820s, the greater and more visionary he became. There is a certain amount of megalomania in wanting to be like Beethoven, but as Nelson Mandela said, who are we not to be great, fabulous, glamorous, righteous, good, bigger than life?

Beethoven is a major presence in the book. When did you first get into him?
I took a music appreciation class at John Burroughs Junior High School. It was the winter of 1960. The teacher's name was Allen Hyams, dapper little guy with a pompadour. He was the music teacher at John Burroughs Junior High. I wrote an essay about John Burroughs called "Let's Twist Again" in Crime Wave, my collection of essays. Hyams had a bust of Beethoven, numerous busts of Beethoven, on a desk at the front of the room and he faced us kids. He put a record player there, a phonograph, and said something along the lines of "Hey kids, dig this," and he put down the needle and an orchestra went dun, dun, dun, duuuun, and I was hooked.

You're strictly classical. You're not into rock and roll.
Rock and roll has always felt reductive to me. Like institutionalized rebelliousness. It feels inherently un-profound to me. The "I like you good baby, I'm gonna make you mine" song. The cultural influences that have shaped my generation, or people 10 or 15 years younger than me, never grabbed hold of me emotionally. Which is my way of saying I don't dig it. I'm not saying it's devoid of social content or it's meretricious. I'm saying I don't care. I'm saying it doesn't vibrate my kundalini.

Do you feel like you've said everything you can say about Jean Hilliker with this book?
I don't know. She's there. I'm here. I don't foresee writing another memoir. I wrote a piece for West, which is the LA Times magazine, called "To Live and Die in LA" after moving back to LA after many years. I said it would be my last piece of autobiography but I was mistaken. So, never say never.

Is Los Angeles inescapable?
It's entirely escapable. When Erika's daughters go to college we're getting the fuck out of there.

But that essay from 2006 was so definitive. The thrust was very much "I am LA and LA is me."
Well I think the more honest answer is LA is where I go when women divorce me and I don't know where else to go.

So what's the next place? Do locations still matter to you?
Oh yeah. I want a nice, peaceful, cold, nurturing, homogenous, affluent climate. I don't need culture. I don't need anything other than the minimal surroundings.

INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW CARON
PHOTO BY MICHAEL DE LEON