Rent L.A. Confidential

Synopsis

James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential is film-noir crime fiction akin to Chinatown,Hollywood Babylon, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. IIt's about threetortured souls in the 1950s L.A.P.D.: Ed Exley, the clean-cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of hisdad, a legendary cop in the same department; Jack Vincennes, a cop who advises a Police Squad- like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush-Hush magazine; and Bud White,a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom.Ellroy himself was traumatized as a boy by his party-animal mother's murder. (See his memoir My Dark Places for the whole sordid story.)So it is clear that Bud is partly autobiographical. But Exley, whose shiny reputation conceals a dark secret,and Vincennes, who goes showbiz with a vengeance, reflect parts of Ellroy, too. L.A. Confidential holds enough plots for two or three books: the cops chase stolen gangland herointhrough a landscape littered with not-always-innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who havebeen surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars; a vile developer--based (unfairly) on Walt Disney-- schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse; and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can bemore corrupt and violent. Ellroy's hardboiled prose is so compressed that some of his rat-a-tat paragraphsare hard to follow. You have to read with attention as intense as his#151;and that is very intense indeed. Buthe richly rewards the effort. He may not be as deep and literary as Chandler, but he belongs on the sametop-level shelf.

View descriptions at Amazon.com