Author Interview James Ellroy Rewriting history he last line of Bloods A Rover (and also the last line of James Ellroys biblically proportioned Underworld USA trilogy) reads like a dedication: Here is my gift in lieu of a reunion my lost mother, my lost child, and the Red Goddess Joan. Its a bit of a shift from the last pages of the preceding novel, The Cold Six Thousand, which ended in 1968 with its character Wayne Tedrow arranging for his father to be bashed to death with a golf club. Whats with the new mood? This book ripped me up to write, says the LA Confidential author and self- styled demon dog of American letters, his 6ft-plus frame stretched out awkwardly against the corporate beige decor of his hotel room. And if the last 100 pages dont break your heart then you dont have one. Bloods A Rover concludes Ellroys masterwork: three crazy novels providing an alternative, apocalyptic chronicle to the USs turbulent decade of change from the perspective of the corrupt, right-wing cops and gangsters who pull the strings (and the triggers) for those in charge. From JFK and Martin Luther King to J Edgar Hoover and Nixon via the Mob and Howard Hughes, Ellroy has dished up a bone-crackingly violent parallel history delineating the bloody ideological struggles between the radicals and the reactionaries who helped forge a US that produced Obama. But Ellroy doesnt want to talk about modern America. He wants to talk about the fact that, for all its fevered, brutal psychopathy, Bloods A Rover is finally a love story. My marriage went down; I had a breakdown. I fell in love with a woman called Joan; that tanked, he says, eyeballing me. For a long time Id wanted a daughter and then I met Kathy, who was pregnant. But it wasnt my child and she wasnt going to leave her husband. So this book emerged from my T relationships with these three women and I feel it in my heart more strongly than anything Ive ever written. This is saying something for a man who once wrote a book (My Dark Places) about his search for the man who murdered his mother, raped and dumped in a vacant Los Angeles lot when Ellroy was ten. Ellroy drifted into a life of petty crime and drug and alcohol addiction before getting clean in his late-twentieses and starting to write. Yet, while Bloods A Rover covers a plot to discredit the civil rights movement and the efforts of the Mob to gain control of the casinos in the Dominican Republic, plus a host of spaghetti-shaped subplots, its ultimately about two men ex-cop and closet liberal Tedrow, and FBI agent Dwight Holly. E llroy is in philosophical mood, happy to reveal a sentimental side both in person and in a prose thats among the most formidable in contemporary fiction his signature broken-backed style is more relaxed in this new book compared to the nerve-shredding staccato of The Cold Six Thousand. But his purpose is deadly serious: rewriting American history is a way of reclaiming it. The USA trilogy is about putting in the centre me or you as a kid, scared and wondering what the hell its all about, and making it our lives. Im in the last third of my life, and its spiritually very powerful to go back and recreate history. So no chance of writing about the present? No way. Ive got another memoir coming out then Im gonna embark on another trilogy. Im the only person who does what I do and Im gonna keep on doing it. Bloods A Rover (Century, 22) is out now Ellroy drifted into a life of petty crime and drug and alcohol addiction before getting clean in his late- twenties and starting to write The author talks to Claire Allfree about the facts behind the heartbreaking fiction of his third and final Underworld USA novel Whodunnit... Four other seminal US crime writers La Roux In Town Tonight Its been a whirlwind year for the elaborately coiffured Elly Jackson (pictured) whose synthy 1980s pop has won legions of fans Tonight, The Academy, 57 Middle Abbey Street D1, 7.30pm, 17.50 (returns only). Tel: 0818 719 300. www. laroux.co.uk Bluetooth Fairy Artist Will St Leger takes part in the first Bluetooth art expo, where the audience will receive a digital piece of art on their mobiles Until tomorrow, Filmbase, Curved St D2, from 7.30pm tonight, 15. Tel: (01) 679 6716. www. filmbase.ie metro Arts & Entertainment life Book Now Tommy & Hector Can you handle not one but two of Irelands most exuberant personalities on the same stage? Tommy Tiernan and Hector hEochagin are hosting a music and comedy showcase in aid of new live music venue The Complex in Smithfield. The line-up includes Jape, David ODoherty and Maria Doyle Kennedy, plus sketches Nov 22, Vicar Street, 58-59 Thomas St D8, 8pm, 28. Tel: 0818 719 300. www.ticketmaster.ie 18 metrolife Thursday, November 12, 2009 The hoTTesT TickeTs in Town We have four pairs of tickets to see KNIVES IN HENS Nov 17 at Smock Alley Theatre, 8pm For a chance to win, e-mail your answer to the question below to life@metroireland.ie by noon today with Hot Tickets in the subject line. With your answer please include your name, address and a number where you can be contacted between 1pm and 3pm. Strictly one entry per person; entrants must be age 18+. Q. Alan Gilsenans documentary The Yellow Bittern profiles which veteran Irish singer-songwriter? Dashiell Hammett: A civil-rights activist, Dashiell Hammett was later blacklisted by the House Of Un-American Activities Committee. His fiction innovatively combines violent pulp whodunnits with literary naturalism and conceals his radical political views with varying artistry. In The Maltese Falcon (1930), the hero Sam Spade isnt in it for the money but out of an obscure sense of duty. Crucially, Hammett avoids the clichs of melancholy and machismo that his epigones adopted. Chester Himes: Equally polemical is Chester Himes (pictured), whose 1950/1960s Harlem novels add the element of race to the theme of the cynical, alienated detective. As black police detectives, his recurring protagonists Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones uphold the laws of the very society that keeps them down, and Himes extracts every nuance, as well as anger, from that dilemma. Thomas Harris: Thomas Harris is one of the most imitated crime writers of the last 30 years and the first to combine a wealth of technical knowledge about FBI techniques with a weighty, mournful morality. Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs are also distinguished by a humane treatment of violence and his elegant prose. Carl Hiaasen: Hiaasens preference for the outlandish puts him closer to stand-up than hard-boiled, a quality born from his sense that most crime writers dont capture the craziness of reality. In each of his books he also highlights an issue of corruption or environmental destruction going unchecked in his native Florida. Robert Murphy index.html2.html3.html4.html5.html6.html7.html8.html9.html10.html11.html12.html13.html14.html15.html16.html17.html18.html19.html20.html21.html22.html23.html24.html25.html26.html27.html