White Jazz
Books | Fiction / Literary
4
James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.
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More Details:
Author
James Ellroy
Pages
368
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published Date
2011-06-29
ISBN
0307798429 9780307798428
Community ReviewsSee all
"Reading White Jazz was like listening to a jazz band where the drummer’s having a breakdown, the sax player’s out of tune, and no one told the bass guy the song ended 10 minutes ago, but somehow, it almost works. Ellroy’s style is clipped, frantic, and borderline unhinged, like he’s yelling plot points through a payphone while running from the cops.
There were moments I was hooked, where the grit and grime of 1950s L.A. pulled me in deep. But there were also moments I had no idea what was happening and just hoped I wasn’t having a stroke. The plot spirals, the sentences punch, and the whole thing feels like being trapped inside the mind of a sleep-deprived detective with a nicotine problem.
Three stars because I respect the madness, but Ellroy’s White Jazz made me feel like I needed to sit in a dark room afterward and reconsider my life choices. I didn’t love it, but I’ll be thinking about it for a while, and isn’t that its own kind of compliment?"
sappybeans