Nothing Like a Little Confidence

As most of you already know, The Rap Sheet had James Ellroy as a guest blogger a few weeks back (see here, here, here, and here). So, ever since I’ve been hyper-aware of Ellroy’s appearances elsewhere. Today, for instance, there’s an interview with him in The New York Times Magazine, wherein the “Demon Dog” answers a few questions thrown at him by Deborah Solomon. What’s most striking, though hardly unique to this piece, is Ellroy’s self-assurance (which less-generous sorts than me might call “arrogance”) regarding his place in the crime-fiction-writing pantheon. A telling excerpt:

Do you think of yourself as a novelist or as a crime writer?
I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

How do you know since you say you don’t read other books?
I just know. There is a line from a wonderful Thomas Lux poem: “You’re alone and you know a few things.” I just know that I am that good.

What about Raymond Chandler, who wrote so evocatively about Los Angeles lowlifes before you?
He is egregiously overrated.

Dashiell Hammett, whose name is synonymous with the adjective “hard-boiled”?
I think he’s tremendously great; I just think I am greater. Read the five Hammett novels, and two of them are not good--“The Thin Man” and “The Dain Curse,” which doesn’t even make narrative sense.

My favorite part of this brief exchange, though, comes after Ellroy tells Solomon, “I live in a vacuum” and “spend my evenings alone, usually lying in the dark talking to women who aren’t in the room with me.” She asks the author, “Is this an act? Are you trying to pass yourself off as the sort of isolated sociopath who is a stock character in crime fiction?” To learn Ellroy’s response, you’ll just have to click here to read the full Times interview.