The Story Behind the Story: “The Big Somewhere,” edited by Steven Powell

(Editor’s note: This is the 79th installment in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series. Today’s essay comes from Steven Powell, a British scholar and author of The Venetian Vase, a crime fiction-oriented blog. He wrote Conversations with James Ellroy [2012] and James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction [2015], and edited the encyclopedic work 100 American Crime Writers [2012]. In the essay below, Powell recalls the process he went through to create his brand-new contribution to Ellroy scholarship, The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World [Bloomsbury Academic]).

When I began my Ph.D. on the work of James Ellroy in 2006, there was relatively little critical material on this author who called himself “the demon dog of American crime fiction.” There were a number of good articles by critics such as Lee Horsley and Lee Spinks, and the first book about Ellroy, Peter Wolfe’s Like Hot Knives to the Brain: James Ellroy’s Search for Himself, had been released the previous year. On the whole, I was surprised that such a fascinating and controversial figure, who has arguably done more than any other author to reinvent and redefine crime fiction over the past half century (and has always had the knack for generating publicity), had not received more scholarly attention. In the past few years, this has changed. More and more journal articles about Ellroy have appeared, as well as books by Jim Mancall and Anna Flügge. I have contributed to this growing body of scholarship by editing Conversations with James Ellroy, writing several articles, and finally composing a book titled James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction. After the last book, I could have perhaps moved on to other projects. But I had this nagging feeling that there was unfinished business between the Demon Dog and me, and once an idea for a book lodges in your brain—sometimes it’s just impossible to walk away.

I conceived an idea for an anthology of essays about Ellroy in a project that would bring together the most prominent scholars on the subject (Woody Haut, together with the aforementioned Jim Mancall and Anna Flügge), and also allow some new voices to be heard. With the help of my wife, Diana, and some friends and colleagues at the University of Liverpool, I began organizing the James Ellroy: Visions of Noir conference with a view that the outcome of the conference could be the foundation for an Ellroy anthology. The conference was held in July 2015 at the beautiful School of the Arts Library in Liverpool, the former home of Confederate banker Charles Kuhn Prioleau. It was a wonderful event that lived up to my hopes as its organizer. All of the delegates gave fascinating papers. We had two keynote speakers: Woody Haut, who gave a political commentary to Ellroy’s work from his debut novel onwards, and Martin Edwards, who took part in an author interview onstage and discussed his then newly release study, The Golden Age of Murder. When I was listening to the talks on Ellroy, I was struck, not for the first time, by the dense complexity of his plotting: two speakers addressed the subject of L.A. Confidential, but from their interpretation and focus, you could have been forgiven for thinking they were remarking on two different novels. Such is the richness of Ellroy’s plotting and prose that so much story can be packed into just a few pages, and when this style of narrative unravels over a 500-page novel, the effect is quite extraordinary.

With such an expanse of material to choose from, my next challenge was deciding on the theme for the anthology. I’ve always been inclined towards comprehensive studies; James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction covered almost all of the author’s writing career, and much of his life before that. But I am aware of the dangers of such an approach, that if a book is too overarching it might stray into survey territory. Given the interwoven nature of Ellroy’s thematic approach, I didn’t want to edit a collection dubbed “James Ellroy and Government” or “James Ellroy and Voyeurism.” Ellroy’s portrayal of the Surveillance State is very much influenced by his own obsessions—one might say struggles—with sexual voyeurism. As it seemed impossible to disentangle these themes, I hit on the idea of Ellroy’s narrative worlds being a “Big Somewhere” which could be defined, as it says on the back-cover of the book, as “a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical, and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.” The title refers to half-a-dozen classic film noirs that employed the prefix Big, not to mention Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet novel The Big Nowhere, often considered his greatest work.

(Right) Author Joseph Wambaugh

I was also extremely fortunate that in Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury, I found an editor who believed in my vision of an anthology of essays on Ellroy, which would be, from the beginning, both comprehensive in scope and incisive in analysis. The anthology begins with an examination of the writers who influenced Ellroy, and why. Jim Mancall contributed a superbly composed chapter arguing that Joseph Wambaugh was a major, almost unacknowledged influence on Ellroy. This appealed greatly to me as an editor, because there is very little critical work on Wambaugh, and it was exciting to see original material coming together that assessed his impact on the genre, while noting that Ellroy has surpassed him as a stylist. For my part, I composed a chapter examining Raymond Chandler’s influence on Ellroy’s work. I tried to dispel a few myths Ellroy has created about Chandler, an author he has been very rude about. Ellroy has always claimed that Chandler’s reputation in crime writing is overrated, and that Chandler was only an influence on his debut novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981), after which Ellroy turned his back on him stylistically. I make the case that as a source of inspiration, Chandler’s hold on Ellroy ran deep into the L.A. Quartet at the very least. The anthology ends with an examination on how Ellroy has influenced a new generation of crime novelists such as David Peace and Megan Abbott. Between these opening and closing sections there are chapters focused on the cinematic aspects of Ellroy’s writing, his portrayal of race issues, and the evolution of his most famous—or is it infamous?—character, police detective Dudley Smith.

When you have Ellroy scholars as talented as Anna Flügge, Rubén Peinado Abarrio, Joshua Meyer, and Rodney Taveira as your contributors, editing an anthology is a pleasure and a privilege. I spent many hours poring over their work with movie soundtracks playing in the background—including, appropriately enough, Jerry Goldsmith’s masterful score to L.A. Confidential. In fact, that’s what’s playing as I write this: track 11—“The Victor.” It’s a beautiful piece of music that takes you into Ellroy’s narrative world and serves as a reminder that sooner or later we’re all drawn back into Ellroy’s Big Somewhere. I hope readers of Ellroy, and fans of the crime-fiction genre in general, will find much to admire and discover about the Demon Dog’s work in The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World.

My Ellrovian Journey

(Editor’s note: Steven Powell is a British scholar and the co-editor of The Venetian Vase, a crime fiction-oriented blog. He wrote Conversations with James Ellroy and edited the encyclopedic work 100 American Crime Writers, both released in 2012. In the essay below, Powell recalls the lengths he went to in order to produce his latest book, James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction.)

It was a blurred image of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade which first brought my attention to the work of James Ellroy. I was in my mid-teens, on holiday with my parents on the south coast of England, when a leisurely detour through a local bookshop led me to spot a striking book cover that looked like it had been adapted from the Zapruder film: it was James Ellroy’s 1995, novel American Tabloid. I had never read Ellroy before, but a novel about the 1963 Kennedy assassination seemed interesting. Sure enough, a few pages in and I was gripped. Ellroy portrayed the assassination conspiracy from an Underworld perspective. His characters were brutal but sympathetic, the prose seemed both telegraphic and poetic. But what stood out more than anything else was Ellroy’s unapologetic determination to make the reader empathize with the characters who ultimately conspire to kill Kennedy. As he put it in the prologue, “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.”

Of course back then I had no idea that I would one day write a book about Ellroy, but it was that chance discovery in a bookshop that was the genesis of what I like to call my “Ellrovian Journey,” a journey that culminated in the release last September of James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction, the latest addition in Palgrave Macmillan’s Crime Files series. Previous entries have included Barry Forshaw’s Death in a Cold Climate (2012) and Lee Horsley’s The Noir Thriller (2001). With this study of Ellroy, I have considered all of the author’s major works, examining how his writing style has changed between novels. I have also analyzed the role Ellroy’s “Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction” persona has played in his literary career.

The book was adapted from my thesis. It was my better half who persuaded me that I should take my fascination with Ellroy’s work and direct it toward scholarly research, which is why the dedication of the book reads “For Diana—who started the journey.” During the course of my Ph.D. study, I had to decide what angle I would take in exploring Ellroy’s work. The novelist Craig McDonald has written, “Read five biographies of the same man, say, of Ernest Hemingway, and you’ll close each book feeling like you’ve read about five different people.” There seemed to be many different sides to James Ellroy and many aspects of his life and work I could focus on—the potential autobiographical connections in his fiction stemming from his often horrific early life, the unsolved murder of his mother, Ellroy’s descent into alcohol and drug abuse, and his various stints in the L.A. County Jail—which have all, to varying degrees, had an influence on his fiction. There is also the development of Ellroy’s idiosyncratic prose style. Read his debut, Brown’s Requiem (1981), a private-eye novel, and compare it to a later work such as the epic historical fiction of The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and you can see the remarkable evolution of both plotting and prose in Ellroy’s writing. Then again, a classic work such as The Black Dahlia (1987) could easily justify a Ph.D. in itself. In the end, I opted for a comprehensive study, examining all of the key issues in Ellroy’s work but paying special attention to his literary persona (against the advice of some academics who thought the Demon Dog role was just playacting on Ellroy’s part). Well, I was soon to learn that Ellroy is a very different man in private than his more outrageous media appearances would suggest.

Ellroy kindly consented to three telephone interviews, and when I visited his archive at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, I was able to travel to L.A. directly afterwards and interview Ellroy in person and at length. I had been studying his interviews for a long time, and when speaking to him, I was able to avoid subjects he had already exhausted in writing and conversation (such as his mother’s murder) and focus instead on his unfinished projects (“L.A. Death Trip” and “The Confessions of Bugsy Siegel”) and lesser-known works like the Lloyd Hopkins novels. So, following this research trip I began editing the anthology of interviews Conversations with James Ellroy for University Press of Mississippi. You never truly know when you’ll see a breakthrough while working on a project such as this, and curiously enough it was during a routine copyright request that I was afforded a glimpse into the role and purpose of the Demon Dog persona. One of the earliest interviews of Ellroy’s career was conducted by Duane Tucker and published in 1984 in the now-defunct but fondly remembered Armchair Detective magazine. When I contacted Tucker, he denied conducting the interview and suggested Ellroy used his name to write the interview himself. The more I looked at the interview, the more I became convinced that it is not a two-way conversation, but rather the young Ellroy’s written manifesto for what he wanted to achieve as a novelist. Of course, there were other possibilities: was Tucker winding me up? Had he simply forgotten the interview took place (as former Armchair Detective editor Otto Penzler suggested to me)? In the end, I was unable to elicit a confession from Ellroy, and the anthology states that the authorship of that 1984 interview is disputed, although my personal belief is that Ellroy wrote the interview out of a nascent literary ambition to craft his Demon Dog persona.

(Right) James Ellroy, photographed by Guillaume Paumier

Once I completed my Ph.D., Palgrave awarded me a contract to adapt it into a monograph. During the redrafting stages of the book, I kept myself busy by organizing the “James Ellroy: Visions of Noir” conference at the University of Liverpool. It was a deeply rewarding experience. Not only did we have noir expert Woody Haut as our keynote speaker and novelist Martin Edwards as the special guest, but it was interesting to see through the work of the delegates who came from as far afield as Brazil, Germany, and Australia how critical interest in Ellroy has developed rapidly in the past few years. Although not every critic holds Ellroy in high esteem. Ellroy’s always been a risk taker, and a consequence of this is that some experiments may alienate the reader. Mike Davis described Ellroy’s work as “at times an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore.” In the book, I examine how Ellroy has developed his idiosyncratic prose and plotting style, which has won him legions of fans, but also some severe critics like Davis. Two of the key novels in the development of this style were the L.A. Quartet entries L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992). As I state in the book:

The sparse, distinct style Ellroy had achieved with L.A. Confidential, which was partly reliant on the removal of what he deemed unnecessary words, such as adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions, would become an issue in the first draft of White Jazz. According to [writer and digital marketer] Martin Kihn, Ellroy had taken this redacted style so far with White Jazz that words needed to be added back into the manuscript:

The first draft of Jazz, for instance, was even more clipped and opaque than the version about to be published. Working first with [literary agent Nat] Sobel, then Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, Ellroy painstakingly added words to the manuscript. “The first draft was extremely challenging,” says Mehta. “What James was doing was extremely ambitious. But I think you have to engage people and draw them into the story. And I thought essentially we had to make it a little easier for them.” (Kihn 1992: 34)

Ellroy, however, has offered a different account, claiming he only returned to the clipped style after finding the initial draft of the novel unsatisfactory: “I started writing White Jazz, in a normally discursive, first-person style, but the book felt flabby to me, so I started cutting words” (Powell 2008a: 159). Ellroy’s and Mehta’s accounts of the drafting process, taken together, indicate that the manuscript underwent a laborious process in which thousands of words were cut and then many were subsequently restored.

The immense levels of concentration and determination Ellroy had developed in outlining and writing his original L.A. Quartet ensured that those novels would become defining works in the crime genre. The dizzying, spellbinding style of his later novels American Tabloid and the recent Perfidia (2014) seamlessly flow from what he achieved in L.A. Confidential and White Jazz.

Ellroy’s journey from being a homeless alcoholic, periodically locked up in jail, to becoming one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists is, in its own grueling fashion, a remarkable vindication of the American dream. As for my own Ellrovian journey—it goes on.

A Fresh Take on Crime Fiction’s Stars

(Editor’s note: As I’ve reported before, I am among the contributors to an encyclopedic work titled 100 American Crime Writers, which appeared last month in the UK and this month in the States, courtesy of publisher Palgrave Macmillan. My editor on that project was British scholar Steven Powell, who also wrote Conversations with James Ellroy, released earlier this year. In the following essay, Powell recalls the process of assembling 100 American Crime Writers and several of the difficulties he faced in completing that 392-page volume.)

I began working on 100 American Crime Writers as a contributor. Chris Routledge, the editor of the book at the time, asked me to write three biographical entries: James Ellroy, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane. I considered this to be an exciting and daunting task in itself, between uncovering new biographical details through researching and re-reading each man’s considerable collection. Despite this, when Chris asked me to take over as editor so that he could focus on other projects, I didn’t hesitate to say “yes.” As although it required researching and writing many more entries, communicating with 14 contributors, and dealing with the details of proofreading, bibliographies, editing proofs, and what-not, I was enthusiastic about the great wealth of interesting and engaging material and the opportunity to ensure it reached a broad audience.

100 American Crime Writers is published as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Crime Files Series, which features some of the best contemporary scholarship on crime fiction. Previous volumes in the series include Lee Horsley’s The Noir Thriller and Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, by Barry Forshaw. The purpose of 100 American Crime Writers was to provide short critical biographies of (you guessed it) 100 of the greatest and most influential crime writers in American literary history.

The project was full of challenges. I had long been an admirer of anthologies such as William L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994) and the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976), by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. These books were mammoth reads, and it was difficult to imagine what they would be like to write and edit. Fortunately, I was blessed with a great set of contributors, some of whom I inherited off Chris and others I recruited myself. A few of the names will be familiar from the blogosphere: there is J. Kingston Pierce from The Rap Sheet, for instance, plus Juri Nummelin of Pulpetti and Chris himself, who wrote more entries than any other contributor.

One of the first tasks was to revise the list of authors to be included. Deciding which names would stay in 100 American and who to take off was always going to be a difficult task. There are some authors which no anthology of this kind can do without: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, etc. But I decided to add some relatively new names in the field, such as Megan Abbott, and take off John Grisham and Scott Turow, who--good as they are--just did not fit as neatly into any crime genre. However, some authors such as William Faulkner and Truman Capote, who would not traditionally be considered crime writers, are included for their influence on the genre through such works as Sanctuary (1931) and In Cold Blood (1966).

The entries themselves are a combination of a writer’s biography and an analysis of his or her key works. I was struck by the writers whose lives seemed as remarkable as their novels. Authors such as Harlan Coben and Janet Evanovich seem as emotionally fulfilled as they are professionally successful, while others carry an air of tragedy about them. It’s hard not to be moved when reading about the hardships Edward Bunker or Iceberg Slim endured in prison, or about Ross Macdonald’s slow mental decline. These guys wrote their legend, and a few of them lived it too, but they paid a high price.

100 American Crime Writers should fit comfortably onto the bookshelf of any student, scholar, or fan of crime fiction. My aim was to produce a book which could be either read in sequence or dipped into at will, with many pleasing return visits. Covering writers from Edgar Allan Poe to James Ellroy, the volume of material we were dealing with was immense, and Palgrave gave me a wide berth to explore the subject. At 130,000 words the book is almost twice the length of an average scholarly text, and we had to make sure that every word mattered. The volume also contains two essays, “‘Out of the Venetian Vase’: From Golden Age to Hard-boiled’” and “After These Mean Streets: Crime Fiction and the Chandler Inheritance,” which I wrote to contextualize the entries in terms of developments in the genre and literary themes. One recurring theme of the genre is the dynamic between fantasy and realism. In his entry on Ed McBain, Martin Lightening wrote of McBain’s contribution to this debate:

Unlike Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and other charismatic private eyes, the policemen McBain created are just people coming into work every day to earn a living. They are people trying to do their job well despite the attendant frustrations, such as lack of monetary rewards, physical dangers and the psychological effect of continually dealing with the darker side of human nature. The detectives, who alternate as the main characters, are a microcosm of the ethnic mix of New York, here renamed Isola which translates as ‘island’ in Italian. The most regular character, Steve Carella, is Italian, Meyer Meyer is Jewish, Bert Kling and Cotton Hawes are all American WASPs, Arthur Brown is black, Peter Byrnes is Irish, Frankie Hernandez is Puerto Rican and there is even a Japanese detective named Takashi Fujiwara. McBain deftly trod the path between mystery fiction and social realism. ‘A mystery should be exciting, believable and entertaining,’ McBain said. The problem was that crime is not this way in real life.

It was a problem that McBain would successfully overcome. Indeed, in their distinct styles, whether they strived for realism or not, the most memorable crime writers--Patricia Highsmith, James Crumley, Joseph Wambaugh, Walter Mosley, etc.--never failed to entertain. With any project this size there are usually snags along the way which can lead to anxious moments, but my overwhelming feeling now that the book, as finished, is one of gratitude and pride. More than anything else, I hope anyone who reads 100 American Crime Writers will feel compelled to find the time to pick up a good crime novel.

Speaking of which ...

READ MORE: “Extract from 100 American Crime Writers,” by Steven Powell (The Venetian Vase); “100 American Crime Writers, Steven Powell, Editor,” by Barry Forshaw (Crime Time).

Listening to James Ellroy

(Editor’s note: Steven Powell is a British scholar and the co-editor of The Venetian Vase, a crime-fiction blog. I became acquainted with him when he invited me to contribute to an encyclopedic work called 100 American Crime Writers [due out from Palgrave this coming summer]. Powell later added to The Rap Sheet’s “Books You Have to Read” series with a piece about Theodora Keogh’s 1962 novel, The Other Girl. And when, earlier this year, the University Press of Mississippi published Powell’s non-fiction work Conversations with James Ellroy, I asked that he compose a post for this page about the challenges and rewards involved in producing that interview-focused volume. His article appears below.)

My first conversation with James Ellroy was in June 2008. I’d written to him, through his publisher, explaining that I had recently begun studying for a Ph.D. on his life and work at the University of Liverpool. I wanted to ask him a few specific questions about The Big Nowhere (1988), an outstanding novel which rivals his more well-known masterpiece, The Black Dahlia (1987), as his greatest work.

I did not expect a prompt response for two reasons: I thought Ellroy must be flooded with correspondence from fans (and one or two lunatics), and he has such a prodigious output that I was sure he was too busy to spend much time with such requests.

To my surprise, in a short interval I received an e-mail reply from Ellroy, through his assistant, answering my questions and also giving me his phone number and suggesting that I call him if I had anything further to ask. This led to three telephone interviews in which Ellroy proved to be at turns generous, courteous, combative, outrageously funny, and thrillingly insightful on a whole range of subjects--everything from his life and career to his crime-fiction influences and his views on politics and religion, delivered sometimes with the canine-like howling which has become a trademark of his “Demon Dog of American crime fiction” persona.

Beyond their being invaluable to my research, I wanted those interviews to be shared, because I found them both interesting on a personal level and academically engaging. After discussing the matter with my thesis supervisor, professor David Seed, we both agreed that the best way for the interviews to be published would be as part of the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations Series. That series offers interviews with the most prominent figures in 20th- and 21st-century literature, each volume focusing on a single author and comprising conversations conducted over the full breadth of his or her life and career. More than 100 volumes have been produced so far on figures including Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Anaïs Nin, Elizabeth Bishop, Joyce Carol Oates, Graham Greene, and Walter Mosley. I felt it would be a privilege to edit Conversations with James Ellroy as part of that series.

After making a pilgrimage to the James Ellroy archive at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, and interviewing Ellroy in person at his Los Angeles apartment, I decided it was time to pitch the book. I contacted the series editor, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, and through her Walter Biggins at UMiss Press, and after some helpful discussion, we agreed to go ahead and make Conversations with James Ellroy the best book it could possibly be. UMiss Press armed me with a modest budget for buying copyrights, and I was ready to roll.

As editor of this volume, I had two main tasks: to secure the copyrights of the interviews to be included, and secondly, to write a chronology of the key events of Ellroy’s life. Writing that chronology entailed carefully reading through primary and secondary sources on the author, a task made more difficult by the sources’ conflicting dates of events. However, the arduous process unearthed some research gems. I only discovered that Ellroy’s preferred title for his first novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981), was Concerto for Orchestra after I visited the Ellroy archive in South Carolina. Nor was I aware that Ellroy had planned to make Frederick Underhill, the lead protagonist of his second novel, Clandestine (1982), a character in 1992’s White Jazz (presumably filling the role that went instead to Dave “The Enforcer” Klein) until I listened to Ellroy’s 1987 radio interview with Book Beat host Don Swaim, which appears in print for the first time in Conversations with James Ellroy.


The author recalls the circumstances of his mother’s death, in 1958, for the documentary James Ellroy: American Dog.

As for the task of selecting the interviews to include in this book, I had already begun creating an inventory of the hundreds of interviews Ellroy has given when I started work on my thesis. My challenge was to whittle that list down to the most important examples I could fit into a book of roughly 80,000 to 85,000 words. Included would be exchanges that brought out the key themes of Ellroy’s life--the unsolved murder of his mother, his fascination with the 1947 Black Dahlia case, his Demon Dog persona, his addictions and criminal life, his steady rise to prominence as a writer, and his revisionist take on Los Angeles and American history. There are some interviews which Ellroy fans and researchers would recognize as indispensable to a study of his life or work, such as his 1984 conversation with Duane Tucker for Armchair Detective (which begins the volume), his 1995 interview with Paul Duncan titled “James Ellroy: Barking,” and his two interviews with Craig McDonald: “The Tremor of Intent” and “To Live and Die in L.A.”

Naturally, there were several excellent interviews which couldn’t be included due to space constraints, and it was a tough call having to choose some at the expense of others. However, as the interviews are arranged chronologically, my general aim was for each of them to tell a part of Ellroy’s life story. The unsolved, 1958 murder of his mother, which has haunted him throughout his life, is explored in some detail in the volume, but there are other less well-known incidents which the author discusses, in some cases as they were happening. Ellroy had a nervous breakdown during the grueling publicity for The Cold Six Thousand (2001). In reading Ellroy’s interview with Craig McDonald conducted around that time, it is apparent the author is struggling with his own image and success. As Ellroy tells McDonald, “I’m tired of myself, if you want to know the truth.” Ellroy’s sometimes-turbulent personal life, as the interviews attest, informs the narratives of his novels and even changes his writing plans.

I had a nervous breakdown. I was on a book tour. My marriage went to shit. I fell in love with a woman in San Francisco. A left-wing woman named Joan. Red Goddess Joan. It went bad. Big time. Fucking bad. I got the fuck out of L.A. Then I met a married, pregnant woman …

The breakdown of his second marriage and his affair with the enigmatic “Red Goddess Joan” caused him to radically revise his latest novel, Blood’s a Rover (2009), which forms the subject of his interview with fellow crime writer David Peace that closes the anthology. However, with the news that Ellroy is planning to write a second “L.A. Quartet,” and the recent release of the Ellroy-scripted movie Rampart, there are still more chapters to come in the life and story of one of the most remarkable figures in American crime fiction. For James Ellroy, the conversation continues.

READ MORE: “James Ellroy on Writing About His Mother’s Murder and Why His Novels Will Always Shock,” by Rob Waugh (The Daily Mail).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Other Girl,” by Theodora Keogh

(Editor’s note: This is the 102nd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection has been made by Steven Powell, an editor of the forthcoming Conversations with James Ellroy [a volume of UMISS Press’ Literary Conversations Series], and the 2012 non-fiction release 100 American Crime Writers. He is studying for a Ph.D. on the fiction of James Ellroy at Britain’s University of Liverpool, and blogs about crime fiction in The Venetian Vase.)

Some books defy genre and subgenre labels. Theodora Keogh’s novel about Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, The Other Girl (1962), is one such work. It could be read as a psychological suspense novel or as lesbian pulp fiction. It has the jet-black philosophy of hard-boiled crime fiction but the elegant prose of a Golden Age detective story. It is impossible to categorize the novel as being definitively of any one of these subgenres, as it would be a reductive to a novel that so seamlessly interweaves many styles, and ultimately leaves the impression that Keogh regarded herself as above crime fiction. It is telling, then, that The Other Girl would be Keogh’s final novel: her work would soon be out of print, and all critical interest would fade.

When news reached the blogosphere of the passing of Theodora Keogh on January 5, 2008, it generated a wave of speculation, debate and a renewed interest in her work as a novelist. Who was this woman? Why are all of her novels out of print? The Daily Telegraph published the only comprehensive obituary of Keogh, and it was through the Telegraph that I, like many crime-fiction readers, first heard her name. Keogh had led a fascinating life, which alone could provide material for a dozen novels. Born in New York in 1919, the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, Keogh was educated in Manhattan and Munich, worked as a dancer in Canada and South America, and designed costumes for films such as The Pirate (1948) and Daddy Long Legs (1955), amongst many other triumphs and disasters.

By comparison, her literary career, although influential, formed a relatively minor part of her life. Keogh published nine novels between 1950 and 1962. It was her last book, The Other Girl--a fictionalization of the murder of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia--that took me by surprise. I thought I had read every Dahlia book out there, both fact and fiction. Around the time I heard about Keogh’s novel, I was conducting a series of phone interviews with James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia (1987). Had he read The Other Girl? Ellroy informed me that he had neither read nor heard of the book, or of Keogh. Now my curiosity had got me hooked. I purchased a second-hand copy over the Internet and sat down to read the novel. Although I had built up my expectations, I was not disappointed. I read The Other Girl in a single setting, and instantly came to regard it as a classic of the same stature as John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (1977) and Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.

Although in Dunne’s and Ellroy’s novels Elizabeth Short is not so much a character as a ghost, haunting the lives of those trying to solve her brutal murder (in True Confessions, Miss Short was renamed Lois Fazenda, “the Virgin Tramp”), in The Other Girl she is a character, referred to quite simply as Betty. Betty is just one of a cast of oddballs and eccentrics whom Keogh weaves around Los Angeles’ most infamous and gruesome unsolved crime. The novel’s main focus is on Marge Vulawski, the daughter of immigrant workers who has grown up on a farm just outside of L.A. Marge came to the City of Angels with high hopes but has become bitter and cynical, as her practical know-how with farm machinery and her broad build have led her to a unexciting job as a garage mechanic. In the city, Marge befriends Zoe, a woman who calls herself “the Duchess,” and was once, by her own account, a lady of wealth and importance. Now virtually penniless, the Duchess still wears the luxurious clothes of her better days, but the clothes are, in a reference to Dickens’ Miss Haversham, literally rotting on her and symbolize her decline. Through Zoe, Marge meets Betty at a local drugstore. Betty is an aspiring actress who is represented by the sleazy agent Herman Lee: Lee has never had a successful client, but he does not want one, as he preys on their naiveté. Marge is instantly attracted to Betty, but her sexuality is treated with ambiguity and at times appears to be more of a yearning for friendship. Marge’s desire to be around Betty means tagging along with her on a date with two French sailors. In one of the novel’s most powerful (and for the time groundbreaking) scenes, Marge and Betty have their first sexual contact with each other during an orgy with the two men:

But her [Betty’s] breasts themselves were surprisingly small; fresh and round and shiny like a peeled twig with dark, insulting nipples. The fresh, tender lower curves of these breasts entered into Marge’s memory for ever. They merged with childhood dreams, with infancy. They became the salty, threaded stuff of her generation.

Was what followed called an orgy? The French sailors hadn’t treated it as such. To them it appeared natural, neither odd nor perverse.

The Other Girl is unusual amongst crime novels as it does not begin with a crime that kick-starts the plot and motivates the leading character to try and solve the mystery. Nor is there any significant back-story to shed light on where the plot is heading. This novel is not so much a whodunnit as a who-will-do-it. Keogh supplies a detailed character study of a bunch of unusual people and then follows them as their relationship with Betty gradually turns from attraction to bitterness and sexual jealously. Each character is given a motive for murdering Betty, but how will the narrative move toward the act, and who will be responsible? Keogh keeps you guessing right up until the shocking climax.

Despite the initial interest in Keogh following her passing, no serious reappraisal of her literary career followed. This is, perhaps, to be expected as the tone of The Other Girl can be alienating, and the novel is difficult to place within a genre. Keogh’s sketches of people who have lost their soul while looking for a glimmer of success sometimes reads as misanthropic. Her candid description of sexual experimentation is liable to offend many readers, but the ambiguity of Marge’s sexuality has probably also barred the novel from becoming a classic of lesbian pulp fiction alongside the works of Ann Bannon or Valerie Taylor. Perhaps this obscurity was just what Keogh intended.

The Other Girl is a brilliant novel which has lost none of its power to be both haunting and puzzling.