White jazz

The year is 1958, the place is LA, our protagonist is Lt. Dave Klein, movie star looks, in his 50s' and already earned his police pension… also one-time lawyer and also currently… slum lord, bag-man, wheeler dealer and killer-for-mob-hire! The LA police are corrupt through and through and have been Leggi tutto

This conclusion to James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet is just as wholesome and uplifting as the previous three books with his usual cast of characters such as corrupt cops, gangsters, hustlers, blackmailers, shakedown artists, bag men, thieves, junkies, drug dealers, dog killers, whores, johns, pimps, peep Leggi tutto

”All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams--I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget. Pictures keep the woman young. L.A., fall 1958. Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events--so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down--the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty Leggi tutto

Every time I've finished an Ellroy book, I've had to sit back and process everything, climb up out of his world, shake my brain free of his expert grasp. With White Jazz , he concludes his epic "L.A. Quartet," by narrowing his focus even more so than in The Black Dahlia , and miles away from the g

Feature this is one of Ellroy's best. Dig the economy: scale back the unsustainable sprawl of L.A. Confidential —streamline it. The catch: still cram a CRAAAZY amount of wild plot into a relatively small frame. Single protagonist, single POV—a departure. NO redemptive qualities for the protag: Ellroy's Leggi tutto

I’m well aware I’m going to receive some flak for this, so just know that I consider myself a big fan of Ellroy’s first three LA Quartet novels. In fact, The Black Dahlia is on my “desert island books” shelf. But this almost felt like a parody of late 1980s Ellroy. The short, clipped sentences were Leggi tutto

Lieutenant Dave Klein is not a nice man. In fact, he’s as crooked a cop as one is likely to find. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an occasional hitman and a clever schemer. His newest case is an investigation involving the breaking and entering of drug kingpin’s home. His investigation will lead him to b Leggi tutto

4 και κάτι ψιλά/5 αστεράκια. Βρισκόμαστε στο 1958, και η Πόλη των Αγγέλων φαίνεται να κατακλύζεται από πάσης φύσεως δαίμονες: οι εκβιασμοί, οι δολοφονίες, η διαφθορά και το ξέπλυμα μαύρου χρήματος αποτελούν καθημερινά φαινόμενα, ενώ η αστυνομία φαντάζει εντελώς ανήμπορη να αντιμετωπίσει το κύμα της Leggi tutto