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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans--but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.
The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith--Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls--comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns.
Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ellroy's latest guide to the dark passages of Southern California history is a prequel to his Los Angeles Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz), featuring many of the same characters. It opens with the murder of a Japanese family on the day before the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor. The story quickly spins into a tale of a city so stymied by the possibility of Far East invasion it's all too easy for a cynical police force to make homicides, greed, and corruption? the order of the day. Actor Wasson (Body Double) once again proves to be the author's ideal vocal interpreter, not only providing more than 50 distinct voices but keeping perfect pace with Ellroy's unique style: hammering the novel's staccato narration, intensifying the kinetic passages, and slowing down for the characters' fantasies and self-delusions. A Knopf hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* I condemn these actions, even as I attempt to exploit them. No, that's not James Ellroy speaking, but one of his most memorable creations: LAPD sergeant Dudley Smith, whose charming wink and lilting brogue belie the fact that he is a sociopathic opportunist as likely to slap you on the back as he is to shoot you in the face. It's usually unfair to try to guess what novelists mean, but with Ellroy, the temptation can be irresistible. He has spent his career writing about men for whom brutal violence and casual racism are a way of life and, while a writer's refusal to telegraph his opinions may be the highest form of art, when does the balance shift between indictment and exploitation? Why document the unspeakable behavior of bad men in law enforcement and government in book after book after book? Without knowing the author's mind, those may be unanswerable questions. Ellroy has always thrived on our uncomfortable fascination with the lawless lawmen who shaped the second half of the twentieth century. The good news is that, however unsettling, this book can still be admired without knowing the answers. Opening on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and cast with many of the characters of Ellroy's legendary L.A. Quartet, Perfidia, the first volume of what is being billed as the Second L.A. Quartet, marks both a return to the scene of Ellroy's greatest success and a triumphant return to form. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, a Japanese family is found dead in their home, apparent victims of ritual suicide. Inconsistencies suggest that it might be murder but, as the city reels from next morning's act of war, there is pressure to fit the facts to the crime. Police chief Clemence Call-Me-Jack Horrall demands a solution by New Year's, and Dud Smith is only too happy to oblige. Others demur, but with L.A. caught in a sudden squall of wartime hysteria, their objections are blown away in the storm. As ordinary citizens act out against the Japs and police round up suspects, plans are being made to intern the Japanese, seize their property, and turn a nice profit in the bargain. Meanwhile, clandestine short-wave radios and a submarine attack raise the fear that a Fifth Column is collaborating with the enemy, rendering the entire California coast vulnerable but is the Fifth Column real or imagined? Longtime Ellroy readers will be gratified to see practically the full cast of the L.A. Quartet and some characters from the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, from Bucky Bleichert and William Parker to Ward Littell and J. Edgar Hoover (with a notable cameo by Elizabeth Short), but the most fascinating creation is a newcomer, Hideo Ashida, a gifted forensics man whose job is complicated by his Japanese nationality, his homosexuality, and his inability to choose between would-be patrons Smith and Parker. Smith, Parker, Ashida, and Kay Lake, a bohemian recruited to infiltrate a cell of well-meaning Communist sympathizers, form the key quartet in a typically labyrinthine, byzantine, cast-of-dozens (even Bette Davis plays a part!) effort. Evidence is suppressed, confessions are coerced, plots are hatched, allegiances are broken, and the case is solved after a fashion. As the novel builds to its fever-dream climax, Ellroy's wartime L.A. evokes William S. Burroughs at his surreal and satirical best. It's a landscape where insomniac obsessives fight and fornicate fueled by drugs and alcohol, rifle squads roam the streets wearing shrunken-head lucky charms, and policemen pose their kids for pictures with a murder suspect called the Wolfman. Ashida summarizes it succinctly: Land grabs, plastic surgery, blood libel. Rogue cops, sub attacks, a lynch-mob massacre. . . . Secret radios and feigned seppuku. The haughty Left and the bellicose Right. A grand alliance of war profiteers. All he leaves out, perhaps, are the smut films, sexual perverts, and Nazi sympathizers. In interviews, Ellroy can come across as a conservative curmudgeon, an image it's easy to believe after reading his prose. So it's surprising that the word that comes to mind for this book is balance. His character portrayals have never been more nuanced or dare we say it sympathetic. His prose veers away from the bombast it's sometimes been prey to, and, while still bearing his hallmarks (The kitchen went gas-stove hot), it's less brutally abrupt. The master of telegrammatic typing even turns a phrase or two, and quite nicely. A nascent interest in forensic science C.S.I. L.A. '41? adds interest to what is, above all, a magnificently plotted mystery.Regardless of what Ellroy intends or means, what he's achieved is a disturbing, unforgettable, and inflammatory vision of how the men in charge respond to the threat of war. It's an ugly picture, but just try looking away.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FEW WRITERS, once established in the public consciousness, have changed their style as drastically as James Ellroy. In his early days, Ellroy wandered through the boneyards of 1980s pulp, channeling Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett before he found his own voice with a trilogy of contemporary novels about a troubled, racist genius cop named Lloyd Hopkins. Hopkins was morally despicable in the day-to-day, but compared with the monsters he fought in the neon-drench of underworld Los Angeles, he was quasiangelic. When Ellroy closed out the Hopkins trilogy with "Suicide Hill" in 1986, he shuttered his interest in topical culture as well and moved into the second incarnation of his career, that of the wildly romantic yet increasingly bilious chronicler of Los Angeles in the years immediately following World War II. The four books in what became known as the Los Angeles Quartet - "The Black Dahlia," "The Big Nowhere," "L.A. Confidential" and "White Jazz" - were written with razzle-dazzle intensity and a lust for the past that approached religious fervor. They launched a frontal assault against any crime fiction that had become self-righteous or one-dimensional, and any literary fiction that had become overly enamored of those people Mary Lee Settle called the "vaguely unhappy in Connecticut." The Los Angeles Quartet burned a pathway for the next generation of crime writers by proving genre could be literature if one had the ambition and the talent to make it so. Ellroy was compared a lot to Chandler in those days. He compared himself to Tolstoy. But his true forebear was Conrad. They shared similar obsessions with the savagery at the heart of man, a kindred prose style - sentences that were concrete in their center but occasionally lush around the edges - and both swung for the fences when it came to pronouncements on the human condition. By the end of the quartet, however, Ellroy's prose style had transformed into a staccato bebop: less Chandler or Conrad and more Spillane, or possibly Runyon overdosing on Benzedrine. The clean, if haunting, opening of "The Black Dahlia" ("I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.") has given way, almost 30 years later, to the opening of Ellroy's new novel, "Perfidia": "There - Whalen's Drugstore, Sixth and Spring Streets. The site of four recent felonies. 211 PC - Armed Robbery." For better and often for worse, that style - jumpy, feverish and anarchic - mirrors the world we enter. It's the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the lives of all Angelenos are about to change, some more drastically than others. A Japanese family of four, the Watanabes, is found murdered in their home. Drawn into the case are Hideo Ashida, a brilliant Japanese-American police chemist; Sgt. Dudley Smith, a corrupt, near-demonic police detective; William H. Parker, the real-life captain who ultimately rose to become chief of the Los Angeles Police Department; and Kay Lake, erstwhile love interest of "The Black Dahlia." In fact, all of these characters have appeared before: Parker was in two books of the Los Angeles Quartet, Smith in three and Ashida was mentioned in "The Black Dahlia." (He gets his first speaking role in this book.) Other prominent characters in "Perfidia" first turned up in "The Big Nowhere," "L.A. Confidential," "American Tabloid," "The Cold Six Thousand" or "Blood's a Rover." At times this adds to the richness of the tapestry; at other times it feels like Easter eggs for fanboys. Ashida's closeted homosexuality and an infiltration-of-the-Reds subplot, in particular, play almost exactly like Danny Upshaw's closeted homosexuality and an infiltration-of-the-Reds subplot in "The Big Nowhere." The deaths of the Watanabe family gradually threaten to expose a huge land grab hiding in plain sight. As internment plans for Japanese and Japanese-American citizens shift from horrid idea to shameful reality, Ashida tries to parlay his gifts with forensics to stave off internment for himself and his family. To do so, he must choose between aligning himself with the ferociously ambitious Parker or the just plain ferocious Smith. Kay Lake, meanwhile, is coerced by Parker into infiltrating a group of Communist sympathizers in the film community. Besides Parker, Ellroy has a field day with other "real-life" characters, including Joan Crawford, Police Chief James Davis, Mayor Fletcher Bowron, a pre-"Dragnet" Jack Webb (depicted with pitiless comedy as a sycophant: "He lived to fetch") and Bette Davis, who ends up in an improbable love affair with Dudley Smith. She is, Smith explains, "good to common folk. They make her feel authentic. She covets their approval in small doses." Ellroy depicts a Los Angeles Police Department of order, if little law. It polices the city with thuggery, racism and misogyny, its foot soldiers drunk either on power, alcohol, opium or speed. And while the endless and uncomfortable racial epithets feel true to the times and the men who utter them, the ceaseless "outing" of rumored homosexuals grows monotonous and, worse, predictable. Before I even saw the "Roosevelt" that followed "Eleanor," I knew reference would be made to her rumored homosexual tendencies, and it was. Same went for Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant. The effect isn't revelatory; it's puerile. The police are not knights, they're occupiers, and in "Perfidia," Ellroy comes closer than ever to making the case that he writes alt-histories not of the Los Angeles police but of the Los Angeles police state. Very early in the investigation, it's deemed necessary for the war effort and the city's mental well-being that a Japanese culprit be caught, tried, convicted and executed. And so the morally compromised Parker and the amoral Smith fight for bragging rights to immorally "solve" a crime in the best interests of the city's morale. As Parker and Smith circle the Watanabe murders and their connection to war and postwar profiteering, Ellroy depicts with frightening authenticity how those innocent of crimes are knowingly framed in the interest of the almighty "greater good." IN DUDLEY SMITH, Ellroy has found the hell-hound guide for his neon-noir Los Angeles underbelly. Smith, a demon removed from any concept of restraint, says at one point: "I destroy those I cannot control. I must be certain that those close to me share my identical interests. I'm benevolent within that construction. I'm ghastly outside of it." Smith casts the same shadow over "Perfidia" that Judge Holden cast over Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." He's writ large and writ evil, a monolith of corruption and utilitarian expediency. But unlike what Ellroy did with Smith's previous appearances, here he sets his sights, to varying degrees of success, on the devil's heart and the ways in which satanic charms often coexist with paternal benevolence. For Smith engenders loyalty as much as he does fear. In a world as sordid and chaotic as the one Ellroy depicts, the simple purity of Smith's evil attains a kind of nobility. And what a sordid, rudderless world it is. When, at one point, Ashida complains of someone blowing things "out of proportion," his brother counters: "There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that." The evocation of an erratic Los Angeles under wartime blackout, its inhabitants feverish with insomnia and appetites unbridled by the threat of imminent death, casts a spell over the entire erratic novel. If Ellroy has several themes here - the collusion of leftand right-wing politics when desire for profit trumps the luxury of ideals; the impossibility of passion coexisting with rationality; the essential corruptibility of all humans - the one that lingers longest is that a population in wartime is a population that clings to its core nature. And that core is not lit by higher ideals but stoked by atavistic fires and animal instincts. War is not all stars and stripes and self-sacrifice, even the "good" wars. Sometimes it's self-interest, reckless hunger and perfidy. DENNIS LEHANE'S latest novel is "The Drop." Ellroy has a held day with 'real life' characters like Joan Crawford and Jack Webb.
Guardian Review
There is a little-known Austrian documentary about James Ellroy entitled The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, in which the Los Angeles author can be seen howling at the sky and then dropping to his knees on the beach and making paws with his hands. Towards the end, Ellroy says: "I wanted to be Tolstoy . . . I wanted to be Balzac. Yeah. I wanted to be all these guys that - quite frankly - I've never really read. I wanted to give people crime fiction on an epic, transcendental scale." I bring this to your attention because Perfidia is surely Ellroy's best shot at the second half of this ambition to date. My guess is that we're deep into the dark side of 200,000 words. The dramatis personae alone runs to four and a half pages. And - yes - this is an epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure. Many people know Ellroy as the author of The LA Quartet, which includes The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Perfidia, so the endnotes tell us, is the first volume of the second LA Quartet; the beginning of a prequel that Ellroy hopes will leave him and us with "one novelistic history" comprising 11 books - the two quartets plus his Underworld US trilogy. This second quartet "places real-life and fictional characters from the first two bodies of work in Los Angeles during the second world war as significantly younger people". The zone of Ellroy's ambition, then, is an American Comedie Humaine Perhaps the first thing to say is that "perfidia" as a word - the profession of faith or friendship, made only to betray - simply doesn't cover it. This is 700 pump-action pages of brutality, sex, extortion, eugenics, blackmail, back-stabbing and booze: a sustained farrago of social, moral and human chaos that makes Vice City look like a Christian folk festival. Venality is ubiquitous, murder casual, racism commonplace. Early on in the book, a character accused of getting things out of proportion is told: "There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that." The action - an underpowered word in this context - takes place over 23 days in December 1941. On day one, a Japanese family of four, the Watanabes, are found in their "blood-soaked, blood-immersed" living room, their "entrails flared across the floor". On day two, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. And, from this point on, the entire cast of Ellroy's city chase liquor and drugs with such savagery that, by the end, you're murmuring about how Irvine Welsh is going to have to be re-shelved with the children's books. The principal plot centres on these Japanese murders, which are used, by way of a faked and heavily publicised investigation, to vouchsafe "evidence" that the racist police department is not racist. But as one cop says: "Who gives a shit who killed the fucking Watanabes?" Soon the four protagonists - William H Parker, a bad cop; Dudley Smith, a really bad cop; Hideo Ashida, a gay forensic-genius cop; and Kay Lake, a dreamer shacked up with a bad cop and "possessed of stunning artistry but no character or conviction" - are meshed into a deepening lattice-work of perfidy and corruption, each new layer of which reveals itself to be "bone-dirtier" than the last. With war declared, Ellroy's habitual vices - sexploitation, racketeering, murder; "wedges, fulcrums, coercion" - are supplemented by a febrile fifth-column fascism, by frenzied war-profiteering, torture, internment and the cutting up of Japanese-Americans to look Chinese by the crazed plastic surgeon, Dr Lin Chung. This all makes for a genuinely impressive feat of sustained literary energy: 90% of novelists couldn't get anywhere near it. But what of the first part of Ellroy's stated intent - to take on Tolstoy and Balzac? Well, not quite. Ultimately, Ellroy's foibles as a writer swamp his many skills. His ubiquitous nail-gun prose (deployed in over-repeated triplets: "The wind kicked through. Broken glass shattered. Door padlocks thumped") deafens the reader and disables the writer in his reach for range and subtlety. Too many scenes are served up on steroids and delivered in the same emotional register. The cumulative effect is to demote the impact of what is said and done, so that the noir gradually decomposes into a macabre burlesque - "Grown men wolf-howled and waved shrunken heads". Great novelists disappear so that their characters no longer seem to partake in their creator's sensibilities but instead become real unto themselves and thus to the reader. But Ellroy cross-infects his cast list with such similar traits and strains that they begin to flatten into collage rather than come forward as people. In War and Peace (also a historical novel), Tolstoy succeeds in rendering the entirety of a world - often violent, often venal - wherein his creations are superbly varied. The point being that he has vanished: and that the difference is to do with the imaginative faculty of the writer behind the work. But in Perfidia, "the world is dark and flat", as Ellroy himself writes. When real-life people enter the frame - Sergei Rachmaninoff tending his garden, Bette Davis sleeping with Dudley Smith - the paradoxical effect is to remind us that this story is not real; the fictive spell is broken, not bound, as it is with Tolstoy's historical figures. But I'm only holding Ellroy to these standards because they are the worthy aim of the man. His is still an awe-inspiring artistic vision and this is a novel that should surely be read by new readers as well as fans. Edward Docx's most recent novel is The Devil's Garden (Picador). 720pp, William Heinemann, pounds 18.99 To order Perfidia for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Edward Docx Caption: Captions: Perfidy and corruption . . . James Ellroy Many people know [James Ellroy] as the author of The LA Quartet, which includes The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. [Perfidia], so the endnotes tell us, is the first volume of the second LA Quartet; the beginning of a prequel that Ellroy hopes will leave him and us with "one novelistic history" comprising 11 books - the two quartets plus his Underworld US trilogy. This second quartet "places real-life and fictional characters from the first two bodies of work in Los Angeles during the second world war as significantly younger people". The zone of Ellroy's ambition, then, is an American Comedie Humaine The principal plot centres on these Japanese murders, which are used, by way of a faked and heavily publicised investigation, to vouchsafe "evidence" that the racist police department is not racist. But as one cop says: "Who gives a shit who killed the fucking Watanabes?" Soon the four protagonists - William H Parker, a bad cop; Dudley Smith, a really bad cop; Hideo Ashida, a gay forensic-genius cop; and Kay Lake, a dreamer shacked up with a bad cop and "possessed of stunning artistry but no character or conviction" - are meshed into a deepening lattice-work of perfidy and corruption, each new layer of which reveals itself to be "bone-dirtier" than the last. With war declared, Ellroy's habitual vices - sexploitation, racketeering, murder; "wedges, fulcrums, coercion" - are supplemented by a febrile fifth-column fascism, by frenzied war-profiteering, torture, internment and the cutting up of Japanese-Americans to look Chinese by the crazed plastic surgeon, Dr Lin Chung. - Edward Docx.
Kirkus Review
Though it pivots on the Pearl Harborattack, this worm's-eye view from thoroughly corrupt Los Angeles is a war novellike no other.It's complicated, and the author (TheHilliker Curse, 2010, etc.) wouldn't have it any other way. There's notelling the good guys from the bad in Ellroy's Los Angeles, because there areno good guys. The major distinction between cops and criminals is that theformer have the power to frame the latter and kill the innocent with impunity,which they (or at least some) do without conscience or moral compunction, oftenin complicity with the government and even the Catholic Church. With hisoutrageously oversized ambition, Ellroy has announced that this sprawling butcompelling novel is the beginning of a Second L.A. Quartet, which will coverthe city during World War II and serve as a prequel to his L.A. Quartet, hismost powerful and popular fiction, which spans the postwar decade. Thus, itincludes plenty of characters who appear in other Ellroy novels, sowing theseeds of their conflicts and corruption. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the fourcorpses of a Japanese family are discovered in what appears to be a gruesomeritual suicide. It seems they had advance knowledge of the attack (which, bythe end of the novel, appears to have been the worst-kept secret in history).The investigation, or coverup, pits Sgt. Dudley Smith, full of charm but devoidof scruples ("I am in no way constrained by the law," he boasts), against Capt.William Parker, who's plagued by demons of alcoholism, faith and ambition (andwho is one of the real-life characters fictionalized in a novel where BetteDavis plays a particularly sleazy role). Caught between the rivalry of the twoare a young police chemist of Japanese descent and a former leftist callgirl-turned-informant. The plot follows a tick-tock progression over the courseof three weeks, in which "dark desires sizzle" and explode with a furiousclimax.Ellroy is not only back in formhe'sraised the stakes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.