Book review: Perfidia

Cover for Perfidia.

Welcome to the Big Nowhere redux. Five years after completing his sprawling, labyrinthine, fevered, counterfactual Underworld USA trilogy, the great and difficult James Ellroy returns with more tales from man's dark heart.

That Ellroy, the so-called demon dog of American crime fiction, reappears after years of silence with yet another sprawling, labyrinthine, fevered, counterfactual series should surprise no one; Ellroy's schtick is his schtick, and this dog is too old, too ornery and too convinced of his genius to change.

Yet the sheer weight of his new novel, Perfidia - it runs to nearly 700 pages - and what it portends gave me pause before I sat down to read it: this is just the opening salvo in a new four-part, sort-of prequel to the (sprawling, labyrinthine, fevered, etc, etc) LA Quartet that made Ellroy his literary name back in the late 80s-early 90s.

Those four remain my favourite crime series and in them Ellroy set about redefining and refining his writing - as the quartet progressed his sentences became more and more like data bursts with a drumbeat - and in the process he made noir crime fiction cool for a new generation. I love them.

But the quartet of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz came to a mere (but not insubstantial) 1600 pages. By the time Ellroy is done with this new LA foursome - and, at five years per book he'll be in his 80s - it could be twice the length.

So what's he got for us in all those pages?

The crime at the heart of Perfidia - the word an author's note tells us is Spanish for perfidy or treachery - is pure Ellroy. There is history and there is horror. The day before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour, the Watanabes, an LA Japanese family of two adults and their two teenage kids, are found eviscerated on the floor of their living room. It looks like they've committed ritual suicide. They haven't. As LA war fever grows post-Pearl, we soon learn a war-profiteering land grab might be behind the killings - but there are those, besides the murderer(s), who don't want the crime solved. If you know Ellroy, you know the drill.

Playing supporting roles to the dead Watanabes are racism, political corruption, Chinatown, Hollywood big-shots, Japanese subs, Nazis, benzedrine, lugers, leftwing subversives, slave labour, heroin, boxing, closet homosexuality, Bette Davis and way too much driving around LA.

The very large cast - there are close to 90 players - have mostly appeared in Ellroy's fiction before.

Sergeant Dudley Smith, the dark centre (or presence) for much of the original LA Quartet, is back and remains one of the most compelling evil men in crime fiction.

The yang to his yin is Captain William H. Parker, a real life LA cop who, here at least, is a booze-fuelled, guilt-ridden Catholic with a major thing for a redhead he knew but lost contact with years before. Ellroy has previously fictionalised him in LA Confidential and White Jazz.

Ellroy's femme fatale - and every Ellroy novel must have one - is Kay Lake. She spends much of the novel causing trouble for no good reason. We last saw her in The Black Dahlia.

Among the main players, only the unconvincing Hideo Ashida, a Japanese-American police chemist and wannabe forensics man, is new.

The sum of all these parts and dozens of characters feels a lot like an aimless drive (there is so much driving) around a place that is just too familiar to be interesting, even if it's five years since you were last there.

As the opening novel of a new series, Perfidia needed to be as fresh and shocking as The Black Dahlia and as thrilling and outrageous as American Tabloid, the first of the fatly plotted trio of Underworld USA. Perfidia just isn't. His shotgun-blast sentences still blast, his characters still philosophise like cut-price Nietzsches and Los Angeles is still a cesspit of the corrupting and the corrupted.

But the familiarity of much of the cast means we don't have much to learn about them other than backstory. There is nothing new here at all.

As Ellroy might put it: this is schtick sustain, this is netherworld USA reiterated. And it will take a startling second book in this series to keep me reading 'til the end.

Perfidia
by James Ellroy
(William Heinemann $39.99)