Book Review - Perfidia. James Ellroy. Australian Book Review, January 2015.

Bold and simple Christian Griffiths Perfidia

by James Ellroy

Random House $32.99 720pp 9780434020539

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here is a quality in James Ellroy’s fiction that evades analysis and exceeds his popular status as a successful author in the ‘crime genre’. This quality is in part connected to his demanding narratives, which inevitably leave one with the nagging feeling that there is a great deal one has failed to understand, and which prompt (often multiple) re-readings of his novels; but it is also connected to his stylistic and structural development, an aspect of his work that is generally ignored. Ellroy’s reputation as a ‘noir’ stylist is well established, mainly on the basis of his vaunted LA Quartet of novels, published between 1987 and 1993. Since then, Ellroy has completed the Underworld USA trilogy, an epic cycle of historical crime novels that has driven his stylistic development far beyond the humble literary ambitions those early works represented. These later titles, American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood’s a Rover (2009), are rich, complex, and sometimes confounding novels that give a sense that Ellroy is a writer altogether too singular, and perhaps even too intelligent, to really be successful within the framework of any genre. Underworld USA comprised a narrative chronology spanning from 1958 to 1972. Since then it has been an open question where its author would, or could, go next. True to form, the answer is both bold and simple: the release of his most recent novel, Perfidia, is accompanied by the declaration that it is the first instalment of a prequel quartet, in which many characters from both the first LA Quartet and Underworld USA will appear as much younger versions of themselves.

There is a (usually warranted) suspicion that prequel writing reflects a breakdown of the creative process: when the forward momentum of a multi-work narrative is interrupted, the author, wishing to prolong the franchise, is often faced with no alternative but to revert to the beginning and explore the origins of his or her characters. This would certainly appear to be a valid criticism of Perfidia, and the informed reader will inevitably interpret the actions of the novel’s characters in light of their later narrative destinies. Yet, any claim that Perfidia reflects a creative impasse for its author – or worse, a plundering of his own canon – would be to misconstrue Ellroy’s resistance to genre, which extends as much to prequels as it does to crime writing. The prequel genre offers authors the opportunity to satisfy reader appetites by resurrecting memorable or familiar characters that have otherwise been deprived of narrative futures. In Perfidia, the most prominent use of this strategy is the appearance of historical LAPD Chief William Parker and his fictional arch-nemesis, Sergeant Dudley Smith, as the central protagonists. Smith had been the primary antagonist of the second half of the LA Quartet, where his often bizarre attempts to establish a criminal empire in Los Angeles were ultimately interdicted by Parker’s (also fictional) protégé, Ed Exley. This seems consistent with the tropes of the prequel genre, but Ellroy is not willing to rest there. Instead, he populates the novel with a carnivalesque array of familiar characters, whose newly revealed connections to one another are not even hinted at in the earlier books. The full parodic effect of this strategy is likely to be blunted for all but the most attentive readers of Ellroy’s canon. For example, there is the revelation (hardly a spoiler, since it is revealed within the novel’s first fifteen pages) that Elizabeth Short, the historical victim of the famous Los Angeles murder case that formed the basis of the first LA Quartet novel, The Black Dahlia (1987), is in fact Dudley Smith’s illegitimate daughter. Despite the lunacy of this unsuspected coincidence, it has no impact either on the earlier novel, or on Perfidia itself,

and one cannot escape the impression that Ellroy is consciously parodying the tropes of prequel writing, either for his own amusement or as a nod to his most dedicated readers. Another familiar trope of the prequel genre is its tendency to mitigate the subsequent evil of characters by depicting its roots in expediency. This too is subverted in Perfidia, and any reader anticipating that the novel will depict Dudley Smith as an otherwise decent human being driven to villainy by traumatic events will probably be disappointed; from the outset, he seems as ruthless as he does later in the chronology.  The only new insight into the character given is through the details of Smith’s sex life, where he has a short but passionate affair with movie star Bette Davis. Of course, much can be made of the considerable historical research that Ellroy has brought to this novel, which concerns the internment of Japanese– American citizens in California in the period following the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but I will leave it to other reviewers to address that. What stands out more is the fact that, even though the author has moved backwards in his chronology by returning to Los Angeles at the outbreak of World War II, he has nonetheless leaped forward in stylistic and structural terms, and that he has created high hopes as to where the series will lead. g

Christian Griffiths is a PhD candidate at Monash University. In 2015 he will take up a position at Goethe University in Frankfurt as a part of Monash’s Joint Award program. Fiction

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