L.A. Confidential

Throughout his career, James Ellroy has drawn on the pioneers of the crime novel, notably Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep, echoed by Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, of which L.A. Confidential is the sequel. If any American writer has profoundly renewed the crime novel, it is Ellroy, who here paints a vast panorama of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. Although certain characters reappear from one volume to the next, Los Angeles itself and District Attorney Ellis Loew are the only “characters” common to all four volumes of this informal tetralogy (The Big Nowhere, The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz).

L.A. Confidential was adapted for the screen seven years later by Curtis Hanson, a film that won its director the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Kim Basinger the award for Best Supporting Actress. Ellroy has recently disparaged the adaptation: “The director is dead [in 2016], so I can disparage the film. People love this film. I think it’s a giant piece of shit, though. I find it problematic and emblematic of Curtis Hanson’s disconnection. Although I felt nothing, I retain admiration for the director. What I lost emotionally, I regained by observing his extraordinary craftsmanship,” adding that Hanson’s “sense of drama” never matched his own.

Much as Melville transcribed the vocabulary of the sailors of his time for use in Moby Dick, Ellroy reproduces with astonishing precision the slang of policemen and gangsters of the 1950s, delivering a formidable plunge into a Los Angeles gripped by a wave of score-settling following the fall of a crime boss: the entire homicide division mobilizes over the Nite Owl case, a shooting in which a former policeman was killed.

A very fine copy, in the true first printing of June, now scarce.