INTERVIEW: James Ellroy explores 1940s Los Angeles in ‘Perfidia’
James Ellroy has explored his home city of Los Angeles over the course of his celebrated writing career. Writing profound tomes centered on strong, yet fractured characters, the novelist has created a network that has stuck in the minds of his dedicated fan base.
His first L.A. Quartet features the critically heralded and bestselling books The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, White Jazz and, of course, L.A. Confidential. After these came the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, which focuses on the 1960s and took more of a national approach to the narrative. Those well-received novels include American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover.
Now Ellroy is back with Perfidia, the first installment in what will become the Second L.A. Quartet. This go-round he travels further back in time to describe the events surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack and how they greatly affected Los Angeles. His main characters include both old favorites and newcomers: Kay Lake, who featured prominently in The Black Dahlia; Dudley Smith, a character documented in the original Quartet; the real-life William H. Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who the author believes is the “greatest American policeman of the 20th century, a tremendous reformer, misjudged largely by history”; and Hideo Ashida, a Japanese chemist who works with the LAPD and faces prejudice in the wake of the attacks in Hawaii.
When taking his books as one long dissection, Ellroy has explored decades of American history and a city’s development through a remarkable era.
“What I wanted to is create one massive fictional history of L.A., my city, and America, our country, between 1941 and 1972,” he said of the many novels.
Perfidia is a big book told in real time, with every minute adding to the engaging narrative and characters swapping points of view as they wrestle with demons both public and private.
“Well, I wanted to, in general, expand my narrative base, and it’s the construction of real time,” Ellroy said recently on his decision to include four main characters. “It’s the idea of a month of Pearl Harbor in real time, and there needed to be four characters. There’s Kay Lake, who is there from The Black Dahlia. There’s Dudley Smith as we know is the chief villain of the initial L.A. Quartet. Hideo Ashida is, you know, just new, and he’s only mentioned in The Black Dahlia, one of the Japanese people that Bucky Bleichert rats out to get on LAPD. … And then there’s the great William H. Parker, the real-life character.”
The author called Lake, who is 21 years old at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, “the greatest single fictional character” of his career. In many ways, Perfidia fills in more information on the character, allowing the reader to see her in a new light.
“In The Black Dahlia, Bucky Bleichert narrates the entire book,” Ellroy said. “You’re only in his viewpoint. You’re never in Kay’s viewpoint. Hence, it’s safe to assume that there’s things that she’s omitted from him, like her heroic actions in Los Angeles during World War II. And that’s the case here. She has this secret life that she never mentions to Bucky. … Adhering to her backstory, you know, the Boulevard-Citizens heist, her relationship with Lee Blanchard, the disappearance of Lee Blanchard’s kid sister, you know, all of it, I recreated that again. I paraphrased it, and I stuck to the facts of her life like her being born in Sioux Falls, S.D., in 1920 and extrapolated. And she also derives from the two lead female characters in Blood’s a Rover, my previous novel, the concluding version of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, you know, Joan Rosen Klein and Karen Sifakis.”
He added: “I enjoyed always getting back to Kay. Yeah, it’s true.”
Ellroy said that Ashida is the fan favorite, and he digs the character as well. “I dig Ashida big time,” he said. “And, yeah, I would be remiss not including at least one major Japanese character.”
Even though Ellroy couples real-life events with fictional creations, most of Perfidia is made up. The story centers on events that make the history books, but most of the action consists of personal encounters on the streets of L.A., conversations between broken souls and desperate people caught up in momentous times.
“I don’t like telling people what’s real and what’s not in my books because, by and large, I just make this sh– up,” he said. “You start telling people, you know, the fountain of whatever genius I possess is my ability to make it up, they go, huh? They want a literal answer to everything. They want a material answer to everything.”
The author did allow a glimpse into the research needed to frame his fiction.
“A woman that I’ve worked with for years compiles fact sheets and chronologies,” he said. “And the research was staggering in Perfidia because the story was told in real time, and, you know, it was a colossal amount of work to outline it in a continuous 24-hour motif. And there’s a reason for this, there’s a reason why I deployed real-time in this particular book, and it’s that Pearl Harbor made L.A. a 24-hour city for that particular month. We were under eminent fear of Japanese sea and air attack.”
It’s a time period when the City of Angels is awake and alert, taking to the streets and making connections. “Everybody’s f—ing, sucking, drinking, using drugs and staying up around the clock, and you’ve got a huge murder investigation,” he said. “You’ve got civil defense measures. You’ve got William H. Parker deployed across many different arenas, and Dudley Smith trying to work … the war for some nefarious ends. Hideo Ashida trying to hide his homosexuality and stay out of the internment camp, and Kay Lake looking for adventure. … To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, if you can’t be with the history you love, love the history you’re with. Right now it’s just all L.A. during World War II for me.”
Perfidia, as the author mentioned, is his largest and most intimate book; the idea for this second Quartet came back in 2008. However, it’s not the most complex of the many narratives he has created. That award would probably go to The Cold Six Thousand. He sees this new work and the last one, Blood’s a Rover, as sharing similar qualities. “The style is more explicated,” he said. “It’s more formalized. It’s less concise. It’s less abbreviated. It’s less experimental. There is a great deal more emotion in Blood’s a Rover and in this book than in the books that immediately preceded it.”
In the past, the writer would often produce short fiction and journalism pieces. He said that particular work has stopped. When he’s not working on his novels, he’s penning motion pictures and television shows for money. He said a project like his last short story — Shakedown, which published online — will not happen again. He did recently take part in a project with Glynn Martin for the Los Angeles Police Museum. That book, LAPD ’53, couples words with crime scene photos.
Ellroy, an American original, someone who presents text and language in an evolving, stylized manner, is iconic. He doesn’t own a computer, has never been on the Internet, never sent an email, never sent a text message. He writes his outlines and manuscripts by hand, a gargantuan feat that has produced some of the most memorable and challenging books in the last three decades.
“That’s the way I do it,” he said.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
- Perfidia is now available in paperback. Click here for more information.
