Literary High Wire Acts 3

James Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand.

Prose is not the same as jazz but if it was, this might be what its like. Ellroy is all about rhythm and punch; you can hear the beat and it never stops. It takes you like music more than most fiction, a particular song, working the set of keys, opening some place new.

It opens with:

(Dallas, 11/22/63)

They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn’t sure he could do it. The Casino Operator’s Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.

Nobody said it.

Kill that coon. Do it good. Take our hit fee.

The flight ran smooth. A stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions.

He said he worked Vegas PD. He ran the intell squad. He build files and loggged information.

She loved it. She swooned.

“Hon, what you doin’ in Dallas?”

He told her.

A Negro shivved a twenty-one dealer. The dealer lost an eye. The Negro booked to Big D. She loved it. She bought him highballs. He omitted details.

The dealer provoked the attack. The council issued the contract - death for ADW Two.

The preflight prep talk. Lieutnant Buddy Fritsch:

“I don’t have to tell you what we expect, son. And I don’t have to add that your father expects it, too.”

The stew played geisha girl. The stew fluffed her beehive.

And so it goes for over 700 pages, some sort of bastard cousin to hard boiled Hemingway crossed with bebop. Its all about the Kennedy assassination as an American plot, all dirty deals and dirty men, no morals and a lot of death, and its still music to read.

I don’t think there is anything around quite like this. There are quite a few writers with discernible patterns but this is in another league altogether.