It must be two decades since I read The Black Dahlia, and dropping back into Ellroy is quite the adrenaline ride.
This fictional imagining of the back story to the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination is a wild ride that blends real historical figures such as Jack, Bobby and Joe Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover with a wide cast of corrupt FBI, CIA and mafia characters.
The plotting is intricate, the dialogue whip smart, and the pace is full steam ahead. It could arguably lose a few pages in the second half but that’s a minor point. The contrast in style to a classic UK security services novel, perhaps a Le Carre or a Len Deighton, is immense; Ellroy consistently delivers gory violence, wanton drug taking, etc. And yet the double crossing, the corruption, the trust-no-one vibe are common… just presented inside a Tarantino-esque flow.
Not having realised this was part of a trilogy, I may now have to commit to the second and third acts…
