Here’s James Ellroy, dialing in from Denver. “Your name, your surname,” Ellroy observes, “is almost identical to the dead guy in James M. Cain’s novella The Postman Always Rings Twice.” (“Nick Papadakis,” aka “The Greek,” may he rest in peace.) Convivial crosstalk follows; the self-proclaimed Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, it turns out, is a pussycat on the phone.
He’s supplied a list of books, films and other cultural ephemera for us to talk through—works that informed and influenced his new novel Red Sheet, his third book in a row about the Kennedy-era exploits of ex-LAPD private eye, fixer and “shit-magnet” Freddy Otash. In this one, “Freddy O” deep-dives dirt-packed docs on suspected Communist sympathizers and uncovers a baroquely complex murder plot connecting Richard Nixon and his shrink, Hugh Hefner, future L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, Hollywood lefties, and a gang of homicidal Spanish Civil War vets. Ellroy’s at his best when speaking through a secret-sharer narrator like Freddy, and this electrified tangle of fact, fiction and fever-dream pulp is his best book in a while, even when its two-fisted anti-Commie sentiment goes way over the top—not for nothing does Ellroy’s list of key influences on this one include a 1951 Mickey Spillane novel that ends with P.I. Mike Hammer machine-gunning a meat locker full of filthy Reds.
But before we get into that list, I hit Ellroy with an opening query on behalf of his fiendish fans. Some years ago, he launched what he called his “Second L.A. Quartet,” World War II-era prequels to the four-book suite that yielded epochal Los Angeles crime novels The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. But after two sprawling, thick-as-a-brick volumes–2014’s Perfidia and 2019’s This Storm—the Demon Dog changed course, returning to midcentury L.A. and the exploits of Freddy O, who does dirt for Hollywood scandal rags, the LAPD, and Robert F. Kennedy while continuously ripped to the gills on extravagant cocktails of uppers and downers. So, I ask, what gives? Is writing Freddy just more fun?
“Here’s what happened,” Ellroy says. “I got bored to shit with L.A. during World War II. I didn’t want to write two more gigantic World War II books, and repeat the surviving characters and go one more into war profiteering and the rampantly corrupt 1940s LAPD, and I got the idea to move into an area of my own cognizance”—the L.A. of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when Ellroy was alive and “bopping around looking at the world in my little-kid way.” So we’ll start there—with young James as witness to history.
1. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Kennedy and Kruschev’s era-defining staring contest; still the closest the U.S. has ever come to nuclear war (at least at press time.)
GQ: On the list you sent, the first influence isn’t a book or a movie but a geopolitical event. You wrote, “I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, at age 14 in L.A. Man, what a gasser!!!!!” What were you up to during those 13 days, when it looked like the Cold War might turn hot?
James Ellroy: I was up to perving on a girl named Donna Weiss, who I knew in junior high school, and danced with once—the Twist, of course, at the John Burroughs Junior High prom in June of ‘62. She was in my class. We both went on to Fairfax High School and I never really talked much to her because I was afraid of girls. So that’s what was going on with my soul and my heart and everything.
