I wasn’t aware that James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are formally two-thirds a trilogy titled Underworld USA. And it’s been so long since the last one that I suspected Ellroy had retired. Now the finale, Blood’s a Rover, is coming out in two weeks, and the question is: do I want to tackle another fervid blockbuster (656 pages). After all, I’m still struggling with The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.
Strangely enough, the advance review that gets me over my laziness is not a crime fiction mag review (one expects them to rave about Ellroy) but the last sentences in a rave in The Economist (Sep 19):
This trilogy is a work of ambition unmatched among contemporary crime novelists. Only Roberto Bolano, with his genre-bending mysteries, approaches Mr Ellroy’s skill at simultaneously hewing to and subverting the genre’s conventions.