Between 1987 and 1992 the Los Angeles-born writer James Ellroy published the LA Quartet, a sequence of four novels – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz – that placed him as right up there with Elmore Leonard at the cutting edge of US crime fiction. Ellroy did not so much reinvent or re-imagine what we understand when we speak of a certain ‘hardboiled’ character endemic to his chosen genre as he stuffed it full of many different genres and propelled them all along at breakneck speed barely held in place be enormously rickety sandcastles of plotting and story.
Now along comes Perfidia, the first volume of a planned second (a kind of prequel to the first) LA Quartet which opens on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor and again takes up with Dudley Liam Smith, the Jesuit-educated Irish republican maneuvering his way up through the ranks of the labyrinthine LAPD. Along for the ride and muscling in on the action are dozens of characters from the first Quartet but it is Smith and “Whiskey Bill” Parker, an ambitious LAPD captain, on one side, and Hideo Ashida, a brilliant young forensic cop (and the only Japanese on the force) and left-wing high society type Kay Lake, on the other, that carry the narrative.
In Ashida, Ellroy has created a subtle portrait of a reserved, thoughtful ethnic character that stands in sharp relief to the over-the-top glee with which he usually trots out his stable of alpha males and femme fatales working this or that angle. Ashida also serves to mirror the savage anti-Japanese jingoism and paranoia that spreads like wildfire in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
Containing America’s largest Japanese and Chinese populations, Los Angeles is primed to boil over into full-blooded race riots and random acts of violence. Indeed, the novel takes us right there, though not without a dash of Ellroy’s trademark ambiguity and misdirection: the narrative finds its initial thrust in the apparent suicides (or murder) of a Japanese immigrant family named the Watanabes. This event serves as kind of center of gravity (but not, however, a moral center: we remain firmly in the shadow cast by Ellroy’s amoral or, more to the point, anti-moral, half-light) that draws Ellroy’s fourf central characters into alignment.
Dudley, despite his penchant for Benzedrine, opium and dispensing instant justice in the form of violent retribution, is nevertheless equipped with enough smarts to recognize Ashida as a skillful and meticulous investigator and perhaps his only chance of solving the Watanabe case. Dudley takes Ashida under his wing – protecting him against the barely-contained white blood lust against the city’s Japanese – but in doing so also forces him to share in and help contain Dudley’s own covert history of crimes and misdemeanors.
Ellroy fills this half-formed narrative to the brim with dozens of micro-portraits of an LA underworld consisting of pornographers, back-lot abortionists, cut-rate plastic surgeons, prostitutes and their pimps and the cops who sanction it all for a fee, not to mention Nazi sympathizers in high places in City Hall. It is clear that the author is well past containing his fascination with this particular time and place in history and while it makes for some random juxtapositions of over-the-top depictions of violence alongside great wedges of historical research, it is somehow brilliantly effective at unearthing the sense of the times – the zeitgeist by which LA understood itself in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
Thrown into the mix is Kay Lake (another of Ellroy’s later takes on an earlier invention: Kay was the major female character of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential): Midwestern street trash smart enough to stay out of the gutter. If the Watanabe case provided a focus about which drew into alignment Dudley, Parker and Ashida then Kay is the force that sets a mirroring or oscillating paranoia running down any half-established narrative track. Only now do we truly feel back at home in Ellroyville and environs, for it is an investigation into what you might call a kind of tribalism of “…covenants and agendas [that] supersede human logic,” as Ashida says, that lies at the heart of Perfidia.
Ellroy is engaged in a terrific effort to map out the code or value system of the paranoiac, an effort in which he enlists – synthesizes – all the registers at his disposal: grand events seen through the microscope of historical research conducted at an almost sub-atomic level, violence and action writ so large and loud you almost feel you are being subjected to a beating by Ellroy himself: not a voice is heard that does not in speaking implicitly endorse excess, whether that be sexual or chemical in nature, or reinforced in the almost endless rat-tat-tat staccato that literally moves the book along from paragraph to paragraph, page to page.
