James Ellroy: ‘I’ve been canonised. And that’s a gas’
James Ellroy: « On m'a encensé. Et c'est génialissime. »
James Ellroy, l’écrivain américain emblématique du roman noir est célèbre pour son exploration des bas-fonds de l'Amérique des années 1940 à 1960. Connu pour son style percutant et ses intrigues complexes, il a marqué la littérature avec des oeuvres telles que L.A. Confidential et Le Dahlia Noir. Ce mois-ci il sera en tête d’affiche du Festival America à Vincennes, pour des moments d’échanges et la présentation de son dernier roman qui s’inspire de la mort de Marilyn Monroe. Les Enchanteurs, le 18 septembre aux éditions Rivages/Noir.
James Ellroy is a crime fiction writer, best known for books such as The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid, which are often set in mid-20th-century Los Angeles. His preoccupation with crime began as a child when his mother was killed in LA in what remains an unsolved murder.
2. Why do you write in trilogies and quartets? James Ellroy: I love everything big. I love a big movie. I love big pieces of symphonic music. And I like large novels. Since my early childhood, I have always lived in the past. Most often the recent past of America, this historical past, it’s what I love, it’s what I am, it’s what I do. My intent with readers is to uproot them from their daily lives and force-feed large swathes of American history and more specifically Los Angeles history. It’s a love of size and scope and density and big emotion, big police investigations, big conspiracies. Everything big.
3. How do you think your writing style has changed since your breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia, in 1987?
J.E.: It became much more terse. Two books after The Black Dahlia, with LA Confidential, I developed a truncated, clipped style with exposition cut down to the minimum. Then when I embarked on the Underworld USA trilogy, I expanded the text in the third person because I wanted to enhance the emotional content of the book. I went back to the truncated style in The Cold Six Thousand, and took it to such screaming extremes that many reviewers found the book incomprehensible. And then in my ensuing three novels, I have been more interested in enhancing the style of the book to fit a more wholesome view of humanity. I am always tailoring the language of a book to the immediate story I am telling.
4. You’re highly successful, but do you feel that you’ve received the critical acclaim that you deserve?
J.E.: It’s funny because I’ve been more critically acclaimed in Britain than I have here in my own country. What’s important to me with the new book is that it also complements the publication of the three volumes of Everyman Library in America and the UK. So you have the LA Quartet in one volume, and then the Underworld USA in two volumes. In effect I’ve been canonised. And that’s a gas.
5. Do you ever have problems remembering all the different characters you’ve created while writing a novel?
J.E.: No, because I write enormous outlines. The outline for This Storm is 450 pages. So everything is there on the page. It’s a diagram for me to write these extremely complex densely structured books. And the viability of the outline is such that given that the overall dramatic arcs are already established before I write the first word of the texts, this allows me to know that the story is there, down to
the most minute detail, so that I can live improvisationally within the individual scenes, as long as they don’t diverge from the outline.
6. What was the last truly great book that you read?
J.E.: I reread Compulsion by Meyer Levin, his novel of the Leopold and Loeb killings in Chicago in 1924. It was published in 1956. I read it in the early 70s the first time. I’ve read it six or seven times. It’s a very fine novel of 1924 Chicago, a very astute novel of affluent Jewish American life, and it’s a very deft portrayal of two psychopaths.
7. What kind of reader were you as a child, and which books have stayed with you?
J.E.: I was an early reader. My father taught me to read before I went to school. I’ve always been a slow reader, a deliberate reader. It takes me longer than most people to read books. My early reading experience was going through stacks of Life magazine that my parents had in a closet. After my mother’s death in the summer of ’58, I started reading crime books. I remember reading John Creasey’s Gideon of Scotland Yard books when I
was 12 or 13. What I loved was the police novel, the detective novel, the spy novel, the novel of realistic intrigue. And that’s what I still love.
8. Who is your favourite literary anti-hero? J.E.: You know who I love, and I can’t point to any one, are the psycho policemen in Joseph Wambaugh’s early novels. They’re funny as shit. The books went through me like a jolt. This was the Los Angeles police department that I knew, that kicked my ass and deservedly so on three notable occasions.