James Ellroy, author of "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," takes us back to the summer of 1968 in his latest book, the last in his Underworld USA Trilogy.
"You get to live the history, you get to be in 1968, assassinate people and fall in love with great women," says Ellroy about "Blood's A Rover" (Knopf 2009, $28.95). "What I have done is create the personal infrastructure of huge historical event which have real life people like J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and Howard Hughes ... ."
If Ellroy's description of his book, with its right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries, mobsters and power mongers, seems somewhat over the top, so is Ellroy who has almost defined a new writing style - one that is powerful, with its fast-paced staccato sentences and intricate events that eventually all come together.
A self-admitted brooding man who tends to sit in the dark and listen to music ("I growl and play Beethoven," he says), Ellroy likes to write about "brutally driven men like me looking for lonely haunted women."
And he also just likes to write. The outline for "Blood's A Rover" was 400 pages, about 200 pages less than the finished novel. And, interestingly, in turning out all these pages, Ellroy doesn't rely on technology.
"I don't read, I don't go to movies, I don't watch television, I don't have a cell phone or a computer, I don't like the digital age, I'm not connected to the world," he says.
The means both his outlines and his novel are written in long hand, the pages given to an assistant who lives nearby. She types up the pages and gives them back to Ellroy who then edits his books. It may seem cumbersome and time consuming, but it works. Several of Ellroy's books have been made into movies and many have hit the best-seller list. And he's not planning on stopping for a while.
"I have five more great books and I don't want to be deterred," he says. "I want to be able to roll out of bed in the morning, drink a bracing cup of coffee and thank God for giving me another day to write. I want to be able to brood, obsess about women and write."
James Ellroy book signing
When: 6 p.m. Sept. 29
Where: Book Cellar off-site at the Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St., Chicago
FYI: (773) 293-2665
