White Jazz

L.A. Quartet #4

by James Ellroy

Best-selling crime fiction author James Ellroy returns with the fourth in his LA Quartet.

Los Angeles, 1958: a city on the make. A boom town at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder.

Lieutenant Dave Klein: in turn a lawyer, bagman, slum landlord, mob killer. Klein stands at the centre of a complex web of plots where violence and death will intersect. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.

Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time...

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Mystery, Noir, Thriller, Historical Fiction, Detective

403 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

About the author

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 2 out of 5]

The year is 1958, the place is LA, our protagonist is Lt. Dave Klein, movie star looks, in his 50s' and already earned his police pension… also one-time lawyer and also currently… slum lord, bag-man, wheeler dealer and killer-for-mob-hire! The LA police are corrupt through and through and have been so for decades, but now the Feds are moving in to investigate and make some arrests. Klein knows he should keep his head down or even retire but a macabre robbery at a mob boss's home starts connecting dots for him. Conspiracies within conspiracies in a world where every single police, crook and dame are playing their own game for the best of themselves.

Although the final of the LA Quartet series this book hasn't got the rights to even lick the sole of the boots worn by L.A. Confidential, the third, and what should have been left as the final book of the series. The only reason to read White Jazz is to find out the fates the series' cast members and the LA police corruption itself! 5 out of 12.

2022 read

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Dave Klein, the dirtiest cop in town, catches a burglary, he quickly becomes entangled in a web of drugs, prostitution, and murder...

James Ellroy's four volume treatise on family values and the integrity of the Los Angeles police department comes to a conclusion in White Jazz. White Jazz ties up some nagging lose ends leftover from the previous three volumes. Gone is the "trinity of sin" structure of The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential, replaced by a first person narrator, a throwback to The Black Dahlia.

Ellroy's machine gun style is ratcheted up to an insane degree in this one, the short choppy sentences hitting like the needle of a sewing machine. Honestly, it got a little hard to follow what was happening at times. However, the crazy style added something to the book, giving it a frantic, paranoid feel.

The story itself continued in the vein of the previous two; the corpse of the integrity of the LAPD was exhumed, violated in every orifice, and buried again. What starts as a burglary investigation tears the scab off of the gaping wound of the LAPD's narcotics division and exposes the infection beneath, namely their longtime relationship with the Kafesjian family. Dave Klein, a cop, lawyer, and mob enforcer, finds himself navigating a maze of filth to figure out just what the hell is going on, caught in a power struggle between two of the most powerful men on the force.

After finishing LA Confidential, I mentioned that I thought Dudley Smith was James Ellroy's Randall Flagg. After reading this book, I stand by that. The master manipulator was in fine form in White Jazz, doing his puppeteer act from the sidelines for most of the book. Once all the cards were on the table, the book got so frantic I thought I might have an anxiety attack.

As with the previous books, the dialogue and relationships between the characters threw a lot of gas on the fire. Klein's complicated relationships with his sister and Glenda, as well as Junior and the rest, made him another of Ellroy's shitbird characters that you couldn't help but root for, especially since all the other shitbirds had a lot more blood on their hands.

While I didn't like White Jazz quite as much as the previous two books in the LA Quartet, it did a great job wrapping things up. Hell, when the three previous books are of such high caliber, they're hard to follow. Four out of five stars.

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

This conclusion to James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet is just as wholesome and uplifting as the previous three books with his usual cast of characters such as corrupt cops, gangsters, hustlers, blackmailers, shakedown artists, bag men, thieves, junkies, drug dealers, dog killers, whores, johns, pimps, peepers, perverts, panty sniffers, and politicians. Oh, and most of them are killers, racist, and/or incestuous as a bonus, and that includes the hero of the novel.

It's 1958 and LAPD Lieutenant Dave Klein is a busy guy. In addition to his police duties he’s also a lawyer, a slumlord, and he does the occasional contract murder for hire. Klein gets assigned to investigate a weird break-in and vandalism at the home of a police sanctioned drug dealer, but with an ambitious US Attorney sniffing around the LAPD trying to build a corruption case it seems a bad time to be drawing attention to that particular rotten apple. Klein also takes a side gig from Howard Hughes investigating an actress who left him to star in a B-horror movie about communist space vampires, and he’d love to start chasing down a gang who pulled off a daring robbery of a fortune in furs to get a piece of their action. However, Klein soon finds himself in the middle of a living nightmare which pull his loyalties in multiple directions, and as the crimes pile up it’ll take a miracle to keep him from ending up in jail or the morgue.

The last two novels of the L.A. Quartet each used a trio of bad men doing bad things as their main characters, and Ellroy very consciously breaks the format here by making Dave Klein the solo lead and a first person narrator. This seems kind of like a call back to the structure of Black Dahlia and gives the conclusion a more intimate and personal feel, but it also seems like it doesn’t quite fit. As usual when things really start going off the rails Ellroy has his lead running around like a maniac both committing and investigating crimes while constantly making and betraying alliances that further his own agenda for the moment. When you have three characters doing this they can share the load and have them in various levels of trouble. By having only Klein to put in the soup it really stretches credibility too far to think that he wouldn’t have been arrested or killed about halfway through the book, and it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone would deal with him after the third or fourth time he’s double-crossed them.

Ellroy also advanced the clipped sentence fragment/stream of consciousness style he’d been building to new levels, and in fact, he probably pushed it too far in this one. L.A. Confidential has a flow to it that works whereas White Jazz too often veers into near gibberish. It’s a problem that shows up in other Ellroy novels, too. When he’s got this style on a leash he can really take it for a walk, but when it gets away from him it runs wild and devolves into near self-parody.

Probably my biggest disappointment with this is that it just doesn’t seem to deliver on the promise of the ending that L.A. Confidential pointed towards. That built to where it felt like the final book had to be an all-out war between two of the characters left standing. By bringing in a new character with the LAC angles only coming into play late in the game it doesn’t have the epic climax to the entire story I was hoping for.

It’s still a solid Ellroy novel, but it doesn’t quite deliver on the potential of what came before.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams--I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget. Pictures keep the woman young.

L.A., fall 1958.

Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events--so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down--the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell.

I'm old, afraid I'll forget:
I killed innocent men.
I betrayed sacred oaths.
I reaped profit from horror.
Fever--that time burning.
I want to go with the music-spin, fall with it.”

Lieutenant Dave Klein is in the middle of so many treacherous situations that the spread on whether he will live to see 1959 is carrying long odds. The only way he might live that long is if he is in jail awaiting trial, but even then powerful people, like the gangster Mickey Cohen or the Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley, better be convinced his lip will stay buttoned or something most sinister will happen to him before he ever gets a chance to flap his gums.

He’s got a lot to talk about.

”Killings, beatings, bribes, payoffs, kickbacks, shakedowns. Rent coercion, muscle jobs, strikebreaker work. Lies, intimidation, vows trashed, oaths broken, duties scorned. Thievery, duplicity, greed, lies, killings, beatings, bribes, payoffs, Meg--”

I’d like to tell you that Klein is an innocent, caught up in the machinations of a corrupt system, and that he is crusading to do the right thing, while trying to work the ends against the middle and the middle against both ends, but the truth of the matter is, he is as morally corrupt as the city he is paid to protect.

You need a witness tossed out a window? Call Klein.
You want a rival neutralized? Call Klein.
You need an illegal payoff dropped off? Call Klein.

Klein is a most resourceful young man just trying to make enough money to finish law school.

Some of you may have noticed the mention of Meg at the end of his list of sins. She is his business partner in a block of rentals. He is head over heels lustful in love with her. The problem is, incest is a sin, and my, my, my does Klein want to sin, sin, sin with his sister Meg.

So the trouble begins when Exley calls in Klein to investigate a burglary of a “sanctioned” drug dealer’s house. The guy’s name is Kafesjian, and his illegal activities are fronted by a string of dry cleaning stores. It doesn’t take long for Klein to realize that the story surrounding the Kafesjian burglary has a lot of sordid intrigue attached that goes well beyond the parameters of what he is supposed to be investigating. Exley, you remember Exley from L.A. Confidential, has made it clear that anything regarding Kafesjian is not to be touched. In fact, don’t even turn the rock over to start with.

As if Klein doesn’t have enough to do on his plate, Howard Hughes, yes that Hughes, calls him up and wants him to find a girl. It seems one of his actresses, Glenda Bledsoe, has gone off the reservation, and her contract with Hughes gives him exclusivity on what films she can work on, and he had her sign a morality clause as well. What? Hughes has someone sign a morality clause? Most actresses in Hollywood of the 1950s had to resign themselves to the fact that, sooner or later, they were going to be summoned to Hughes’s estate to service the beast.

Well, Klein doesn’t exactly follow Hughes’s instructions because he falls in lustful love with Glenda, which frankly proves a nice change of pace from the mooning he has been doing over his sister.

Feature:”Tall, lanky, honey blond. All legs, all chest--a grin said she never bought in. A little knock-kneed, big eyes, dark freckles. Pure something--maybe style, maybe juice.”

That “never bought in” part is what really drives Klein crazy. She isn’t an innocent, but yet there is something untameable about her that allows her to feel free to give Hughes the double middle finger salute. Klein doesn’t need to be made any more insane, but this woman is going to put another layer of care on the mound of unsavory deeds he can’t find a hole deep enough or big enough to bury.

Klein even gets caught up in the ongoing feud between ex-partners Edmund Exley and Dudley Smith. He has to play Exley and Smith and rely on their natural high levels of paranoia to keep them from realizing that Klein isn’t playing either one of them straight. One thing he knows is that Exley is the Wyatt Earp of Los Angeles. Whenever the gunfire has ended and the smear of accusations have been wiped off the wall, as the smoke clears, Exley will always be the last man standing.

Don’t bet against Exley.

The plot is, needless to say, convoluted with shotgun splattered sentences and what I can only describe as scat speak. James Ellroy takes us into Klein’s head, and what we get isn’t necessarily cohesive sentences, but broken pieces of thoughts, sometimes unfinished. Yet they convey the tortuous twists of guilt and fear that is wrapping around Klein’s brain tighter and tighter with every new revelation, with every new indiscretion.

I read quite a few hardboiled books a year. I don’t know why, but I always seem to get a hankering for them in the summertime when my blood runs hotter anyway. I have to say that there is no one working in the genre today, or maybe ever, who brings a more realistic view of the sordid underbelly of society. In fact, Ellroy makes other writers look almost naive about the extremes of human nature and the true motivations that make people into brutal, self-destructive, untrustworthy, shameful versions of themselves. If you were in trouble in Los Angeles in 1958, you didn’t call the LAPD because you might end up needing to be saved from them.

Hush hush, keep these SINsations on the QT.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"in the end I possess my birthplace and I am possessed by its language."
-- Ross MacDonald."



"Tell me anything
Tell me everything.
Revoke our time apart.
Love me fierce in danger."
-- James Ellroy, White Jazz

4.5 stars. Sure, you could read this as just the final book in Ellory's masterpiece LA Quartet, but Ellory is playing for bigger stakes. He isn't just writing crime. He is writing the human condition. He isn't just giving you straight dope. He is playing you with pairs. He gives you E. Exley v D. Smith. He gives you Noonan vs. Gallaudet. He gives you J.C. Kafesjian v.P. Herrick, Richie V. Tommy, Sad mom vs Crazy mom.

Think of all of these pairs as fugues that swirl around the narrator, dirty Lieutenant David Klein, reflecting, stream of consciousness, talking, screaming, building, dropping. The narration is like jazz playing two themes together into one. The themes finally coalesce and you see that black and white, criminal and the cop, these are all just linked brothers and sisters trapped in a long and fatal incestuous battle for survival, for love, for understanding.

Coda:

In the end everybody dies, but you hope before then someone tells you the truth and tells you they love you. If you are lucky, perhaps, those two will be the same.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I've finished an Ellroy book, I've had to sit back and process everything, climb up out of his world, shake my brain free of his expert grasp. With White Jazz, he concludes his epic "L.A. Quartet," by narrowing his focus even more so than in The Black Dahlia , and miles away from the gargantuan L.A. Confidential . Returning to first-person narration and a single protagonist, Ellroy presents a portrait of racist and corrupt police lieutenant Dave Klein, who finds himself a pawn in a law enforcement political war when a Federal attorney mounts an investigation into LAPD malfeasance and its involvement in Southland vice.

Klein is a fascinating character, because he's not some hero or your everyday good guy caught up in a conspiracy and must be the one to bring it all to light. Instead he's a full-time criminal/part-time cop who finds himself in over his head, involved with individuals and systems that are even more corrupt than he is, and must fight through the entire book just to keep his head above water. And it was cool to witness as some semblance of justice (maybe goodness) starts to seep in to his motivations, once he gets a little love in his life and is forced to confront his actions in the past.

Style-wise, Ellroy takes the trimmed and slashed prose style he adopted for L.A. Confidential (by cutting out unnecessary words to cut the manuscript down by 100 pages per his editor) and ratchets it up to a thousand here! Paired with yet another complex plot, the clipped style makes White Jazz a very challenging read, as it's hard at times to follow, as major plot developments and twists can occur in just several well-chosen words, and if you blink (or skim), you miss it. It's not a casual read. But once I got settled in and used to it, I was along for the ride. And I began to realize how much this jazzy, bebop prose fits the confessional, stream-of-consciousness style that's used in the book. It's Dave Klein truly telling his story in his own words. And at times, it can be really poetic in it's own way. Here's what Ellroy himself had to say about his choice to continue the use of this technique for Klein in a Paris Review interview:

"I saw that if I eliminated words from his speech, I would develop a more convincing cadence for him: paranoid, jagged, enervated..."

This book, it's content, and it's writing style, as with most of Ellroy's work, definitely won't be to everyone's taste, and I would suggest that people new to Ellroy not start with this one (probably start with the more accessible Dahlia). For a taste of what's in store in the book, here's a portion of the novel where Klein searches police records for a possible suspect:

Keyed up—glom the pervert file. Dog stuff/B&E/Peeping Tom, see what jumped:
A German Shepherd-fucking Marine. Doctor "Dog": popped for shooting his daughter up with beagle pus. Dog killers—none fit my man's specs. Dog fuckers, dog suckers, dog beaters, dog worshipers, a geek who chopped his wife while dressed up as Pluto. Panty sniffers, sink shitters, masturbators—lingerie jackoffs only. Faggot burglars, transvestite break-ins, "Rita Hayworth"–Gilda gown, dyed bush hair, caught blowing a chloroformed toddler. The right age—but a jocker cut his dick off, he killed himself, a full-drag San Quentin burial. Peepers: windows, skylights, roofs—the roof clowns a chink brother act. No watchdog choppers, the geeks read passive, caught holding their puds with a whimper. Darryl Wishnick, a cute MO: peep, break, enter, rape, watchdogs subdued by goofball-laced meat—too bad he kicked from syph in '56. One flash: peepers played passive, my guy killed badass canines.

Although the style is more challenging than the previous books, making for a less smooth a read as I wanted, this novel is still an incredibly engaging crime saga, and skillfully ties in the events in the earlier novels, bringing the entire Quartet to a close in satisfying fashion (Ellroy's most poignant ending since Dahlia)! Ellroy and his work continues to fascinate me and he just climbed even higher in the ranks of my favorite authors.

To eclipse my guilt with the sheer weight of his evil. I'm going to kill him in the name of our victims, find Glenda and say:

Tell me anything.

Tell me everything.

Revoke our time apart.

Love me fierce in danger.

[Krok Zero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feature this is one of Ellroy's best.

Dig the economy: scale back the unsustainable sprawl of L.A. Confidential—streamline it. The catch: still cram a CRAAAZY amount of wild plot into a relatively small frame.

Single protagonist, single POV—a departure. NO redemptive qualities for the protag: Ellroy's most tainted hero. First-person narration—sharp, minimalistic. Fractured consciousness: a dirty cop seen FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

Style: heavy—but not off-putting or hard to read like future Ellroy prose experiments. Heavy on punctuation: em-dashes, colons. Rhythmic sentences—no bullshit repetitive/arrythmic/declarative sentences a la Cold Six, etc.

Story: PROPULSIVE—constant forward motion—the pages turn themselves. CRAAAZY complex plotting, payoffs aplenty—satisfying. Paradox: pared narration AND expansive story—BIG plot unfolds SUCCINCT.

Ellroy's dialogue: peerless. As always—hardcase attitude/patter covers for guilt/fear/despair/obsession.

Social/historical context—still there—but more backgrounded. Institutional corruption/personal corruption/psycho obsession/nexus between the three—MORE THAN EVER.

Only flaw: female character(s) underdeveloped—casualty of shorter page count, blinkered focus. Relationship: not quite up to ending's swoony romanticism.

Feature this stands apart from both the earlier L.A. Quartet books and the later political stuff. Feature it's unique in the Ellroy oeuvre. Feature start with Black Dahlia if you're a squarejohn n00b—work your way up.

Spinning, falling—

Hit SAVE—

[Jack Tripper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m well aware I’m going to receive some flak for this, so just know that I consider myself a big fan of Ellroy’s first three LA Quartet novels. In fact, The Black Dahlia is on my “desert island books” shelf. But this almost felt like a parody of late 1980s Ellroy. The short, clipped sentences were taken to such an extreme that I could barely decipher them at times, and the whole thing ended up becoming a chore to read. Told in first-person by ultra-corrupt cop Lt. Klein, it almost felt as if he (Klein) were writing in police shorthand, but forgot to go back and make it readable for others. Other GR reviewers – many of whom share similar tastes as me – strongly disagree with my views on the writing style, so don’t simply take my word for it.

I also felt let down by the fact that this was supposed to be the culmination of the Quartet, and yet barely any characters from the prior entry, LA Confidential, are integral to the plot, even though this takes place just 6-7 years later. The storyline itself is extremely underwhelming (from what I could parse) compared to the previous installments, and the disjointed writing and lack of any semblance of narrative flow made it difficult for me to care enough about what the hell was happening to try and decode the gibberish.

The only reason for two stars instead of one is because Ed Exley and Dudley Smith, two of my favorite leads from LA Confidential, play important roles, and their intertwined stories kept me at least somewhat invested. But I found myself constantly peeking ahead to see when one of them would show up again, only to be completely dejected whenever I noticed I had a few chapters still to go.

Recommended only for those who enjoy Ellroy’s post-Quartet work, which, from what I've gathered, seems to share many of the characteristics I dislike here. Those looking for charismatic and/or intriguing characters like Bud White, Vincennes (hard not to picture Kevin Spacey when re-reading. Oh well), Lynn Bracken, Sid Hudgens, etc. need not apply.

IMO.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lieutenant Dave Klein is not a nice man. In fact, he’s as crooked a cop as one is likely to find. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an occasional hitman and a clever schemer. His newest case is an investigation involving the breaking and entering of drug kingpin’s home. His investigation will lead him to be officially on everyone’s list, as his past is catching up to him, and for every friend he’s made through his actions, he’s made a ton more enemies.

I think it is safe to say that as a whole, Ellroy’s LA Quartet is one of the best series I’ve ever read. It is an excellent set of detective stories, and a wonderful tale of corruption. While each book is a stand-alone story, they all build upon each other, with little details mentioned in one book and coming back in another. Characters come and go, and we see LA change from the early 40s and into the 50s. The series is a masterpiece, and White Jazz brings it, I’m pleased to say, to a satisfying close.

I just wish I liked the damn book more, because it irritated the hell out of me. Don’t get me wrong, the story is pretty great. As with all of Ellroy’s novels, be prepared to make notes if you want to catch everything that happens, as people come and go for 200+ pages without a mention and then pop up and you’re supposed to remember them, despite only appearing on one or two pages. That’s not the problem (at least not for me), no the problem is the stylistic choice Ellroy chose for this one.

When I made my first update for the book, it went like this:

“Okay Ellroy, I know I said that The Big Nowhere was overwritten. I’m sorry. I won’t say it again. Now could you please, PLEASE use complete sentences again? I would really appreciate it.

Same paragraph as above, but written in the style of White Jazz:

Sorry Ellroy. Was wrong. Big Nowhere overdone. Won’t repeat. More words? Appreciated.“

In other words: Quick sentences. Cut out words. Needles. Fill in blanks. On own.

I genuinely considered writing my entire review in this style, just to show how frustrating it was, but couldn’t pull it off. So, sure, points to Ellroy; it is artistic in its own way and he managed to write a 354 page novel in this style, and that’s pretty damn impressive. I’m sure some people really found this clever (it does certainly keep the pace quick, and put you into our lead's paranoid and on the run state of mind) and enjoyed it, but I found myself rereading lines just to figure out what the hell was happening.

This is a shame, as plotwise, I found this to be one of the cleverer books in the series. Honestly, I would have given up despite my investment in the series if I hadn’t been so intrigued by where he was taking the story and wanting to know what would happen to DUDLEY FUCKING SMITH. I’ve never found the literary equivalent to nails on a chalkboard until this book, but unfortunately, I can say that now I have.

Do I recommend it? If you’ve come along this far, absolutely. It’s a wonderful conclusion from a plot standpoint. If the writing style doesn’t bother you, it may be one of your favorites in the series. For me though, it’s a stunning disappoint coming off LA Confidential, while still being an epic conclusion. 2.5 stars rounding up to 3.

[Χρύσα Βασιλείου · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 και κάτι ψιλά/5 αστεράκια.

Βρισκόμαστε στο 1958, και η Πόλη των Αγγέλων φαίνεται να κατακλύζεται από πάσης φύσεως δαίμονες: οι εκβιασμοί, οι δολοφονίες, η διαφθορά και το ξέπλυμα μαύρου χρήματος αποτελούν καθημερινά φαινόμενα, ενώ η αστυνομία φαντάζει εντελώς ανήμπορη να αντιμετωπίσει το κύμα της εγκληματικότητας, που βρίσκεται σε συνεχή έξαρση. Κάτι που είναι λογικό, αφού ένα μεγάλο μέρος της αποτελείται από φιλόδοξους και αδίστακτους μπάτσους που σχετίζονται άμεσα ή έμμεσα με τον υπόκοσμο, χρηματίζονται, πουλάνε προστασία ή κάνουν τα στραβά μάτια στα όσα διαδραματίζονται γύρω τους. Όλοι όσοι κατέχουν κάποια θέση εξουσίας ή δημόσιο αξίωμα στην πόλη δρουν με γνώμονα τα προσωπικά τους συμφέροντα και κανείς δεν μπορεί να είναι σίγουρος για τα κίνητρα του άλλου.
Ο Ντέιβ Κλάιν είναι υπαστυνόμος της αστυνομίας του Λος Ά��τζελες· την ίδια στιγμή όμως συμμετέχει ενεργά σε αρκετές ‘βρώμικες’ δουλειές, εκμεταλλευόμενος τη δύναμη της θέσης του και τις γνωριμίες του. Όταν το FBI ξεκινήσει ομοσπονδιακή έρευνα για τη διαφθορά στους κόλπους της αστυνομίας, θα βρεθεί από τη μια στιγμή στην άλλη στη θέση του εξιλαστήριου θύματος. Όλοι όσοι εμπλέκονται, με τον έναν ή τον άλλον τρόπο, στα παράνομα κυκλώματα που ελέγχουν την πόλη καλούνται να προστατέψουν τον εαυτό τους και τα μυστικά τους – και δεν θα διστάσουν ακόμα και να προδώσουν ή να πουλήσουν τους παλιούς τους συμμάχους, προκειμένου να το καταφέρουν. Ο Ντέιβ μένει ολομόναχος, και συνειδητοποιεί πως έχει έρθει η ώρα να πληρώσει. Είναι όμως αποφασισμένος να κλείσει πρώτα ορισμένους λογαριασμούς και, μιας και δεν έχει τίποτα να χάσει, γίνεται άκρως επικίνδυνος για πολλά πρόσωπα. Πρόσωπα που μέχρι τώρα είχαν σημαίνουσα θέση στη δημόσια κοινωνική ζωή της πόλης, και βλέπουν στο πρόσωπο του Κλάιν έναν επικίνδυνο και θανάσιμο εχθρό. Η μάχη θα είναι μέχρις εσχάτων και, όπως σε κάθε μάχη που σέβεται τον εαυτό της, οι αντίπαλοι θα χρησιμοποιήσουν θεμιτά και αθέμιτα μέσα, ενώ τα όρια ανάμεσα σε νικητές και χαμένους θα είναι εξαιρετικά λεπτά κι επισφαλή…

Ο Ellroy έχει δημιουργήσει έναν συναρπαστικό και ‘δυνατό’ επίλογο για την περίφημη τετραλογία του, αποφασισμένος να κερδίσει και τους πιο απαιτητικούς φαν του. Και το κατορθώνει. Καταφέρνει να ‘μπάσει’ τον αναγνώστη στην πλοκή από τις πρώτες κιόλας σελίδες, να τον παρασύρει σε έναν κόσμο άγνωστο, επικίνδυνο, σάπιο, αλλά ταυτόχρονα παράξενα γοητευτικό. Η αφήγηση είναι γρήγορη, ρέει χωρίς ανάσα, τα γεγονότα διαδέχονται το ένα το άλλο με ρυθμούς φρενήρεις και καταιγιστικούς, διατηρώντας τους αναγνωστικούς σφυγμούς υψηλούς. Κανείς, ούτε οι ήρωες ούτε και οι αναγνώστες, δεν ξέρουν τι τους περιμένει παρακάτω· η επόμενη αράδα, η επόμενη σελίδα είναι μια ωρολογιακή βόμβα έτοιμη να ανατιναχτεί ανά πάσα στιγμή, χωρίς να λογαριάζει τις εντυπώσεις που θα αφήσει πίσω της.
Η αφήγηση γίνεται σε πρώτο πρόσωπο, από τον Ντέιβ Κλάιν. Έναν άνθρωπο που έχει συνηθίσει να μιλάει με πράξεις και όχι με λόγια. Ο τρόπος ομιλίας του είναι απόλυτα ‘αστυνομικός’: κοφτός, σκληρός, πλήρως εστιασμένος στα γεγονότα και τις πράξεις των προσώπων που εμπλέκονται στα όσα περιγράφει. Χωρίς ωραιοποιήσεις ή λεκτικά στολίδια, που δεν έχουν ούτως ή άλλως κανέναν λόγο ύπαρξης σε ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο. Ο ήρωας δεν νοιάζεται για το αν προκαλεί ή σοκάρει· επιθυμεί να αφηγηθεί τα γεγονότα έτσι όπως τα έζησε ο ίδιος, όπως έγιναν, αποδίδοντας τις ευθύνες όπου πρέπει, ξεσκεπάζοντας πρόσωπα υπεράνω υποψίας, μην αφήνοντας ούτε τον ίδιο του τον εαυτό απ’ έξω. Ο αναγνώστης αποδέχεται αναντίρρητα πως ναι, πρόκειται για τα λόγια ενός μπάτσου, γιατί ο συγγραφέας έχει διαμορφώσει ολόκληρη την πλοκή του με απίστευτο ρεαλισμό, την έχει προσαρμόσει επάνω στον χαρακτήρα του ήρωά του, οπότε τα λόγια του Κλάιν ρέουν απόλυτα φυσικά, σαν να βρίσκεται απέναντί σου και σου εξιστορεί ο ίδιος τη συναρπαστική ιστορία της ζωής του, αναπολώντας τις μέρες που ήταν πανίσχυρος, αλλά και εκείνες που οδήγησαν τελικά στην πτώση του. Χωρίς να μετανιώνει, γιατί όλο αυτό αποτελεί κομμάτι του ίδιου του εαυτού του.
Παρ’ όλο που το μυθιστόρημα αυτό κατακλύζεται από εικόνες όπου το ψέμα, η βία, η προδοσία και το αίμα κυριαρχούν, το έγκλημα πρωτοστατεί και η αφαίρεση ανθρώπινων ζωών θεωρείται ρουτίνα, ο Ellroy δεν σοκάρει τον αναγνώστη του. Έχει δημιουργήσει με τέτοια λεπτομερή προσοχή και αυθεντικότητα αυτόν τον κόσμο που, αυτόματα, όσοι τον διαβάζουν αποδέχονται ως απόλυτα φυσιολογικό να είναι έτσι τα πράγματα, να είναι αυτή η καταιγιστική έκρηξη βίας η μόνη επιλογή. Όλα φαντάζουν άκρως ρεαλιστικά, κοντινά και τόσο μακρινά ταυτόχρονα, χάρη στη ζωντάνια της αφήγησης και την χρήση της απλής, καθημερινής γλώσσας.

Η «Λευκή τζαζ», ένα μυθιστόρημα καθηλωτικό, γοητευτικό και ανατρεπτικό, αποτελεί ιδανική επιλογή για τους λάτρεις της αστυνομικής λογοτεχνίας, αλλά και για όσους απολαμβάνουν την αφήγηση μιας πολύ καλής ιστορίας. Αφεθείτε στην μαγική πένα ενός από τους μετρ του αστυνομικού είδους, του James Ellroy, και αποκλείεται να μην βγείτε κερδισμένοι!

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams-I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget. Pictures keep the woman young. L.A., fall 1958. Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events-so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down--the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell. I'm old, afraid I'll forget: I killed innocent men. I betrayed sacred oaths. I reaped profit from horror. Fever-that time burning. I want to go with the music-spin, fall with it.”

White Jazz completes James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, set in Los Angeles, 1958, with the corrupt LAPD again as its focus. I read and reviewed the other three--Black Dahlia, probably my favorite; The Big Nowhere, maybe my least favorite but I still gave it four stars; and LA Confidential, which is probably Ellroy’s masterpiece, though it takes White Jazz to round things off, finish off Elroy’s LA and LAPD in the fifties. What makes White Jazz the nastiest and darkest of the four is that it is told by a corrupt cop, Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He’s described as "forty-two and going on dead.” He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer, he’ll beat up or kill anyone to get what he wants or to make a buck or gain power.

Real historical figures weave their way through the narrative. Klein takes a side job from Howard Hughes to investigate Glenda, an actress who left Hughes to star in a B-horror movie about Communist space vampires produced by mobster Mickey Cohen.

Like The Black Dahlia, this is a first person narrator, but of all the guys to tell a story, this is one of the worst. But when the city calls for Real Reform--and as those of us who have read all of these four novels can attest, there is a great need for reform in the LAPD, as connected as it is to the mob, to Hollywood, and so on--Dave Klein is singled out as the scapegoat, the Bad Cop, the fall guy. So the angle is unique, that a bad-un seems to be involved in taking down even worse-uns.

And in the process of getting indicted, Klein gets in the middle of the continuing war between Dudley Smith and Ed Exley, two guys we met before in the series, two terrific characters. Thos of us who still care about morality and justice, who do we side with?! The lesser of two or three evils?

Jazz is always running through White Jazz, as it is 1958 and jazz was the music of the day, and this is the west coast, where West Coast Jazz featured maybe more white guys like Chet Baker, but the title also seems to speak to a kind of stylistic, jazz-style prose, intense. Klein listens to jazz, and he gets “jazzed,” up, wired, as the pace quickens. Dunno, but I think that may work.

“Canned shtick—Pete gleeful: ‘The left one's the hospital, the right one's death. The right one steals your life while the left steals your breath. These hands are bad juju and the bad boogaloo, they're the teeth of the demon as he slides down the flue.’”
BeBop jazz rhythm? Sometimes it becomes too much, this style, too staccato, since it is essentially a continuation of LA Confidential, where we also read hundreds of pages with this style. but it adds to the intensity, I guess.

Listen: This is one of the greatest crime series of all time. Period. A new LA quartet is under way, beginning with Perfidia. I need some time off from all the gutter filth. No one is admirable, no one anywhere, in these novels. No heroes. But is great noir writing. I still need to read Ellroy’s My Dark Places, his memoir about how he got such a low view of humankind, and why he original wrote The Black Dahlia, as the story echoes the unsolved murder of his own mother.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

RE-READ REVIEW: I'll leave my original review from 2014 up, but I just re-read this and I have no idea what I was thinking giving this four stars originally. It's easily at the same level of brilliance as The Big Nowhere or L.A. Confidential. I suspect that when I inevitably re-read The Black Dahlia I'll give it five as well, because Ellroy is a goddamn genius. Dave "The Enforcer" Klein is the ultimate Ellroy character, an incredibly dirty motherfucker who kills people for the mob and wants to pork his own sister, yet I found myself constantly rooting for him to escape the closing jaws of the Feds, his fellow police and the myriad of underworld characters that populate Ellroy's Los Angeles. The increasing tension is fucking palpable and jaw-grinding by the end of the book and the incredibly terse, blunt language is absolutely the apotheosis of Ellroy's ever-evolving style. I did complain originally that the scope of the novel seems like a kind of step backwards from the gargantuan L.A. Confidential, but fuck that. It's only barely less ambitious in terms of the complicated and interconnected criminal landscape and I realize that Ellroy was not trying to write one of his Big Books with this one. It's a high-speed fever dream. It's paranoid as fuck and the style, speed and content are consistently raw and scathing.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: There's a blurb on the back cover of this, a quote by some critic probably. It says something like "Ellroy has stripped his broad brush down to a hard cutting tool." That's clever, but for me it was less "hard cutting tool" and more "brain-caked block hammer." Ellroy was getting increasingly staccato and blunt by The Big Nowhere but this makes L.A. Confidential look like some Goodnight Moon shit. Twists that alter the nature of the story and the fate of the characters within can come in the form of a couple words where most authors would take a few paragraphs. It feels like Ellroy was honestly on coke, meth or huge doses of caffeine when he blasted out this chunk of battery-acid-flavored crime fiction. It can be exhilarating or frustrating, or both at the same time. Of course, this is coming from a guy who reads lots of genre fiction with symmetrical, easy prose.

I'm not terribly used to or familiar with stuff that plays with the structure of novel-writing like Faulkner or maybe Pynchon. And I don't even like much of that shit either so that gives you an idea of how good Ellroy is. This is highly conceptualized and stylized language for the average bear. I know I'm harping on the style a lot, but this really is a notable and interesting metamorphosis Ellroy's language has undergone. I haven't read any pre-Dahlia stuff of his but that probably reads like a completely different person at this point. And this is an old novel by the dude! Came out in like 1992. I have no idea where the hell his writing has gone to since then, but I'm definitely going to find out. Okay, enough with the style talk. Like I've said, I'm a meat-and-potatoes guy all the way but it's really interesting stuff.

This continues in the same loose arc as the last two books. We have familiar characters like Ed Exley and Dudley Fucking Smith, and some stuff from previous is mentioned like the Nite Owl. It's still 1958 and the world is recognizably familiar as Ellroy's Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is a little less thick than preceding novels, because at this point you need to take what Ellroy has given you and run with it in terms of visualizing the setting and whatnot. This book is all plot. It's almost overwhelmingly intense how much stuff he's crammed into a relatively short novel. You have the feeling that you could blow just a little air into it and suddenly it'd be like 600 pages. Every kind of crime is examined, from the usual B&Es and murders to weird shit like animal killings and...sex vandalism? I have no idea what to call it. The usual reprehensible behavior that Ellroy fans hate to love.

Dave Klein is our protagonist and he has to be the harshest pill to swallow. He's so corrupt he's more of a criminal moonlighting as a cop than vice versa. He commits murder with very little sense of remorse or guilt and has gotten in so deep with organized crime figures that he's basically a slave to them at this point. He also loves his sister. I know that last one sounds nice, but I mean...loves his sister. Hardly your usual protagonist cop, and even darker than what we're used to from Ellroy. The rest of the cast is the usual gang of creeps, killers, weirdos and criminals. Some gross people in here, even for Ellroy. Makes you miss the almost Captain America-type days of Bucky Bleichert from Black Dahlia. What was his skeleton in the closet, anyways? Fucking...snitched on his petty-criminal buddies? That just illustrates how far we've come. It's nothing compared to Klein.

Overall a great novel. Unfortunately the style was exhausting and the scope seemed to draw back a tiny bit from the grand heights of L.A. Confidential, and not just because of the return to the single POV of Dahlia. It's just a smaller story and thusly a little disappointing, at least for me. I really wanna see how bloated and weird Ellroy can get. I wanna see him do a billion-page crime-history extravaganza. I'm not sure he's actually done one yet but I'm definitely going to find out. Everyone who is into crime shit; read Ellroy immediately...obviously excepting the easily offended. And definitely don't start with this one, because it will probably be like having your legs broken and then thrown into a pool--all sink, no swim.

[Wes Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was reading them, each entry in the L.A. Quartet was my favorite book. Kinda awe inspiring to watch James Ellroy move from a style your 11th-grade English teacher might have described as "economical" to a one so determinedly spare it makes Hemingway seem profligate. 'Long about L.A. Confidential, we see him start to use sentences like "Bud, soft." and I started to love things about the English language I'd forgotten about, like how having too many words means you don't need as many rules as you think you do. Hey, folks'll figure it out if they want to. Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential got the big screen treatment, but The Big Nowhere and White Jazz will be the ones I re-read. All the novels are about obsession, about guys trying to make the world good by being bad, about Ellroy slowly killing the things he hates about people and about himself. His characters look like him, they act like him, they probably quote him. By The Big Nowhere (book 2) things have already become so bizarre and unlikely, that it feels like Ellroy has lost control of his process, that he is, perhaps, so angry and lousy with self-loathing that his characters have literally become ravenous animals who are cannibalizing themselves and returns are already diminishing. So it's cool to read L.A. Confidential (book 3), which introduces Ellroy as a great writer capable of holding an ensemble cast of obsessed bad men in stasis with each other for almost an entire decade. It's abstract and it's vicious (though not as vicious as T.B.N.), but it's pretty restrained for all that. White Jazz (book 4) is not; we get corruption, murder and incest damn near from the giddy-up, and I was questioning the humanity of anyone to sport an LAPD badge by page 25. Can't decide if that's what Jimmy actually wants or not. He pals around with a lot of cops, seems like, and his author's photos always make him look like a Nazi fresh from the Alps. But he's conflicted, right? Conflicted guys write books, right? If conflict wasn't interesting, goodreads would just have a bunch of manuals on it.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this novel September first, took a break and believe it or not read it (and the other three) all over again. The first time through was the hardest, but in the end I loved not only White Jazz but also the three that came before. And now we've come to the end.

full post here (no spoilers):
http://www.crimesegments.com/2020/10/...

White Jazz closes out Ellroy's LA Quartet, and in doing so, takes us into the life of Dave Klein, Ad Vice lieutenant in the LAPD. Unlike The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential , Ellroy's writing style is dialed up full throttle, set at pure, raw energy here as he moves his reader into Klein's head

"his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing -- taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and pervision."

Klein is telling this story years after the events of White Jazz, looking backward with his beginning in the fall of 1958:

"Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events -- so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down -- the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell."

Afraid he'll forget:

"I killed innocent men. I betrayed sacred oaths. I reaped profit from horror. Fever -- that time burning. I want to go with the music -- spin fall with it."

Mind you, we haven't moved into the actual story yet and right away we have a preview of not only what's coming down the pike for Klein, who lived to tell the tale if one could actually call it living, but of Ellroy's superb jazzed-up prose style as well. A bit harder to read than its predecessors for sure, but slow down, savor it, and it will start becoming naturalspeak in a while.

While I've done my usual and posted a sort of barebones outline of White Jazz as part of my reading journal entry, it is actually sort of impossible to even try to enumerate the subplots found in this book, nor is there any way to possibly describe the bleakness tied to the characters or the way in which things spiral out of control throughout the story. I will say that while the books that came before this one were dark, this one is downright claustrophobic, a connected web of murder, revenge, sick and damaged souls, making the reader wonder if there is any possibility of justice at all in this hellish vision of LA.

This final entry picks up speed toward the finish of the twelve years (1947-1959) covered by Ellroy in a way that only he could make it happen as he closes out the series; more accurately it ends what is often labeled as the Dudley Smith Trio that had its roots in The Big Nowhere and comes to a head in White Jazz. Yet one could make the case that while The Black Dahlia has little to do with the characters of the three novels that follow, it is most certainly the foundation of Ellroy's vision and as such necessary to understand many of the themes that make their way through all four books. Word to the wise: do not under any circumstances make White Jazz your starting point -- you will be lost.

I think there have only been two other series I've read that have come close to this one in terms of sheer darkness of vision and which out-noir noir, Derek Raymond's Factory series and David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. While Ellroy's Quartet novels are, as I've been saying all along, not easy to get through on a number of different levels, reading these four novels has been an experience in itself and I wouldn't have missed it. I'm genuinely sad that it's over.

happier reads now, I think!

[Anthony Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fourth volume in Ellroy's LA Quartet sees a stylistic shift from his previous work as he adopts the paired down, staccato prose which has since become his trademark. LAPD detective and occasional mob-hitman Dave Klein develops a dangerous obsession which will set him on a potentially fatal collision course with the dread Dudley Smith. 1950's LA is presented as a cess pit of vice, corruption and murderous cruelty, the horrors somehow made worse by the Ellroy's unadorned language. Recommended for crime lovers with strong stomachs.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feature: Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley, the once morally ambiguous hotshot in LA Confidential, now revealed to be a dangerously polished hyena is mad at the Feds, who are now launching a full fledged investigation into the gutter that is the LAPD. At one of his many press conferences, he says of the probe: "It will fail because he (the Fed head of the probe, Welles Noonan) has grievously underestimated the moral rectitude of the Los Angeles Police Department." No such luck, moral rectitude is never an issue here. The only thing an inquirer may underestimate is survival skills.

The slime-balls are all here. James Ellroy's White Jazz is the authentic feeling, brilliantly foul continuation of the life and times of the various parasites that populate the 50s LAPD and the corrupt politicians, drug-pushers, tabloid hounds, pornographers, pimps and prostitutes they feed on.

It is a first person account by Lieutenant Dave "the enforcer" Klein. A casual murderer of numerous witnesses and others that happen to be in the way of where ever he's going. He doesn't feel bad about it, probably doesn't have time to. But he does admit certain queasiness after a kill. Ellroy's novel is too hardboiled to be one of redemption, but he does offer castigation to all his sinners. There is, for instance, Klein's unsubtle incestuous obsession with his sister. In fact, incest seems to be Ellroy's preferred method of punishment. A longing that can never be satisfied, and if satisfied will be the source of infinite desolation. At the center of this hell is a diseased family Klein observes as an investigator. They are a crime family, long involved with the LAPD. Their numerous afflictions are of the darkest kind, and are the source of the novel's deceptive title.

This is an incredibly hard novel to read. The prose is brutal, almost verbless, and confusing. It requires the reader to remain at a high level of concentration, which is exhausting. Recommended only for hard-core noir fans.

[Phil Mc · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final instalment of Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet and, sadly, the worst by a country mile. The clipped, staccato sentences that work so well in the earlier novels have now become disjointed lists with occasional function words thrown in hither and thither. Ellroy has virtually parodied his own style and it makes for an incredibly annoying and difficult novel to read.

The story focuses on Dave Klein, a corrupt cop, and his attempts to unravel more crimes than I can relate here; however, the real interest is in the continuance of Exley Vs Dudley from the previous novel. It is interesting in that Ellroy decided to have this play out through the eyes of a third-party and that certainly offers a new perspective on these characters but it doesn’t really work. After two-hundred pages, I didn’t care about the story or the characters and the narrative was so twisted in knots that I couldn’t be bothered to figure it out. Eventually the conclusion is played out and it is reasonably satisfying but then we return to Klein’s conclusion. I didn’t care.

Ultimately, it is perhaps to Ellroy’s credit that two characters from a previous novel were all that could hold my interest. They are that good. But, in reality, it simply shows how mis-guided White Jazz is. It’s a shame it had to end this way: A fitting epithet for almost all of Ellroy’s characters and perfect for this disappointing novel.

[Mei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dudley Smith deserved worse.

[Βάιος Παπαδόπουλος · Rating 5 out of 5]

Φόνοι, ξυλοδαρμοί, δωροδοκίες, εξαγορές, ανταποδόσεις, εκβιασμοί. Πιέσεις για πληρωμές, εκφοβισμοί, σπάσιμο απεργιών. Ψέματα, τρομοκρατία, αθετημένες υποσχέσεις, καταπατημένοι όρκοι, παραμελημένα καθήκοντα. Κλοπή, διπλοπροσωπία, απληστία, ψέματα, φόνοι, ξυλοδαρμοί, δωροδοκίες, εξαγορές... Τζέιμς Ελρόι! Ο μεγαλύτερος μυθιστοριογράφος της εποχής μας...

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I fix things, Exley runs things."

(I'm not going to go out of my way to spoil the previous novels, but I'm writing this assuming you've read L.A. Confidential at the very least.)

At its best, White Jazz feels like it's in the process of rewiring my brain. Ellroy's patented staccato goes beyond style here and almost becomes its own genre, a feverish fury of cross-connections, revelations, instincts, and revulsion. What makes it work is that here we lose the Ellroy trio for a singular narrative, Dave Klein, and so the writing feels like a natural expression of Klein's shaky brilliance, his instability, and his need to think through the angles. Klein is a contract killer, a slumlord, a bagman, a fixer, and LAPD Ad Vice Lieutenant; he's tailing an errant actress to prove she's broken her contract with Howard Hughes; he's investigating a robbery that no one but Chief of Detective Edmund Exley (hey, buddy, always nice to see you! Also, hey, Pete Bondurant!) wants solved, considering it makes official business out of the "hush-hush" relationship between the Narcotics division and their licensed heroin dealers; he just shoved a witness out of a window; his entitled, erratic partner's going off the deep end; and he has that whole "awkward, incestuous crush on his sister" thing going on. And you thought you had problems. If you had all that going on, your prose would get a little tense, too.

White Jazz has the burden of closing out the incredible L.A. Quartet and telling Klein's story, and it knocks both out in about three hundred and fifty pages, and knocks them out of the park.

When Exley assigns Klein to investigate the bizarre robbery of the Kafesjian house, he has his own motivations--doesn't he always?--but for Dave Klein, following the trail of evidence through a thicket of peeping toms, prostitution, and family secrets turns out to bring him close to some kind of redemption, if only because it lends him a sense of purpose. He also falls in love, in an abrupt and desperate way that feels like he's reaching for a rope to save himself from drowning. Neither the work nor the woman can really save him--in fact, both come with their own levels of corruption--but they help, if only because in giving him mysteries to solve and opportunities to work towards truth, they provide a way for him to admit the truth about himself. To confess. Dudley Smith continues to sell the principle of "containment"--keeping organized crime away from the white areas of Los Angeles, essentially--and Exley continues to make use of it--advertising the LAPD as fundamentally "clean," with only a few cordoned-off rotten apples. (There's a wonderful moment when Klein asks Exley if it bothers him that he and Dudley are so much alike, and Exley shows as much anger as Klein has ever seen in him.) But Dave Klein is walking, talking proof that containment is a lie and the danger and destruction is everywhere, and over the course of the novel, he stops being able to hide that from himself.

After L.A. Confidential, it's fascinating to see Exley from the outside as this brilliant, self-possessed, icy figure who has devoted himself thoroughly to authority, smooth process, and revenge. The tango between Klein and Exley of trust and manipulation made for my favorite part of the novel. This isn't long after the conclusion of the previous novel, but it feels almost a generation later, with Exley's secure authority and almost invulnerable reputation--no trace here of the man who put his hand on Bud White's through a car window, no softness or sentimentality. If the previous novel was Exley's ascension, this is Exley's rule and his kingdom. Looking at White Jazz as Dave Klein's story of the clash of rival powers Exley and Dudley makes this the perfect bridge between the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy: one man erratically bearing witness to a conflict bigger than himself and just trying to survive it.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

hush-hush magazine, 5/2/08

feature this hepcats:

north-carolinian noir knuckleheads hook respectable rushdie reader on amphetamine-amped narratively-novel nonsense lit. _white jazz_ delivers double dose of goofball graft and convoluted criminal crosses, but chavez ravine/fed-LAPD probe context can't compete with _american tabloid_'s epic evisceration of early 60s political posturing.

all on the QT and very hush-hush.

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meno conosciuto di altre opere di Ellroy, come Dalia Nera e L.A. Confidential, White Jazz è invece uno dei suoi lavori migliori.
Scritto col consueto stile che mescola articoli di giornale, veline della polizia, dialoghi serrati e scene di violenza estrema, è una storia dove si trova la quintessenza del marciume poliziesco, dove non esistono né buoni né cattivi, e dove il più marcio di tutti è quello dall'animo migliore.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saying that nobody writes like Ellroy is like saying nobody invents atomic bombs like Einstein. Working my way back through my favorite Ellroys begins with White Jazz, which is hands-down my favorite. Clooney should get off his ass and star in the movie already. Although I think Don Draper would make a fine Dave Klein, too. GET IT DONE, ASSBAGS!

[Antonis]

Εγκατέλειψα την ελληνική έκδοση λίγο μετά την εκατοστή σελίδα και συνεχίζω από το αγγλικό πρωτότυπο...

[Micah Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so ends Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. All worthwhile, and, surprisingly, White Jazz would be a strong favorite out of the series.

[Leland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Take the least interesting aspects of bad Film Noir scripts, magnify them, enhance with cardboard dialog, add a generous but unnecessary dose of F-word, N-word and others in a silly attempt to achieve a snappy style, and you are left with the utter failure that is White Jazz.

Ellroy seems to have fallen victim to his own success with this one. The speech patterns of 1950's L.A. hipsters, gangsters and cops do not a readable novel make.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Ellroy novel. This one closes out the L.A. Quartet, but you don't have to have read the others before this one. First person narrative of a very bad cop. His first novel where he delivers the story using the staccato hipster slang that he became known for.

[Liam · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 50%.

[⚔️Kelanth⚔️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finalmente sappiamo come andò a finire. Degna conclusione della quadrilogia di Los Angeles, un ciclo leggendario, come viene comunemente chiamata la raccolta di libri che parte con la "Dalia Nera" e finisce con questo "White Jazz" passando per "Il Grande Nulla" e "LA Confidential". Meno chiassoso, fiammeggiante e ambizioso dei precedenti, ma sicuramente un bel finale. Solita ambientazione in una Los Angeles cupa e meschina, dove la polizia e i criminali si scambiano i ruoli, si uniscono, entrano ognuno nel cerchio dell'altro sfumandosi insieme nel colore prevalente del nero e del rosso. Solita narrazione veloce, ancora di più delle precedenti, in un turbinio di personaggi, di sangue, di perversione e omicidi come fossero un intercalare continuo. Ma soprattutto fine del burattinaio che compare in tutti i quattro libri uno dei personaggi più belli nell’ambito del noir che mi sia mai capitato di leggere e il suo solito "Ragazzo..." biascicato all'irlandese mi rimarrà impresso nella mente di lettore per sempre. Un romanzo che in verità parte dalla “Dalia Nera” e arriva a “White Jazz”, perché sono talmente collegati l’uno all’altro che possiamo considerare questa quadrilogia come un’opera unica, un grande affresco della Los Angeles degli anni cinquanta, una Città degli Angeli oscura, perversa, corrotta, insanguinata all’inverosimile; personaggi che sono tutti cattivi senza nessuna distinzione, uomini che uccidono per soldi, che sono corrotti e marci, ossessionati in tutto. Anche quest’ultimo personaggio principale di questo libro, Dave Klein, è freddo, calcolatore e corrotto, un uomo che ha ucciso a sangue freddo, un uomo che ha ingannato, un uomo che ha pesacato nell’orrore per trarne profitto. White Jazz è indimenticabile per le ultime righe, la quadrilogia per tutto ciò che ha provocato in me lettore e sappiate che il classico lieto fine qui non esiste, ma Ellroy è un grande scrittore perché sa dove colpirti, lì dove si annidano le tue parti più oscure.

[Andrew Yuen · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my first attempt reading White Jazz, I could not understand a thing.

Ellroy's book reads like frenetically, a staccato shorthand from a police stenographer's fever dream. It exhausted me. Here I was, a boy at seventeen and wet behind the ears, born ten thousand kilometers from L.A, born fifty years away from its noir setting. What would I know?

I put the book down.

A few months later, I began to read it again. The prose flowed. It spoke to me. The dark places of very dark men. What I did not understand I cribbed from imagination. I finished it completely. The epigraph at the end is beautiful.

I never liked this book. But I'll never forget how I tried its cipher, and L.A opened up to me in its coldest embrace.