Reading the 20th Century discussion
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James Ellroy
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An all time favourite which I am pleased to report delivered, yet again, on my latest reread (January 2026). American Tabloid (1995) is the first part of James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy and must surely rank as one of the most ambitious crime novels ever as well as an undisputed masterpiece of the secret history genre....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Essential
5/5
Nice! I'm determined to get to Ellroy this year.
Reading in James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand, I chortled at this: ——-
Gusts kicked in. The plane dipped resultant.
The sky was black. The air was cold. Ice hit the props. Altus, Oklahoma – due east.
Chuck flew low. Chuck flew radar-proof. Chuck flew minus landing log. No airstrip. No runway.
——-
The compression is insane. The next step would be to omit the vowels, as in written Hebrew.
Oddly, Ellroy makes for slow reading, because those rat-a-tat three and four-word sentences with only periods as punctuation, especially noticeable in The Cold Six Thousand, slow you down considerably. The style is very effective for purpose, but it is like a hammer to your skull, so I can only manage 20 pages at a time.
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Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
American Tabloid (other topics)American Tabloid (other topics)
The Black Dahlia (other topics)
American Tabloid (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
James Ellroy (other topics)James Ellroy (other topics)
Many moons ago we read The Black Dahlia as a group, as some of you may recall
I've also nominated....
American Tabloid (1995)
by
James Ellroy
...for a Group Read with no success, so I've decided to just dive back in for a re-read. I'm a few chapters in and it's just as good as I had remembered
I'll keep you posted. It's a 600 page behemoth so I'll be reading it for quite a while.
More about American Tabloid....
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C....
Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy...
Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty...
Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....
James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.
Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year.
"Hard-bitten ... ingenious ... Ellroy segues into political intrigue without missing a beat." —The New York Times
"Vastly entertaining." —Los Angeles Times
"One hellishly exciting ride." —Detroit Free Press
"A supremely controlled work of art." —The New York Times Book Review