Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22418 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Sunday Times
'Ellroy writes as if driven by demons. His brutal, staccato graffiti tips over into art'

Synopsis
This work is set during Christmas of 1951. Los Angeles is a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.

From the Publisher
The bestselling cult classic

Customer Reviews

Fast-paced, well-plotted brilliance
Personally, I very much enjoyed this book. However, Ellroy's style is definitely an acquired taste. I've spoken to people who can't live with it and have stopped reading only a few pages in, but many readers, like myself, are addicted.

The Times' description of Ellroy as 'brutal' is very apt. His plot moves fast and in many different directions, following the different characters and personalities of three main detectives: Bud, Jack and Ed. The three men are very different but the chapters following them, that greatly range in length and detail, as they investigate their own cases, are all compulsive. The way Ellroy ties the men's separate stories together as the plot progresses is also highly impressive.

The film is infinitely less complicated than the novel, but don't let that put you off. If you like a good detective story with many different strands to the plotline, plenty of context and secrets from the past, intense relationships and a fast-paced, hard-hitting narrative style that pulls no punches, then give this book a go. It is uncomfortable to read at times, but then comfort was never Ellroy's intention.

A tour de force
Few books have had an affect on me as this one - it's deep plot, brilliantly realised characters and Ellroy's machine-gun prose are unlike anything else. He creates a world almost frightening in it's perversion - there's no absolute good and evil, merely levels of corruption and criminality. And to cap it off, the ending scene is heartbreaking : a victory that costs everything and means nothing, indeed. Dare i say it, one of the truly great books in American fiction.

Noir Kinda City
James Ellroy is one of the late XX Century master in noir fiction. His works are in the same level of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Harmmet. His prose has a by flying style and appeal that make almost impossible to put down any of his books once you had started.
I have to admmit that I'd watched "L. A. Confidential" dozen times before reading the novel -- and it is something I don't usually do , I mean I prefer reading the novel before watching a movie. So my work was a bit easier, because I didn't need to picture the characters, I imagined the actors who played them in the movie. But, as my reading went on and on, I noticed how different -- and equally good the novel and the film are.

The novel focuses on the life of three officers of PDLA through seven years. They are Bud White, Jack Vincennes and Ed Exley. And there are hundreds of suporting characters that help to show how these guys went up and down in their carrers.

It is almost impossible to put this novel in a nutshell due to fact it has so many plots, sub-plots and important twist through the story that it would be impossible to tell them without taking away the surprise of who hadn't read the book yet.

Ellroy is really good in character developing. All of them have a past -- and most of them very obscure-- with interesting facts that also have some relation in their present time. Moreover, they are very psychologically believable.

LA has never looked so glamurous and so scary! In this city everyone is an angel, but also a little devil. This is the perfect city where any noir story fits.

When it comes to the movie, the script written by Curtins Hanson and Brian Hellgland is very smart. Many scriptwriters could have fallen into the trap of trying to translate the whole novel to the screen. Such a thing would be very complicated and the film would result in a mess. In the book, many characters and plots work very fine once the readers can move back and forward according to their needs. But in the movie -- once you are in a theatre-- you have to follow what is in the screen, so if you missed an important line, you can miss the whole movie.

More than adaptating everything, they took L.A. Confidential's premisse and worked on their very own story, although it has many things inspired by the novel. They left out many sub-plots and created another ones, that make the story more watchable and interesting. But, they never lost the Ellroy's appeal.

All in all, both novel and movie are great, and they should be experienced by everyone, once they are two different works that complete each other.