What do You think about The Big Nowhere (1994)?
Los Angeles, 1950 Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name as a cop... and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.'s Bureau brass. He's climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks-bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes-is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare. This was a grand novel of twists and turns, double-crosses and blackmail, and political intrigue all tied together by the master of noir, James Ellroy. It doesn't get any better than this, people! One thing I found interesting was Buzz Meeks' back story. While I haven't read LA Confidential (it's up next), his character was something of a mystery to me in the movie. This cleared up some of the background between him and Capt Dudley Smith.
—Steve
The Big Nowhere follows The Black Dahlia in Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. Is the genre "crime opera" a thing? 'Cause it should be. Space gets one, why not crime? Anyways, if crime opera is a thing then this is a classic example of it. The scope has widened in this second entry to the L.A. Quartet on multiple levels; we have three POV characters and an omniscient perspective as opposed to the single first person POV of the first book, the single main story thread being replaced by two in this volume and it's just longer, dealing with more people, places and locations. It's also markedly darker, grosser, and more nihilistic. I really thought Ellroy was giving me a heavy dose of grit and corruption with the first book, but this makes me laugh at how naive I was. I had no idea how dark and compelling things could get in this series.Ellroy is the perfect example of a writer transcending their genre; I really hesitate to throw this into the mystery or crime pigeonhole. It's so much more than that! It's too well-written, too character-fueled and too packed with details sordid and sublime. The plot is dense, dark and labyrinthine and at least ONE of the three main characters will grab you. There's Danny Upshaw, a surprisingly moral (for Ellroy) detective obsessed with solving a seriously disturbing and gruesome murder for reasons obvious and less-so; Mal Considine, a man bringing home SERIOUS WW2 baggage who gets involved with another one of D.A. Loew's schemes to elevate himself to power; and finally Buzz Meeks, an ex-cop and semi-pimp to Howard Hughes who also happens to be involved with the ever-present ganglord Mickey Cohen. These guys are interesting before they even do anything! They're also very fallible and occasionally utterly immoral human beings--never plot puppets.Ellroy's prose is still extremely readable while also retaining a certain elegance. I did notice a bit of difference in the voice in Dahlia and in this one; it just seems more assured, more streamlined, more descriptive, more...visual. Even though this was like his sixth or seventh book (read: eighth) at this point he still seems to be developing his style, which is exciting! What kind of creature is going to emerge from this fucked-up smoggy cocoon he dwells in? Makes me kinda glad I was never aware of Ellroy's work until this point, as I get to read all these books and find out. As you might have guessed, those with sensibilities less rough than your average-grade sandpaper will probably want to avoid this. It's totally bleak, harsh and occasionally even disgusting, particularly when it comes to the murder story. From the first chapter when the body is found I had to find out what kind of monster Ellroy had built.The second thread in this story focuses on the D.A. from Dahlia Ellis Loew scheming to uncover a communist conspiracy in the Hollywood film industry--but of course he's doing it to further his political career and not out of any sense of patriotism or real communist threat. Initially I was not terribly interested in this (because while I am a young man and didn't live through the times I still believe that there was no real reason to give a shit about communism in the States...or anywhere else like Vietnam) but the story just grows so much more sordid and layered and tied into Upshaw's murder investigation that I just wanted to keep reading and reading and reading. Seriously, I don't know exactly what it is about Ellroy's writing but his books absolutely fucking REFUSE to be passed over for another on my nightstand. They just scream and cajole and coo until I'm done with them. It's probably unhealthy.I love Ellroy's use of period slang. You don't have political pull, you have juice; you don't wear a gun, you wear a heater; you don't drive a stolen car, you drive a hot roller. Some other fun terms I learned were hophead, rape-o, rebop, sawbuck and roundheeled. The dialogue and writing is musical and smart and completely offensive in a very blase way. He may have had fun indulging in the completely un-PC array of epithets, slurs and insults but I never got the feeling that he used them just for shock value or the hell of it; it seems very true-to-life. It's no secret that the LAPD back then consisted of a vast majority of WASP dudes and thusly they would have been racist as fuck, misogynist and just generally caustic as they are portrayed in these pages. And these dudes are bad men; even the white knight of the story still engages in unarguably illegal acts of questionable ethics. They're horrible, but you can't help but keep your eyes glued to their stories and even, yes, occasionally root for them.This book is the perfect sequel: bigger, better, meaner, faster and more filling than the first, building on the first entry's strengths with every page. If Black Dahlia was an uncomfortably close flyover of Ellroy's postwar L.A. cesspit, The Big Nowhere is a full on cannonball into the filth, grime and dessicated corpses, and one that I happily drowned in for 400 superseedy pages, rushing out and grabbing L.A. Confidential before I had even finished it. The last like 100 pages is a gripping series of curtains being pulled back to reveal the heart beneath layer after layer of plot. And once you get to the bottom...damn. I can't even describe how drained I felt after finishing this. Ellroy pulls tight the myriad perplexing threads with a master's hand. The series continues to be a grand literary tour of the murky netherworld of postwar L.A; its streets, its people, its landmarks, its history. Read it! But start with Black Dahlia.
—Nate
Detective stories are about bringing order to the universe. The genre doesn't start with Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, it starts with Sherlock Holmes, applying logic and reason to the unknown and unsettling. There's a hint of darkness even in the most basic version of the formula- our good detective never stops the Bad from happening, he arrives too late every single time- but by the end of the story he knows what happened and why, and justice is served. Later arrivals to the genre saw the opportunity and chipped away at the happy ending. Sometimes not everything is okay at the end. Sometimes the hero pays a price that goes beyond what is right or fair. But the protagonist doesn't usually come away empty handed. Usually, he (for a long time it's always a "he") gets to leave things at least a little better than he found them. Almost always, he at least comes away knowing what happened, and gets to find out in a way that reinforces the idea that it was possible to figure it out, after all. And at the very least, he gets to set himself in opposition to the evil around him. He gets to draw the line. He gets to be the good guy.For many reasons (the ironic consequences of the moral rules early movies were made to follow, a dependence on visuals, atmosphere, and personality that made it okay for the plots to not always make perfect sense anymore, or just the times when the movies were made), film noir, as opposed to just noir, chipped away at many of these assumptions. The shadows got deeper, motivations got murkier, the world got stranger. And the hero was not only necessarily the hero, he also couldn't count on winning anymore, in any sense.Which brings us to James Ellroy. He doesn't do things exactly the same way each time, but the patterns are telling. There's not usually one protagonist. Usually, there's three. Three is an important number. A solo main character can at least count on not catching a bullet until the last few pages. Two characters will wind towards being allies or being enemies. With three characters, we get to see each member of the trinity from at least two different perspectives. We don't know how the unstable molecule they form will shake out when the heat gets turned up. And we go into the story knowing that we could lose any one of the guys at any moment, and the world will keep on turning.They're not good guys. Ellroy strips his characters of anonymity and privacy, and let's us see the bugs squirming under the rock. They're caught in the grip of forces so much more powerful than they are that they probably can't save themselves, let alone anybody else. And to the extent that they get a glimpse of the events going on around them, it's only to mock the idea that their frail selves ever could've guessed at how complicated, weird, and bad things really are.None of his books are perfect (I might actually give this one four stars purely on it's own merits), but watching him chase down all the loose threads of his world view is fascinating and disturbing in a way that makes me with I could squish both words together like they do in German. I'll single out this one for being the first appearance of Mr. Dudley Smith, who might be the best and scariest bad guy I've ever read. Imagine if Satan were a staunch patriot and not too hung up on prestige. Then finish the book, knowing there's plenty more of him waiting for you. Good stuff.
—Brendan Detzner
