“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white*” -- nixon was a racist, red-baiting bastard. nixon was a paranoid insecure fuck who probably jacked it at night thinking about days spent bugging offices and launching latin american juntas. nixon said "make their economy scream" to 'the jew' (his term of affection for kissinger) as a means to destabilize Chile in order to insert an american-friendly right-wing dicktator. LBJ was cheating on Ladybird, stealing elections, calling out political enemies as commies fags or anti-americans, Gulf of Tonkin'ing as a means to escalation, forcing reporters to conduct interviews in the bathroom while he's taking a shit as a means of intimidation: 'wanna fuck with me? eat my ass fumes, cocksucker.'JFK was banging whores, starlets, singers, and secretaries. he's colluding with the mob to take down foreign leaders. he's running so much CIA blackops he makes Bush look like a friday night regular at Unicorn Alley.J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping the fuck outta EVERYONE. he's got bagmen working for the FBI, mucho shakedown and extortion, and a closet full of clothes my grandmom'd love to get her hands on. that's why mike davis' criticism that ellroy's world is too much a black hole of immorality doesn't hold. when we hear the words and catch wind of the actions (and these are the ones in the public eye! imagine what the behind-the-scenes scumbag was up to?) we get a sense of what was happening. davis contends that when things are so dark, so black, there's no contrast and everything's flattened. not so. when things are so dark it's like driving drunk: we're being overly careful so we're better at it. heh. in the dark we can see more.JFK, RFK, and MLK all assassinated within 5 years. all by lone gunmen. make sense? on the one hand. we feel that the cosmic balance is way off if a major figure such as JFK or MLK is taken down by some previously irrelevant asshole - it just feels wrong. history doesn't work that way -- some nothing, some peon, can't alter the stream like that, right? maybe. maybe the times created these assholes. maybe peons did and do alter the stream. maybe oswald worked alone but was really an agent of History. maybe oswald was our creation.on the other hand. it just can't have happened like that. fuck no. as ellroy's j. edgar hoover makes clear in both books, it all seemed to be moving toward a common point. it was inevitable. and it wasn't some random peon influenced by some vague 'Tide of History'. there was so much going on it had to happen. castro nationalizes the casinos and the mob is booted. they're in deep with the kennedys. joe's an ex-rum runner, joe bought w. virgina, joe's crooked and bought his boy the power. his boy: a humper, a stickman, a cuntman. 'get up on top, baby, i have a bad back' MLK incites the spooks, the shines, the smokes; RFK incites the kikes, pinkos, and the young. it's all happening and it's inevitable and it's growing and it's racist and hateful and brutal and hungry and never sated and devouring everything in service of what it is and what it knows and it keeps moving. it's still going. ellroy's the great american writer of our time and this trilogy, his 'american' trilogy, is shaping up to match (surpass?) what dos passos did with his 'american' trilogy. that is: offer one hell of a fun time while saying something very profound and disturbing about what america is. america? from american tabloid, the first volume of the trilogy: 'America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.' i first met james ellroy when i worked at the book store and he was doing a reading -- i asked if he wanted a drink and he told me rapid-fire that he'd been sober for years but could use six espressos. i laughed. he wasn't kidding: he wanted six espressos poured into one cup. i ran to Coffee Bean and got the order and ellroy gulped it down like water and launched into a tirade of alliterative and intellectual dementia focused mainly on the sleaziness of bill clinton and on his great love for pit bulls. words can't express. ellroy admitted he's upset he'll die in however many years only in that he won't have the time to gain proper distance from the clinton administration to write a book about it. i love this man. *a gem, but not even close to one of the best from the nixon tapes
American Tabloid was about criminals making history and culminated with the plot to kill Jack Kennedy. In The Cold Six Thousand, the characters aren't trying to make history, they're just trying to survive it.American Tabloid is one of my all-time favorite books. The second part of this trilogy has always been a bit of a disappointment to me. I read both again to prep for the release of the final book, Blood's A Rover. With that one sitting here, just waiting for me to start reading, I'm feeling a bit more charitable to this one now.I judged it harshly because after the mind blowing brilliance of American Tabloid's fictional re-telling of the JFK years from the perspective of a cop/criminal trio of Ellroy patented Bad White Men, anything was going to seem like a let down. Ellroy's crazy fragmented writing style works brilliantly when he keeps it on a leash like he did in L.A. Confidential or American Tabloid, but when it gets away from him, it slips into near self-parody, as I think it did in White Jazz. He comes dangerously close to that in this one, too.And while American Tabloid felt like an epic re-telling of American history during the JFK era, The Cold Six Thousand has always had a slightly grungier and grimmer tone. That's understandable since American Tabloid mirrored the JFK administration. Even the guys trying to scam and steal their way to greatness felt like they were making history as they did it.Here, with the fallout of the JFK assassination plot hanging over everything and coloring all the characters with varying degrees of paranoia and guilt, the schemes feel small-time and cheap, no matter how much money is involved or how grand the plot. Howard Hughes wants to buy every casino in Vegas, and the Mob is selling, provided they keep their own people in place to run their skim operations and steal crazy Howard blind. Vietnam is ramping up and everyone in the book sees it as a business opportunity to start large scale heroin smuggling operations to fund their own pet causes.An aging J. Edgar Hoover is obsessed with bringing down Martin Luther King Jr. for having the nerve to demand equal rights. All the players are worried about what Bobby Kennedy actually thinks about his brother's death and what he plans to do about it. Loose threads to the JFK plot are getting ruthlessly snipped and the only way to stay alive is to stay useful to the men in power which means that even the worst of them are being told to do things that push them to their limits and beyond.Adding to the grimmer tone of this one is the new guy, Wayne Tedrow Jr. He starts out as a relatively clean Vegas cop being pushed towards contract murder by his rich asshole father, who wants him to join the family business of peddling hate against anyone but white Americans. When Wayne is given cause to start hating too, it makes him one of Ellroy's most uncomfortable characters to read about. Wayne isn't an ignorant racist just hating for hate's own sake. He knows it's evil and wrong, but he's so committed to it that he practically creates his own purer form of racism that's scarier than the worst redneck rants. And he's one of the main characters so spending several hundred pages in his head isn't exactly a joy ride.But reading this one now, after some time has gone by after my initial disappointment, I think I've gotten a better idea of what Ellroy was going for. Here's hoping that he can finish off the '60s and wrap this up in style.
What do You think about The Cold Six Thousand (2002)?
I read the first third with so-so but hopeful interest and a mounting headache, then, unable to take anymore but still wanting to know what happens, I skimmed through to the last fourth and read that, which gave me the gist of the story and the outcomes for principal characters. There's a good novel here and a few great scenes, but Ellroy's hard-boiled style and signature staccato sentences mostly felt forced and routinely maddened; as my daughter used to say about frustrating reads: "This is making my eyes orange."As I've said before and will no doubt say again, American Tabloid is brilliant, but this one just did not engage or impress me. I think the difference, in a word, is finesse. Anything that's exceptionally well done, even the hard-boiled crime novel, is a matter of finesse. I started American Tabloid thinking, whoa!, what's going on, does this guy know what he's doing. And indeed he did. The first time you read Ellroy the rhythm takes some getting used to, but inside of 25 pages of American Tabloid I was following right along, never missing a beat. A few passages of Cold Six got me grooving, but never enough to sustain the momentum.
—Bennet
The hardest boiled of crime and detective writers turns to politics to cover the right wing underbelly of the sixties. Starting with White Jazz, Ellroy changed his writing to a more modernist, fast paced and chopped up narrative style, and it gets even more extreme as he progresses through the Underworld USA series. The series begins with American Tabloid, which covers the late 50s up through the Bay of Pigs to the JFK assassination, twisting in every conspiracy theory into a believable narrative. The Cold Six Thousand is even better, taking off from the day JFK is shot and goes to RFK's assassination. The plot weaves a tapesty of collusion between the mob, the FBI & the CIA, with Howard Hughes and Joe Kennedy being arch enemies behind the scenes, and J. Edgar Hoover being an evil genius between them. Likeable mob hit men, CIA heroin running from Viet Nam, bribes to Nixon and the setting up of the MLK & RFK assassination are all part of the compelling story. For any one who loves conspiracy theories about the political assassinations of the sixties, this book is essential. Often violent and breath taking, it moves along at the pace of a automatic in a gun fight, yet has more depth than your typical crime story. It's so compelling and believable, it made me go back and check some of the historical background behind the fiction.
—David Batten
This is the 2nd book in a planned 3 part series that began with American Tabloid. 6K picks up exactly where AT began (late November, 1963 in Dallas). The only difference between books is that Ellroy seems to have run out of innovative plot and moved to a machine gun form of storytelling. 7 out of 10 sentences are no longer than 3 words a piece. Many are shorter. or Most. Are. Shorter. The main characters of Ward Littell, Pete B and Wayne Jr. Hoover is back for more as is Hughes, who Ellroy hysterically portrays. MLK and RFK find there way into the novel as well. I would recommend this book to anyone who liked American Tabloid, but if you don't find yourself enjoying it to the same extent as AT, don't sweat it and put it down.
—Ira
