"Excel stood up. 'A question before you go.' 'Sir?' 'Did a friend tell you to push Sanderline Johnson out the window?' 'No, sir. But aren't you glad he jumped?'"Carhop's, mutilated dogs, bagmen, incestuous thoughts and acts, kickbacks, police informants, shakedowns, strikebreakers, conyinuous shows of force... This is the world that Lieutenant David D. Klein is held, and in some cases participates in as well. Lt. Klein is the commander of the LAPD's Administrative Vice division, he has six men from Internal Affairs working under him and one trusted partner George 'Junior' Stemmons. One side note is that Klein is also an accredited attorney which he exhibits at various times throughout the book in times when professionalism is in question or as a getaway hatch when in precarious situations.To say things are on the shady side in 1958 Los Angeles would be a gross misuse of the word shady. The Los Angeles Police Department is as bent as their K9 companion German Shepherd's back leg and it is difficult to decipher who is doing what, And to whom?The initial focus of the story is on the work behind the scenes in severing the ties that organized crime has to the boxing industry. In doing so Klein shows how his professional and personal life is one big conflict of interest as he ends up killing a federal witness that he is by rule, required to protect. You soon understand that Klein had to consider outside work in order to compensate for his law degree. He did so by participating in mob hits which earned him the nickname "The Enforcer", buying real estate with his sister Meg and becoming slum lords, tax evasion, property transactions and kickbacks, and bribary. Now that he has climbed the ranks at the police department he realizes that getting out is easier said than done. Knowing that he can't escape his mob ties, he has been forced to maneuver his way around it, and by maneuver I mean kill people that are standing in his way from freedom. What turns everything on its head is when Klein is directed by the Captain of the Narcotics Division to investigate a buglary of a known family, and gets a side job from Howard Hughes (yes, the American aviation business tycoon Howard Hughes), to follow a young starlet named Glenda Bledsoe to see if she is in breach of contract. Soon Klein will realize that he is being pulled in many different directions by very powerful figures in the city and it finally is catching up with him. He will have to make a decision on what is most important in his life or he will be burning the candle at both ends leaving his life and the lives of his loved ones hanging in the balance. "I never said I knew; she never pressed me. Biographies, gaps: I hid Meg, she bypassed whoring. I never said I kill people. I never said Lucille K. made me a voyeur. She said I used people up. She said I only bet on rigged games. She said ranking cop/lawyer put some distance on white trash. She said I never got burned. I said three out of four - not bad." I found James Ellroy's White Jazz to be too busy. Between inside jobs, outside jobs, inside-outside jobs, outside-inside jobs, shakedowns, the plethora of characters, and not to mention the dialogue it was hard to keep up. I really believe that I would have enjoyed this story if it weren't for the convaluted nature of the story. I didn't find my groove until about fifty pages in when the plot started to reveal itself and things began to settle down. I hope it wasn't due to me not reading the earlier books because that has never been a problem that occurred to me before, and I don't believe the author would punish me in that way. I didn't read L.A. Confidential, but I saw the movie and thoroughly enjoyed the brutality and the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department combined with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.Honestly Mr.Ellroy seemed much more interesting in the interviews that I read to get a better feel for what he is, than he did in this book. I believe he let the style of the story get ahead of his writing ability which inhibited my personal troubles with comprehension and overall enjoyment. As crazy as it sounds, if he would have let his natural delivery take hold, I believe the novel would have taken on an even more coarse tone than White Jazz did. In one interview he proclaimed himself to be the 'best crime writer in history', he also mentions that Dashiell Hammett is essentially a God of crime writing and Raymond Chandler is vastly overrated. While I can't agree or disagree with him on any of his claims, I can definitely see Hammett's influence while looking back at White Jazz. The narrative of White Jazz is one long, non-functioning stream of consciousness that went from tolerable to intolerable at the drop of a hat (or turn of a screw however you want to look at it). I enjoyed certain aspects of the story, and I believe the author can deliver the nasty that I love about books like this, but in the end White Jazz just didn't sing. " Rattle rattle - I shoved Moms some change. 'Listen, have you ever seen the man staying in this room?' 'Praise Jehovah, I seen him from the back.' 'Have you ever seen him with someone else?' 'Praise Jehovah, no I hasn't.' 'When was the last time you saw the girl in my photographs?' 'Praise Jehovah, when she did that striptease at Bido's maybe four, or five days ago.' 'When was the last time she brought a trick to this front room here?' 'Praise Jehovah, maybe a week ago.' 'Where does she solicit her tricks?' 'Praise Jehovah, I don't know.' 'Has she brought the same man more than once? Does she have regular tricks?' 'Praise Jehovah, I has taught myself not to look at the faces of these sinners.' "
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.
What do You think about White Jazz (2001)?
Too much like Twitter... Ellroy's feted L.A. Quartet ends on its only damp squib; to qualify that, it's a James Ellroy "damp squib" so it's still searing and packs enough wallop to leave you giddy. That said, there's something perfunctory about much of its gargantuan archness, and the telegraphic style seems born of frustration or impatience rather than anything else, Ellroy apparently ascribes it to an issue regarding the size of the original draft needing to be cut down... I don't really consider it an asset, many times it even takes us out of the moment.Ellroy would go on to blow minds with his incendiary Underworld USA trilogy, even then though the "See Spot Run, Run Spot Run" sentence structure was irritating, perhaps reaching it's nadir with The Cold Six Thousand before returning to more muscular forms of prose with Blood's A Rover (and then back to L.A. with Perfidia).White Jazz is by some distance the least of the Quartet, it has a fuller and more mature story than Black Dahlia but is nowhere near as compelling, and anyone (daftly) hoping for closure is not going to find it. I suspect I'd have liked it more had it not been preceded by the mighty The Big Nowhere and L.A Confidential, though...
—Steve
“White Jazz – Noites Brancas”, publicado inicialmente em 1992, é o último livro do L. A. Quartet, juntamente com “A Dália Negra”, “The Big Nowhere” e L. A. Confidential. Li estes três livros, amplamente divulgados, no início dos anos 90 e confesso que passados estes anos não consigo ter uma avaliação “detalhada” para determinar qual o melhor. Mas numa análise exclusiva a “White Jazz – Noites Brancas” tenho a “sensação” de ser claramente um dos melhores livros do referido quarteto (?). James Ellroy introduz-nos o tenente David Klein da polícia de Los Angeles, com segredos profundos enterrados no seu passado e ligações perigosas ao submundo do crime organizado. A corrupção e a justiça “pela sua próprias mãos” determinam um modo de acção que fazem de David Klein, com a alcunha de “o Executante”, um policial implacável, sanguinário e sem escrúpulos.As primeiras 100 páginas do livro revelam a habitual complexidade, tão característica do estilo e da escrita do Ellroy, na “apresentação” dos personagens, alguns “constantes” nos anteriores livros do L. A. Quartet. Assim, o tenente David Klein é destacado para investigar um assalto a uma casa da família Kafesjian, dedicada ao narcotráfico encapotada pelo negócio de uma cadeia de lavandarias e sob protecção da Divisão de Narcóticos da polícia de Los Angeles. À excepção de dois cães mortos, esventrados e sem olhos, não há outras vítimas.Neste contexto vão surgindo várias histórias, ora paralelas ora complementares, que acompanham o desenrolar da acção, que tem como pano de fundo a década dos anos 50 e uma cidade Los Angeles repleta de corrupção, jogos políticos e violência sem limites. “White Jazz – Noites Brancas” é um excelente policial “noir” que evidencia a escrita magistral e complexa de James Ellroy, que exige concentração e disponibilidade intelectual, para acompanharmos o desenrolar da acção, com uma violência sem limites e descrição das cenas de uma forma “fotográfica” e cinematográfica.
—João Carlos
I gave up on this book one third of the way through.I loved the first three books in the LA Quartet, but in this one Ellroy's staccato, cop slang writing style was just too hard to follow, given that the plot is so convoluted and the protagonist so unlikeable. (I think White Jazz refers to Ellroy's writing style more than anything else.)A few days after putting the book down I can't even really remember what the plot was shaping up to be. The narrator isn't a cop. He's a lawyer/bagman poking around in some dark shit involving a drug dealer with conflicting mob and LAPD connections, a prowler who likes mutilating dogs and a prostitute. Dudley Smith was presumably somewhere in the background pulling strings... it might have improved in the middle, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to stick around.
—Simon Lewis
