James Ellroy Confidential

James Ellroy is barking. He is sitting in an upscale restaurant in midtown Manhattan, lampooning John F. Kennedy for his "two minute" sex romps and bragging about his own bullterrier's sex drive when a woman at a neighboring table looks over disapprovingly. So he barks at her. And at the waiter, and at the coat-check girl. Laughing, he barks all the way out onto the street.

Ellroy likes to shock. If you like him that way, fine. If not, he couldn't care less. His new novel, The Cold Six Thousand, uses one of America's most toxic racial epithets right up front. "There's a reason I used that word in the first sentence. I'm warning people: You want a nice book about the '60s, stop right here. You want to know what really happened--read on."

While shooting down a triple espresso--"I need the kick start"--and looking for all the world like James Joyce buffed up on steroids, Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abattoir with the volume turned up. Kennedy? "Jack got what he deserved. He got whacked before the sex got stale and everyone saw him for what he was." Clinton? "I hate him with a biblical passion. He is monstrous and shallow, a cold, manipulative man with a warm front, infantile with women...I would never have done Monica." American innocence? "This preposterous notion that Americans are innocent when this country is based on land grabs, slavery and slaughter of indigenous people. Are you insane?"

He doesn't do innocence. But he does bad guys really well. Having made his name as the latter-day master of noir with books on L.A. cops, murderers and assorted lowlifes

Although his canvas has expanded, the perspective from which Ellroy views humanity has not. "I discovered politics is crime writ large," says the man who writes off J.F.K.'s assassination as "a business- dispute killing." And he found a new bete noire on the national stage: J. Edgar Hoover, the shadowy FBI director with a basketful of hatreds. "It was the horror of the abuse of power by Hoover and the fact that he went after Martin Luther King--and that King was the one guy he couldn't break--that's what interested me," says Ellroy. In high school Ellroy deliberately shocked others with pro-Hitler views, but he now professes great admiration for King, and argues that underneath it all, both American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are "deeply moral books. If you show there was a nexus of racism in America which led to the death of arguably the greatest American of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, you are expositing racism on the page. And literature is the explanation of reality through incident."

The defining incident in Ellroy's life was the murder of his mother when he was 10 years old, an event that has appeared in several of his books. In 1996 Ellroy took time off from his fiction to write My Dark Places, a factual account of his attempt to find his mother's killer 38 years after the fact. He hired a detective and reinvestigated thousands of old leads. They did not find the killer, but Ellroy is not disappointed. "I suspect part of the whole dynamic of Jean Hilliker Ellroy and me is that I'm not going to know and I'm not meant to know ... Closure is bulls___--it's not worth anything." Far from burying the demons that had haunted him since childhood, the exercise brought him to "a level of maturity and of erotic intensity that I think The Cold Six Thousand shows. I couldn't have got there if I hadn't gone snout to snout with my mother's death."

The journey into his mother's past made him more reflective. His instinct now, he says, is to write more "explicative books. My characters are getting older, thinking more about what it all means. I won't go back to writing crime novels." He is already planning his next novel, which will continue the politics-as-crime theme through Nixon and the Vietnam War and up to Watergate. He hopes to have it finished in 2 1/2 years, completing what he calls "the Underworld U.S.A." trilogy. He also has a book in mind about Warren Harding's presidency and "the rumors that some of his family was black."

Ellroy lives a quiet life in Kansas City, Kans., with his wife Helen Knode, "whom I love more than my life and would happily die for," and his bullterrier Dudley, which chases female joggers through his neighborhood. After years in a drug and alcohol haze, he takes care of his health, eating well and working out regularly. At 53, he says, he is still "10 years from the top of my game." He travels tirelessly around the world to promote his books as they come out, then returns to his six-bedroom house in Kansas City--to think. "I've got a den there where I can call epiphanies on."

Epiphanies come in assorted shades of darkness for Ellroy. His critics call him a crazed voice of violent depravity. But Ellroy, like his bullterrier alter ego, cares little for the analysis. Ellroy just barks.