A FEW YEARS AGO, JAMES ELLROY picked up a copy of Libra, Don DeLillo's 1988 fictional meditation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At the time, Ellroy was a writer with a growing cult reputation; his crime novels, set in his native Los Angeles--The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential--had shown up on paperback best-seller lists and inspired much chatter among mystery fans: here was a guy who had pushed the genre way, way past hardboiled, into the realm of the terminally scalded. Ellroy seemed set on a path toward at least a shot at the ambition he had brashly revealed to interviewers who began seeking him out: "I want to be known as the greatest crime novelist who ever lived!"
But something about Libra unsettled Ellroy. It was too good. DeLillo's imagined journeys into the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, among others, had an eerie density and plausibility that Ellroy admired and did not want to emulate. "When I finished the book," he remembers, "I said, 'Now I can never write about that subject.' "
This thought immediately proved intolerable. How could the greatest crime-novelist-in-waiting be denied the subject of the greatest crime? The answer struck Ellroy as simple: he couldn't and wouldn't. "I said, 'Wait a minute. I can write an epic in which the assassination is only one crime in a long series of crimes. I can write a novel of collusion about the unsung leg breakers of history. I can do a tabloid sewer crawl through the private nightmare of public policy.' "
Hence, American Tabloid (Knopf; 576 pages; $25). One month after publication, the novel is in its fourth printing and is creeping up the best-seller lists. It has attracted favorable, though sometimes nervous, reviews, understandably so. Recommending a book like American Tabloid--and there is no other book quite like American Tabloid-is most safely done to close friends, whose tastes and tolerances are familiar. Where do they stand on wall-to-wall violence? What is their position on over-the-top sleaze and the reduction of nearly all human conduct to the narrow, insistent lust of self-interest? Pushing such stuff to total strangers could get a person arrested.
If so, bring in the stenographer for a full confession. At a time when storytelling has largely been ceded to film-makers--when Pulp Fiction causes more chatter than pulp fiction--American Tabloid is a big, boisterous, rude and shameless reminder of why reading can be so engrossing and so much fun. The secret, of course, is language. When it is used well-which in Ellroy's case means being pared down to taut, telegraphic sentences, subject-verb-blooey!-one word is worth a thousand pictures.
The mayhem begins in 1958, unfolding through the eyes and deeds of three men in their early 40s who have not yet learned that they are out-and-out psychopaths. Pete Bondurant is a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff who now works for Howard Hughes; Pete's duties include overseeing the staffing of Hush-Hush, a scandal rag Hughes has bought for titillation and political smears, plus procuring drugs for and keeping process servers away from his billionaire boss. One day Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, who is being hounded by the Senate's McClellan committee and chief counsel Robert Kennedy, calls to offer Pete $10,000 to kill a man in Miami.