The second in Ellroy's still unfinished trilogy, Cold picks up right where American Tabloid leaves off -- the Kennedy Assassination. All the same elements are in place -- the sleazy underworld who, in Ellory's world, are in charge of everything, the pulpy lowlifes, and caustically cynical worldview that leaves zero room for optimism. Here, Ellroy offers his unique take on the RFK and MLK assassinations. But it cuts deeper than American Tabloid. There are more double-crosses, more moral crises and a broader canvas at work. And as always -- Ellroy layers sentence after sentence into an intricate story that defies easy description.

Fucking awesome.

Similarly to White Jazz, this is Elroy’s staccato prose on steroids. It always takes around 100 pages to get used to. The sentences are Spartan, often a few words, but as with all his other novels I’ve read, when the plot really kicks into gear, it’s as engrossing as any crime fiction available. An American tragedy plays out twice infront of our eyes and the late 1960s are portrayed as perhaps the most tumultuous period in American history

Ellroy's take on the LBJ years focuses on CIA-sponsored heroin smuggling from Laos and Vietnam, and the COINTELPRO operations against Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin. As with American Tabloid, it's not strictly historically accurate, but it's probably closer to the truth than most of us would like to admit. It's a compelling pulp history, and it makes for compulsive reading (or in my case, listening. Craig Wasson does a great job narrating the audiobook).

That said, this is definitely weaker than American Tabloid, and probably weaker than the L.A. Quartet as well. Ellroy loses control of the telegraphic prose technique he used more judiciously in his previous novels, leading to entire pages filled with "See Dick Run. Run, Dick. Run."-style sentences. The cumulative effect is more exhausting than it is hard-boiled.

There's also a problem of structure. Much of the story is about the surviving operators from American Tabloid getting manipulated and outwitted by the even bigger and meaner operators in the FBI and the CIA. It's a smart story arc that captures the feel of the country getting out of control as we barrel towards 1968, but it also requires our protagonists to be largely absent from much of the book's back half. The story, then, is carried by transcripts of long, expository conversations between J. Edgar Hoover and minor characters. New character Wayne Tedrow is more unpleasant than he is compelling, making me miss the slyly opportunistic Kemper Boyd from American Tabloid.

*3.5 Stars*

n  n    "You never know when you might rub shoulders with history."n  n

Well here it is, the book that ends my 5-star streak with James Ellroy's books. But it's definitely not a bad book, just not as impressively crafted as the others and much more difficult to read.

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all assassinated within five years, all by lone gunmen who all claimed to not be the only ones involved. Coincidence? James Ellroy thinks not, and just as in the stellar n  American Tabloidn, he deconstructs the turbulent 1960's and rewrites his own version of American history during that time, leading up to the deaths of RFK and MLK. Picking up immediately after the JFK assassination at the end of Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand follows our characters cleaning up after the killing that has shaken the country to its core and they struggle to define their roles in the history being made. Pete Bondurant dedicates himself to staying useful and to mending his fraying relationship to the Mob and the CIA, dreaming of rekindling his Anti-Communist glory days that led up to the Cuban crisis, while Ward Littell uses all the skills he's learned from Kemper Boyd, dangerously juggling alliances with everyone from the Mob, Howard Hughes, the FBI, and the Civil Rights movement, and at the same time feeling increasing guilt with his role in a rising number of conspiracies. Debuting into this mess is Wayne Tedrow Jr., a Las Vegas cop struggling to avoid following in his racist father's footsteps, but tragic circumstances allow him to embrace the darkness within. And looming over everything is J. Edgar Hoover, the Emperor Palpatine of the Ellroy galaxy, increasingly unhinged, crafting conspiracies from behind a desk, wire-tapping every room in the country, struggling to make the country great again.

One of the things that made me fall in love with Ellroy's work is his ability to pull together an immense encyclopedia of material and, through the use of some black magic, craft these tight tales and characters that are engaging and fully memorable. And though his past five masterpieces that I've read haven't been short, this is the first of his work that I actually think is too long. And Ellroy takes his prose-style to the extreme here and that doesn't help. It's exhausting and many times tedious, and there are whole parts that I don't think were all that necessary; the Vietnam storyline in particular didn't really amount to much or affect much of anything. I wish that Ellroy spent less time on that and more time really fleshing out the character arcs, which weren't as finely tuned as in his previous novels. I wanted to feel the conflict in Ward Littell more as he feels the pull of the Left even though he tries so hard to be part of the Right. His story could've been the most fascinating. I wanted to further explore Wayne Junior's acceptance and rationalization of his racism. While all of these ideas were great, I just wish they were fleshed out more.

But the book is still an Ellroy book and like most of his work, it's an epic that stands out in a crowded field of fiction. There are times when the declarative sentence style really shines, as in a chapter where Littell witnesses firsthand the horrors that haunt the civil rights movement. It was also great catching up with old characters from previous books, or witnessing infamous history from a different perspective, like the JFK assassination clean-up, Sonny Liston's alleged Outfit ties, the plots to discredit Dr. King, or the recruitment of both Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray. There were times when the book hovered around 4 and a half stars, but alas I have to settle on a 3.5. Hopefully the next book I read from him is back to the A-quality I've come to expect!

Tightly drawn characters battling for some crude sense of justice and sanity in a world where the world turns a deaf ear to depravity as long as it's on the side of the Law. These later works, though, seem marred by Ellroy's rush to become almost as caricature of himself.

(3.5) Among the many things I blame the Trump administration for, I can now include “being cynical enough to read and not hate a James Ellroy novel.” I wasn’t a fan of American Tabloid when I read it almost six years ago and attempts to get back into Ellroy have failed. But this time did the trick. I doubt this book is much better than its predecessor but I was in a mood to read it in a way I wasn’t before. It held my interest from beginning to end and I’m gonna miss it a little. Ellroy plays with the contextual impressions of historical events for the sake of narrative and that made me dock the book a star. But there’s an underlying sense of humanity here buried under layers of blood and white hoods that I didn’t detect when I read AT. The motivations for some characters were more realized. Or again, maybe that’s just the Trump Era cynic in me talking.

Loved the plot, but man, that telegraphic prose is getting on my nerves. "He was frazzled. Fried. Frappeed. He friended me on myspace."

I read that Ellroy was using this style to echo the frenzied, frenetic pace of the late '60s, but at times he sounds like a bad beat poet.

“Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”

Firstly I should point out that this book is the sequel of "American Tabloid" regarded by many as the basis to the cult movie Pulp Fiction.However, as I can attest, it can be read as a stand alone.

''The Cold Six Thousand,'' depicts an American political underbelly teeming with conspiracy and crime as seen through the eyes of three mid-level operatives: Ward Littell, an F.B.I. agent turned mob lawyer; Pete Bondurant, a hired killer and racket operator; and Wayne Tedrow Jr., a Las Vegas policeman and son of a crooked union leader cum casino owner in the city. The novel begins a few minutes after President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and follows its characters as they become embroiled with the burgeoning civil rights movement, the Las Vegas gambling industry and the Vietnamese opium trade, and ends with the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The F.B.I., the Ku Klux Klan, the C.I.A., Cuban political expatriates, J.Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes to name but a few also make an appearance and at some time or other the three main characters will end up working for or with each of these entities -- sometimes several of them at once.

This novel will not teach anybody anything new about any of the events that take place throughout, instead it leans very heavily on the side of the conspiracy theories of the time. It is richly peppered with scenes of violence although this rarely if ever gets gratuitous and plenty of what is no doubt regarded as gangster slang of the time. Many of the sentences are only two or three words long and many are repeated tabloid style yet my copy of this novel is nearly 700 pages long so is a pretty hefty tome.

Now to me the length rather than being it's strength is it's weakness. The tale is just too far reaching and I must admit that on more than one occasion I was tempted to throw in the towel with it however, I did soldier on and complete it. Personally I would have preferred Ellroy concentrated on one historical event rather than so many. Nor did I really find the three main characters with their somewhat convoluted and entwined alliances that convincing, this was particularly true of that of Ward Littell. In the end I felt that it was OK but reads like the author's pet hobby-horse rather than a true work of fiction IMHO and ultimately was left frustrated instead of enlightened by it.

Is it just me or is this the choppiest Ellroy novel yet? While that clipped style worked very well for me in White Jazz and--to my astonishment--even better in American Tabloid, I found Cold Six to be straddling almost Dick and Jane-like syntactical territory so often, it is almost sinful--makes Hemingway look like Henry James.
Despite this griping, I found myself mesmerized by longish passages in the book which give me pause to wonder if we do not have an epic poem in crime-novel disguise on our hands in this series. I suppose Blood's a Rover will help me to decide.

Continues the panoramic saga of '60's America from the assassination of JFK through that of RFK with many of the same characters from "American Tabloid." Some of the memos, headlines, and records of conversations begin to get old and seem forced.

Audible version. Another great production of a great book. Ellroy was in his stride with this series as it blends real events with fictionalised characters. Dark in places but also with humour.