"They sent him to Dallas to kill a ***** pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn't sure he could do it"

So stars The Cold Six Thousand. Pick up where American Tabloid finished. Tough compelling and brutal. The problem this book has is that everyone who reads and leaves a review of this book has already read American Tabloid. Which is terrific and is about one of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century. This is still a great book. Just as good. Its about the aftermath and cant possibly have the same impact. I think people at taking a star of because the period covered isn't quite as intriging . Take a star off history, not this book.
Every one comments on the writing style. The short staccato sentences. You get used to it. You get hooked on it. Its an extraordinary achievement. A novel without adjectives. Its a novel in bullet points. Its brutal. Straight to the point. Serves a purpose. Gives it a detached documentary feel. This is superlative stuff.

Another breathtaking, snarled novel by Ellroy, filled with phenomenally unlikeable people doing despicable things, and you can't stop reading it. Starts with the Kennedy assassination in Dallas and goes on to police corruption in Vegas, the mob, Cuba, the start of the war in Vietnam, sexual shenanigans, racism and the civil rights movement, Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes, in other words, every damn thing that happened in 1963 and '64... I love this dirty poetry, so for an extra treat, I'm listening to it on tape.

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.

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.

Not quite as compelling as part one of the trilogy which dealt with the JFK assassination. This follows the same characters in the years leading up to the Dr King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, both of which the characters are involved with. Elroy though isn't as convincing that he knows the backstage logistics of these killings as he was with JFK. Once again we get an America governed by the Mafia and rogue CIA agents with Hoover as insane hate-filled puppet master.

WARNING: reading more than 50 pages of this book after a six hour Marathon Final Fantasy Crisis Core, finishing The Catcher in the Rye and watching a crappy Bruce Willis movie may result in total and absolute psychological melt down… that being said I’ma go put on my aluminum foil hat and protect my cake flour cuz I know them aliens want it!!!

*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!

This one gets the full-on review because I wrote one up a few years back in an attempt to understand whether I liked the book. I'm a big Ellroy fan, but the moral stance he takes in this novel is complex, and I had to think it through. I end up siding with him, if you don't want the whole thing. Or, if you have a few minutes:

James Ellroy’s novel The Cold Six Thousand, is an addictively compelling story driven almost exclusively by morally repugnant characters. The characters in Ellroy’s police novels, particularly his Los Angeles quartet, often commit seemingly irredeemable deeds yet by book’s end somehow find redemption. In his more recent works Ellroy’s writing enters the world of big-time politics and redemption is no longer offered as a possibility. Ellroy once wrote about serial sex murderers and the obsessive cops who chased them, propelled by despair tinged with the tiniest drop of optimism; it is only now, writing of deeds sanctioned by the United States government, that Ellroy has written a tragedy of worldly proportions.

The Cold Six Thousand is Ellroy’s take on the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. The book’s primary characters are mercenaries motivated more by the action than by the money, men whose complexities are revealed in three and four word sentences, a spare style that delivers its brutal story sans adjective overkill.

Although it is a common theme in tragedy for the main character to be either an exemplification of evil or battling with that exemplification, Ellroy here stakes out ground in which the evil is all relative; none of his characters are “good,” and although some are better than others, the Nietzschean question is whether good is to be measured by power or by a morality less tangible.

The answer to this question is left to the reader. For the immorality—the danger—is not in Ellroy’s writing, which portrays brute, underground aspects of modern America. The danger is that his audience may be so numbed, so inured to cruelty and violence, that we fail to judge these characters. But people who live as though they are beyond morality are not simply amoral. They are immoral, misguided savages living by their own set of savage rules. Torture, after all, originated with ‘civilized’ man.

Ellroy’s is a fictionalized history, but it is a plausible fiction. His main characters are employed by the Mafia, the government, or both: agencies policed only by themselves and each other. Ellroy does not distinguish organized crime from the CIA and FBI; he puts them all out there, weaves them together, and dares us to disbelieve him. And because what the public knows of these organizations is shrouded in secrecy, knowledge often becoming public only when a cover-up fails, it is easy to accept Ellroy’s fictions as truths. We know that however horrible the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys, the world contains people who hated those men, and some of those who hated may well have not only ordered but enjoyed and celebrated their murders.

Ellroy does not judge. He mires the reader in page after page of blood and torture and souls willingly lost, men who will give up whatever goodness they may have once possessed in order to do battle with their demons. Ellroy’s characters do not make conscious decisions, except regarding the achievement of their own desires. They are animals, oblivious to their capabilities for rational decisions. They live in fear, and the little humanity that remains for them is in the hate they use to defeat that fear. And in that they cannot succeed, for the means becomes the end, and it is here that indeed Ellroy appears finally to pass judgment. For his troubled characters cannot find peace, instead settling for revenge or their own violent ends. And if there are exceptions, and someone survives at the cost of his soul, it is probably due to nothing more than a profound belief that the world is an evil place. It is a world portrayed brilliantly in The Cold Six Thousand. It is a world that must be fought, but in Ellroy’s horrifying vision there is little hope of victory.

‘The Cold Six Thousand’ is a dark, cynical, angry, violent book, full of terrible people doing terrible things.

It picks up precisely where ‘American Tabloid’ left off, and drags the characters from that novel, plus some new faces, through the post-JFK mid to late-60s: Vietnam, drugs, organised crime, civil rights, and the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations.

The language is incredibly violent: violently racist, violently misogynistic, violently violent. It’s got a very unusual, staccato style; Ellroy’s sentences bark at you. The average sentence length is about four or five words, subject verb object, and descriptive language is kept to a bare minimum, often just a few words interspersed with forward slashes. It takes some getting used to, but it does match the tone of the novel. It’s thick with slang, the most offensive words and imagery imaginable, and a huge cast of characters.

It’s occasionally difficult to keep track of who’s doing what and why, and especially what people’s motivations are (since so many of the characters are lying to each other and conspiring against each other anyway), so the authorial device Ellroy sometimes employs of interspersing the main first-person chapters with verbatim phone conversations and letters (most of which involve the loathsome J Edgar Hoover) are very helpful. The main chapters sequentially take the viewpoint of each of the three main characters, rotating between them – but tend to be more about what they’re doing than what they’re thinking and feeling. When we do find what they’re thinking and feeling, we usually wish we didn’t.

In ‘American Tabloid’ you got the sense of these dark, criminal, shady characters actively shaping history - here, they seem much more in the grasp of forces they can’t control. Whenever anyone briefly tries to do the right thing, they’re brutally punished for it. If the real 60s were anything like this world portrayed by Ellroy, it’s a wonder anyone survived it or ever had any hope at all.

For me American Tabloid is a stone cold masterpiece, and I much preferred that to this; despite the fact that the staccato prose I've gotten use to is ever present (even more so here I'd say), certain characters returning, and the story just carrying on from where American Tabloid ended. Things to like certainly is the mix of actual events and real like figures along side the fictional ones, and when it's good it's really good, and despite thinking it tool long and not as engrossing as American Tabloid it's still a hell of a lot better that the best of most other historical crime fiction writers, so four stars for the things I really liked about it.

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.

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.