I tried, God knows I tried. No seriously, I worked hard for this book. I was confused about what the hell was happening, so first I read a couple of critics reviews, just to confirm that I wasn't the only one struggling. I then read through the character list and plot summary of American Tabloid (it's been about five years), just to make sense of who was who. And then, at the end of each chapter, I stopped to reflect to make sure I had actually taken in what I had just read. But, I couldn't tolerate it. I just couldn't see the point.

Reasons not to read The Cold Six Thousand:
1) I'm sick of Elroy's staccato writing style. It was snappy and edgy in American Tabloid, but it just felt clinical and disinterested here.
2) I struggled with the lack of insight into characters' motivations. We knew all about actions, but almost never about WHY characters acted.
3) After reading My Dark Places, and about The Hilicker Curse, I'm generally a bit grossed out by James Elroy and his perversions.
4) I'm not terribly down with the specifics of 1960s American history, and so prefer not to have my learning of it coloured by right-wing conspiracies and fictionalised characters
5) Lastly, normally, the desire to know what happens would be a strong driver to motivate me to finish a book I'm not loving. However, as this one is based in some incredibly well-known history, I already know what happens!

Permission to abandon granted!

Interesting but not near as good as American Tabloid.

★★½

Difficile da digerire. Piatto, monotono e con una prosa troppo frammentata e frenetica quasi priva di sintassi.

Rimane comunque un romanzo di Ellroy, per cui gli ingranaggi nella trama scattano e rendono le ultime 100 pagine una vera bomba. Rispetto ad "American tabloid", questo libro è ancora più spietato e amaro.

Ellroy mostra un affresco di un grande incubo americano dove tutto è deciso dall'FBI del folle Hoover, una frangia della CIA e la mafia. La storia americana dimostra che chiunque si schieri apertamente contro questi poteri forti finisce ammazzato.

I was wondering if I would ever get sick of James Ellroy’s depraved, vile look back on the criminal world of 1960s USA. After finishing The Cold Six-Thousand, the answer is yes. After American Tabloid, the goal with this book seemed to out-do its predecessor on every front: the hyper-staccato prose, the enormous web of conspiracy, the racism, and the racism. The problem is that American Tabloid already pushed this type of storytelling to its limit. The Cold Six-Thousand crosses the line. It’s bloated, over-the-top even by Ellroy’s standards, and directionless.

Following from the immediate aftermath of the first book, The Cold Six-Thousand follows series newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr. and returning characters Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. Ellroy’s signature machine gun prose still puts the book at a breakneck pace as we follow their journey from the fallout of JFK’s assassination in 1963 up to MLK and RFK in 1968. But while the pace of the prose is dizzying, the actual plot is a frustrating combination of agonizingly slow sections where multiple chapters span the course of a day to months of time flying by in less than five pages. At nearly 700 pages, this is the longest book between the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy by a significant margin, and it really, really did not need to be this long. Trying to capture everything that was happening in the 5 year timespan this book takes place in was a huge mistake and doesn’t give a clear climactic point that everything is building towards like American Tabloid. The coverup of JFK’s assassination and the characters’ involvement doesn’t flow well into the heroin trade out of Vietnam to fuel gun runs to Cuba and push drugs on the black population of Las Vegas, which I still don’t really understand how this worked for Howard Hughes’ purchase of Vegas Casinos and what the organized crime rings were getting out of it, and almost none of this really had anything to do with MLK and RFK’s assassinations. In fact, the main characters had so little connection with the assassinations that the majority of the setup was done via recorded conversations exclusively between side characters and news headlines.

The arcs for the three POV characters are just not all that satisfying to follow either. Wayne’s descent into being a super racist like his father stems entirely from the brutal murder of his wife by a black man that he let live in Dallas, who had no reason to even come back to kill his wife in Vegas, and Wayne’s relationship with her was already shown to be something he doesn’t really care about anyway with the way he voyeurs after his stepmother and ignores her for the entire time she’s on the page. Ward’s pathetic attempt at redemption was muddled with how much time he spent just going through the motions of managing all of the schemes of everyone he’s involved with. And Pete’s just kinda there.

James Ellroy always soaked the language of his books in the era of history they take place in. Racism, homophobia, and violent disdain for anyone remotely left of Nazi has always been commonplace. But Ellroy gets really enthusiastic about it here, making puns out of racial slurs and replacing c with k in reference to the KKK. Sometimes it feels like it’s an insight into the personality of the POV characters, but oftentimes it just feels like Ellroy really wants to be Quentin Tarantino and just drop n-bombs twenty times in a paragraph for the sake of it.

Reading this book was frustrating. A lot of what made the previous books in this criminal underworld series so good is still here. Real historical figures and events are woven in with the fictional characters that I had to google some names just to make sure I knew what was real or not. Each POV character had a pretty distinct personality that was conveyed through the prose, and little phrases would sometimes show up in other POV’s chapters as a way of showing how they influence each other. The unapologetic bluntness of the descriptions of hatred and violence are so sickeningly believable. But these elements without a compelling plot and characters to bind them ring hollow.

American Tabloid ends with Pete Bourdant watching Barbara do a rendition of "Unchained Melody" in some Dallas lunchtime geek joint on a particularly historical November morning in 1963. The novel ends with Pete watching and waiting for the screams to start.

The Cold Six Thousand picks up earlier that morning with a new character Wayne Tedrow Jr. flying from Vegas to Dallas to hunt down a black (sorry I can't bring myself to use a more PC term nor can I bring myself to put the N word in the review, although it works better to capture the whole feeling of the book) pimp and kill him for shiving a mobbed up black jack dealer. He discovers on landing in Dallas that JFK is dead and by a series of collusions Wayne passes from being a cop being used for mob justice to an agent in capital H History.

The reader never sees Kennedy get it.

American Tabloid is a lot of things, but one could say that it's the story of why Kennedy gets it in Dallas. I'd say this is only a minor point to the book, and American Tabloid is really not a historical novel at all, but an American Tragedy in the classical sense of the term Tragedy. This Tragedy continues in The Cold Six Thousand.

The first novel is the killing of JFK. The second is dealing with the aftermath.

At the center of both novels are a bunch of morally suspect men. They are Right-Wingers, Hate Mongers, Conservatives, Dope Runners, Extortionists, they are Mobbed Up, Klanned Up, Feds and Mercenaries. None of them are nice people, or people one would want to have any sympathy for. On the surface they are all evil people, doing very awful and violent things, but in a murky gray area where one feels like they can't be flat out condemned. Like the characters on the TV show The Wire there are no real good guys and bad guys here, but an ever shifting landscape of personality, where the people transcend beyond a cookie cutter image and take on a complex reality.

These are some amazing characters.

At the heart of the first two novels (and probably the third), is a conservative presence trying to hold back the tide of progress. They are grasping for a time that maybe never even existed before the first book starts in the late 1950's. The Mob trying to reclaim their casinos in Cuba and harking back to a time when the government turned a blind eye to them, before RFK got a big fucking hard-on for them. Hoover and Howard Hughes trying to hold back the progress of equality, and dreaming of a white old boys country. The various actors in the drama, with their own pet projects, their own dreams and schemes that they are willing to do anything to see succeed. This assorted brand of reactionaries ironically can be seen as the agents of progress, the people who in their attempts to freeze the clock of time are pushing the hands forward faster.

How much of this story is true? I have no idea. Ellroy is convincing in his grand totalizing vision of the era, and while it's convincing to me, it's not necessarily a vision of history that one wants. If Ellroy is telling the truth, than what we know as contemporary America has been built on the grounds of a moral abyss and only the continued reactionary manufacturing of illusions of truth keep the whole fucking thing from collapsing upon itself.

I've rambled enough. If you want to read this as a review, then I recommend you read this fucking book.

To be fair: 'American Tabloid' was Ellroy's best novel, and the sequels had little chance of topping it. With 'The Cold Six Thousand', he picks up right where he left off: the assassination of JFK, orchestrated by a group of gangsters, mercenaries, and CIA hardcases, pissed off over the bloody and embarrassing 'Bay of Pigs' fiasco.



This time the bullseye is on Martin Luther King, as he makes enemies that include a Mormon power-broker and 'Company' connected tough guys selling heroin smuggled in from the ready-to-blow jungles of Southeast Asia, to be sold exclusively to black ghettos. And it's all TRUE. Is it? No, of course not. It's fiction. But... there's truth at the heart of it. Even if Pete Bondurant never existed, someone a lot like him did. Hell, 'American Tabloid' felt like fucking non-fiction.

I'm not someone who buys into conspiracy theories, but nevertheless: Oswald was a CIA asset, Jack Ruby was connected to the mafia, and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't looked closely enough, or they don't want to believe it. This is a story that requires entertaining some ugly possibilities about very important people. It's another dark excursion into the gutters of American history, with Ellroy once again displaying his mastery of stories so vast and complicated, he might be the only writer capable of pulling it off. He manages to beat his prose into something even leaner and denser; it's ugly as hell, and heavier than Osmium.



There are no 'good guys' in Ellroy's America. Even national icons like Kennedy and King are unable to avoid the ever-present cynicism, tainted by the poison Ellroy finds bubbling forth from every crack in the sidewalk. This time out, however, the pace begins to slow; Ellroy seems undaunted by the Osmium-heavy narrative, even as the repetition and pointlessness of the violence and hatred becomes exhausting. It certainly doesn't top 'American Tabloid', but it's still Ellroy in fine form, creating fiction that feels dangerous and true.

P.S.: I remember reading an interview with Ellroy after The Cold Six Thousand was released, and he said he was writing a novel set during the Civil War. I'm pretty sure I didn't dream that. I thought at the time that it seemed so unlikely it was almost ridiculous. And after the 'Underworld' trilogy wrapped up, he wrote 'Perfidia'... settling back in to the well-worn Ellroy beat of 1940's LA. No Civil War novel. Maybe he was joking. He'd have to abandon that style he's been using for the last quarter century, and I'm not sure he can.

Then again, Elmore Leonard used to move back and forth between Crime and Westerns. The two genres have a lot in common; tough men making hard choices, shooting each other and whatnot. I'll read that Civil War story if it ever turns up, just to gawk at the freak a while, and see what such a creature might look like; but I'm sick of that prose, and the poison dribbling from every sentence fragment. There was some ugly-ass shit going on in the 1960's, but I think a modern-day version of Underworld would be even uglier. As someone who's read most of Ellroy's oeuvre, I feel confident saying that many of the toxins in the Underworld trilogy are Ellroy's own brew. The 'dark places' being charted are indistinguishable from the author's. And... I like it when writers say pretty things, or even better, say nasty things in a pretty way. I haven't read anything by Ellroy in years, and his newest book hasn't made it onto my shelves. The thought of reading 'Perfidia' just doesn't appeal to me. He's still an author I like and respect, but at some point in the last few years, I unconsciously bumped him from 'the list'. That whittled down prose... 'Perfidia' might be nothing but bullet points. Or short hand.

Allow me to pat myself on the back a few times for finishing this novel. I made a firm decision to finish at least one of James Ellroy’s novels after I saw him giving a rather provoking speech here in Amsterdam a few years ago. I think that Ellroy likes to shoot sentences from his hip like a shotgun and he certainly succeeds in doing that. I cannot say that I find four words sentences very attractive and they are getting really tiresome after a few hundred pages, but I must admit that they do convey action. Well, Mr. Ellroy, if you are annoyed at me if you would happen to read this review, I would like to remind you of your really rude greeting of the Amsterdam audience. Not that I did not have to grin at your totally inappropriate address and acting like a provocateur throughout, but perhaps 98% of the audience could not appreciate it. I am sure that you have a big following of dedictated readers and I think I can understand that, but your books are not for me.

James Ellroy is the only musician I listen to works in words. Amazing writing!

"I'm seeing visions, Dwight. I'm seeing all the Latter-day Saints."
― James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand



I remember when I was 5, thinking: "if I just didn't screw up, I could have been Jesus". I remember when I was 8, thinking: "if I just killed myself when I was 7, I could have gone straight to Heaven." I remember when I was 12, thinking: "Mormons could make fantastic mobsters." I hadn't yet learned about the John Birch society. I hand't learned about Howard Hughes and his cabal of Mormon fix-it men. I was still fresh. I was still a long way from the darkness bred from hate, from money, from greed, from racism.

Pete said, "Shut Up." Pete Said, "Smile more and hate less."

Like American Tabloid, 'The Cold Six Thousands' deals intimately with the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and the pornography of violence that was the 60s. Now, post JFK assassination, we are dropped into the clean-up, the rise of Las Vegas, the rise of Vietnam, RFK (I share a first and middle name with that man), and MLK. This is another dense novel where the story is told from the middle; from the dark, dank core of conspiracy. Two of the main protagonists traveled from 'American Tabloid'. One was left behind, buried. A new one was introduced. Mormons in Vegas and with Hughes take on a larger role.



I could write a whole book on the Oedipal implications of this novel too. The relationship between Wayne Tedrow, Jr and Sr., could fill an entire psychology textbook. It was a plum fermenting on the Tree of Life. There was some sick shit mixed into all of that. My favorite characters Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant find themselves firmly planted in this book. A trinity of femmes fatale (Jane, Barb, Janice) jump, jive, and swirl like olives jumping from Ward's martini to Pete's martini to Jr's martini.

"Hate Strong. Hate brave. Don't hate like Mr. Hoover."

Probably the only thing I didn't enjoy about this book as much as the last was the prose.* It was a bit too clipped, heavy and fugly for me. Like all of Ellroy's prose there is a bit of a madman, a bit of a savage, stuffed into every clipped, dense sentence, but after a while, I was dreaming of long sentences and sunshine; just a bit of variety. I somehow imagine Ellroy thinking that writing four word sentences was, perhaps, the only way he was going to trim this second novel down by 1000 pages. It is dense. It is rapid. It is rabid. It is almost too much. One more killing. One more spike. One more mike and I might drop dead before I find out who dies other than America. And like all the characters in this sick-mother of a novel, I want to be there to watch. I want to see it framed. I want to hear the crunch and the crack of the very last page.

* "The style I developed for The Cold Six Thousand is a direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards. It was appropriate for that book, and that book only, because it's the 1960s. It's largely the story of reactionaries in America during that time, largely a novel of racism and thus the racial invective, and the overall bluntness and ugliness of the language."
― James Ellroy, The Onion A.V. Club

While this book is not even close to the scope and depth of American Tabloid, it is still a good read.

(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.

Man, what a wild ride. This one picks up where American Tabloid ended. Fast paced, the unique writing style in these book takes a while to get used to, but the story is fantastic.