Still good, but not as good as the opener of this trilogy "American Tabloid" (a must-read for crime fiction enthusiasts). Among one of the most racism-based books I have ever read, "The Cold Six Thousand" pulls no punches in showing the hatred White America had for the Outsider (whether it be African-Americans, Viet Cong, and Communists). It is written in short, quick pace that Ellroy said was specific to this book alone due to its storyline being set through the mid-60s. This format does make the book a bit more confusing. Sometimes I got lost between sentences due to repetitions or vague character actions. It is a "hip" book and does flow with the overall message, but even through this format it was a slower read than "American Tabloid" which had a similar yet slightly more descriptive form. The violence in this one is more shocking as it is all hate-based. Everyone is crooked and has a secret to hide (which is described as a prologue to "American Tabloid") and the worst of them are the higher ups (mainly J. Edgar Hoover and the Organized Crime Outfit run by Sam Giancana). Real characters mix with the fictional, with special attention to Hoover, Howard Hughes, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. which continues the conspiracy aspect explored in the first one and spices up the plot. Once again, the "three character" theme is used, with Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell returning. Instead of Cuba and Miami as central storyline areas, Las Vegas and Vietnam are now emphasized and a good chunk of time is spent there. The Civil Rights Movement and the RFK election provide a backdrop to the racist themes explored in America with the FBI, CIA and Mafia all playing a part in the puzzle. Not a bad book, but not as worthy as "American Tabloid." It does make me look forward to reading "Blood's a Rover," the concluding chapter in Ellroy's Underworld USA.

One of the book's strongest points is the long-range storyline involving the third character perspective, that of Wayne Tedrow Jr. His plotline is a solid gritty mystery storyline. A Las Vegas PD detective who receives a contract and $6,000 (the titular "cold six thousand") to kill a Black pimp who stabbed a blackjack dealer in Vegas sets up the better part of the story, as it runs through the entire book. Wayne does get involved in Ward's and Pete's business and both characters do mesh with Wayne's main plotline as well. It works as both mystery novel and conspiracy novel alike and does keep the book burning at a fast rate. Tedrow also has the best character study in the novel, much like Kemper Boyd in "American Tabloid" he goes through a range ideas and actions that prove to have very rash consequences. However, most of what he must go through is beyond his control, as his cold six thousand was more a commission than a choice.

Despite my praise of "American Tabloid" over this one I find it a worthy sequel.

2nd reading.

I regret to say, this was the first time JE left me somehow disappointed. Slow and hard to follow. Still, with flashes of his undisputed talent, as eg the end

In all fairness, I should confess that I only made it 100 pages in. But I pretty much never stop reading a book unless I'm really pretty miserable. In my opinion, Ellroy took his sparse, slang-soaked writing style a bit too far in this one. with the exception of the FBI "reports", there are no sentences longer than 6 words in the first 100 pages. I felt like the book was shooting the story at me with a semi-automatic weapon. I was able to adjust to his style in American Tabloid, but perhaps it wasn't quite so, well, SO? Or maybe I could better handle it then. But this time, no can do.

This trilogy presents something like a postmodern (L.-F.) Céline. If L.-F. came back to life in contemporary America, this is the sort of thing he might have written (I am talking, of course, about 'late' Céline -- Castle to Castle, etc.). It is very intense. Perhaps one has to be obsessed with the period/events to 'dig it' -- as I am.

Céline, of course, is more authentic -- Ellroy is fictionalizing far more. I'm sure Fred Otash (whom I now realize I sorta crossed paths with as a teenager -- so much for SIX degrees of separation...) surely didn't 'run' Sirhan or Jimmy Ray...

Nonetheless... this IS a postmodern epoch, and everything IS slightly inauthentic -- even... or *especially* what is billed as hyper-authentic.

Still -- a good (if not great -- it IS too long...) follow-up to American tabloid.

(Now on to 'Rover'....)

Secondo volume della cosiddetta “Underworld USA Triology“, Sei pezzi da mille è il seguito del bellissimo American Tabloid.

Il romanzo di James Ellroy, pubblicato nel 2001, riprende la narrazione esattamente da dove l’aveva lasciata: dall’omicidio di JFK. Kemper Boyd, protagonista del primo romanzo viene sostituito da Wayne Tedrow Jr, mentre ritroviamo i punti di vista del grosso franco-canadese Pete Boundurant e dell’avvocato ex agente FBI Ward Littell, insieme alle comunicazioni tra J.Edgar Hoover e i suoi sottoposti.

Un ritmo incalzante con frasi brevi e scarne ci condurranno attraverso gli anni della rivolta alla segregazione razziale e della Guerra in Vietnam di Lindon Johnson, segnate dalle ormai ricorrenti lotte di potere tra i gruppi di forza della politica americana: FBI, il miliardario Howard Huges, anticastristi cubani e Mafia.

Un libro perfettamente equilibrato tra fonti storiche e finzioni letterarie, che ritrae l’America non come la Statua della Libertà, ma come i vicoli maleodoranti di una metropoli sovraffollata che sfociano su viali perfettamente freschi e puliti.

E se siete arrivati fin qui, il prossimo, l’ultimo, non potete perdervelo: Il sangue è randagio.

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.

Fucking awesome.

This book, recommended by my roommate, is the second in a three-volume series reimagining some of the major events of the second half of the twentieth century in America: the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the assassinations of King and the Kennedy brothers--and, I suspect, events inclusive of Watergate in the third volume. The players are just the kind of CIA-, FBI-, Mafia-connected thugs often adduced (quite plausibly, I think) behind the aforementioned political assassinations. The atmosphere is dark, the action degenerate, often violent. The writing style is terse, few 'paragraphs' being longer than a couple of sentences.

I enjoyed both of the first two volumes because it was obvious that Ellroy had done some homework (although, oddly, he makes the Lebanese Christian Sirhan Sirhan an Arab Moslem) about matters of serious concern. However, they aren't for everyone. If you don't know about the world-historical background to his tale then you'll likely be confused. Hell, I know the material pretty well, lived through many of the events he describes, and I found parts of his narrative difficult. It is also rather difficult to believe in most of his main characters. Their immorality is absolutely stunning.

A book that tries to say a lot of things with sentences never longer than 5 words. Ellroy continues to rip the glossy veneer off the ‘60s with even more brutal force. The entire package feels less impactful than ‘American Tabloid’ but is a necessary step. The most interesting stuff here concerns the nature of hate, how it spreads, how it’s exercised, It’s habitual nature and its ultimate destructive power. This power is, of course, exemplified by the book doubling the assassinations.

n  Retire me. I'm stretched thin. It hurts to sleep. My hate life's a mess.n

(This review will assume you've read American Tabloid.)

The Cold Six Thousand is a jittery, ugly, brilliant, haunting, flawed, and unforgettable book, and the first thing you need to know about it is I used more commas writing this sentence than James Ellroy used in this entire novel. I just want to get that out of the way. I said that White Jazz's chopped-up style worked well as an expression of Dave Klein's paranoia and rapid consideration of all angles--it also worked well because White Jazz is comparatively short. The Cold Six Thousand is long, and Ellroy uses its style to indicate theme rather than characterization: the "declarative and ugly and right there" style and "bluntness and ugliness" of the reactionary movement he's writing about. I appreciate that and respect the thought that goes into it, but my admiration doesn't make it any easier to read it. It's a problem, but it's a problem you run into only when an artist is working at the edge of a literary form and therefore expanding it.

Our Ellroy trio: Wayne Tedrow, Jr., Las Vegas cop and son of right-wing hate-tract pamphleteer and all-around mover-and-shaker Wayne Tedrow, Sr. and returning guests Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. There's no way for me to talk about our trio without talking about a structural weakness of the book, which is that only Wayne's story feels like a story.

At the start of the novel, Wayne is paid the titular "cold six thousand" to go to Dallas and kill Wendell Durfee, a pimp who stabbed a blackjack dealer. His father wants him to do it in part because Durfee is black and Wayne, despite growing up in his father's house, just doesn't hate the way he's supposed to. But Wayne finds himself rapidly entangled with a corrupt cop and the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and he chooses to let Durfee go, a decision which will shape the rest of his life, as he walks, eyes open, further and further into the Life of mobsters, CIA heroin manufacturing in Vietnam, and the not-technically-authorized murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

n  "You're going to do things that you won't be able to live with."
"Maybe I have already."
"It gets worse. And you'll do worse things, just to prove you can take it."n

That's Wayne, who spends the novel discovering a lot of hate and a lot of violence within himself, and who it's impossible to look away from.

With all that going on, it's difficult to miss that Pete and Ward don't have that magnetic appeal here. With Pete, it's less of a problem, because Pete is a more static character. Loving and marrying Barb gave him something to lose in his pursuit of money and power, and it gave him a reason to maybe walk away, but it didn't change his nature: he's fundamentally an agreeable team-player willing to do evil if it benefits him. His story in The Cold Six Thousand is really the aftermath of a story: a long, long epilogue to American Tabloid. He's hungover on his dreams of Cuba. He's not sure if the Mob will forgive his theft. He's not sure Barb will stay with him now that she knows what he's capable of. He's tying up loose ends. You don't expect him to change, and he doesn't: he just gets older and tries to decide what he wants more, the corridors of illicit power or a stable life with Barb.

With Ward, the lack of story is a problem, because Ward's arc in American Tabloid from righteous, eager-to-prove-himself anti-Mob crusader to cold-blooded Mob lawyer to blackmailed and humbled Mob tool was flat-out brilliant. But Ellroy has nowhere new for him to go here, and so Ward ends up vacillating in a way that might be realistic but is definitely undramatic: he falls quickly in unmotivated love with a Kennedy assassination witness and renews his infatuation with Robert Kennedy and spends the whole novel spying on Martin Luther King and facilitating Howard Hughes's takeover of Vegas hotels (all as the Mob wishes) and having conflicting feelings about all of it that plunge him back into the same emotional territory he's already explored. He'd make a stunning supporting character, the way Ed Exley was in White Jazz: his best moments here are all like that, deft evocations of how much he changed over the course of the previous novel, from his early "frisky" rapport with J. Edgar Hoover (their phone calls are one of my favorite parts of the book) to him noting that his "best friend" gave him the scars on his face (not Kemper Boyd--RIP, favorite part of American Tabloid--but Pete Bondurant, the only real connection he has left, the man who once hated him so much he had to reluctantly settle for almost killing him rather than going all the way).

"We all went to school on Jack," Agent Dwight Holly observes at one point, and it's both a great line and an encapsulation of the problem with The Cold Six Thousand, which is that two-thirds of it are all the aftermath of Jack Kennedy's administration.

Nevertheless, this book has its own difficult charms. There may not be a better literary exploration of hatred around, and Ellroy's illumination of how hate underlines and supports so much of American political life is both awe-inspiring and unfortunately believable. It's not just Wayne going deeper and deeper into his newfound race hatred, it's also "hate smart," the KKK busts that target mail-fraud and let castrations slide, Chuck Rogers and his parents, Janice Tedrow and her cramps, the fake letter that goes out to MLK, and Hoover's rabid froth. It's hard to read, but it's also powerful, and equally powerful are the sections where Ellroy matter-of-factly shows that it's not even always hate: Vietnamese slaves work to process heroin for the CIA and the CIA lets them sell it, provided they're not selling it to whites, and the racism that keeps it all functioning isn't hate but sheer indifference and dehumanization. (It's also a lie, which is another Ellroy throughline: you can't escape or contain corruption. The dope gets out, and the pipeline for the money is leaky, too. Beautiful, loved-by-all Barb snorts heroin to try to deal with her husband's role in a war and business she hates; the CIA funds Castro instead of the Cuban resistance and siphons off money for luxury goods, too. Pete gets stunned by all of it, but you can't do evil and expect to control its consequences.)

So there you go: The Cold Six Thousand is a novel that's brilliant about some very ugly things, and that's brilliant about them in an ugly way. It's at its best when its plot is moving and its characters are acting ways that reveal the novel's themes, which unfortunately doesn't happen as much as it should. When it clicks, though, it makes for one of those spit-teeth-on-the-floor Ellroy-trademarked knockout punches.

On to Blood's a Rover.

(Bonus: I forgot to add a link to the Chuck Rogers episode of the excellent podcast Criminal.)

Interessantissimo ma la scrittura didascalica di Ellroy qui è esagerata e rovina un po' il piacere della lettura (ovviamente è un'opinione personale)