James Ellroy walked onstage Saturday in teal slacks, a bubble gum pink button-up and white Converse sneakers, motioning for the L.A. Times Festival of Books audience to keep up its roar of applause greeting him and his interviewer, crime novelist Michael Connelly.
Friday night at the 43rd L.A. Times Book Prizes, Ellroy received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, and Connelly kicked off the discussion by asking Ellroy how he felt about it. “It was the most significant and pertinent award I’ve ever received,” Ellroy told the crowd at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.
“Widespread Panic” is Ellroy’s latest crime novel, and Connelly said it’s his best.
The book follows Freddy Otash, a real-life Los Angeles Police officer, private eye, Hollywood fixer and head goon for Confidential magazine through 1950s Hollywood. Ellroy researched the book more than 30 years ago with Otash himself.
Ellroy said he humanized Otash for “Widespread Panic” but still described the man as the “evil godfather of the TMZ scandal rag era.”
“He was a freelance extortionist and had hotel suites hot-wired all over the city. He had the dirt, the skank, the skinny — and it was all true,” Ellroy said. “Freddy was in his heart a chicken, he was charmless, he was brutal.”
For Ellroy, the old saying of “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” does not apply. Ellroy talked at great length about his love for all things Los Angeles, especially the LAPD, and his hate for the late Raymond Chandler, James Dean, cancel culture, the film adaption of “L.A. Confidential” and his complete disinterest in literature that isn’t about crime or that’s written outside of America.
“Raymond Chandler is full of [crap],” he said. “He wrote the man he wanted to be. I hate Chandler.”
“People love the movie ‘L.A. Confidential,’” Ellroy said. “I think it’s turkey of the highest form. I think Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger are impotent. The director [Curtis Hanson] died, so now I can disparage the movie.”
Ellroy on his own reading habits: “I’ve read almost no work by non-American writers,” he said. “What can I say, I’m the American Dostoevsky and I’ve never read the guy.”
Ellroy continued that he didn’t care about St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s (“Crime and Punishment”) and that, for him, “it’s gotta be Los Angeles, it’s gotta be about my love for the Los Angeles Police Department.”
In more expletive-laden language, Ellroy said he loves a tough police department. “I love the LAPD, and they kicked my tall skinny [butt] on three notable occasions,” he said. “I have not stolen so much as a paper clip in 53 years. My relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department is in no way P.C., it’s in no way current, it’s in no way topical. It’s loving, It’s paternal.”
When an audience member asked Ellroy what he thought of cancel culture, the “Black Dahlia” author quipped, “I think it’s a bunch of [crap]. I think you can’t let fear run your life. I think censorship is permeating, soul destroying and polluting our country.”
It’s fairly well-known among crime novel connoisseurs that Ellroy’s fixation on crime stemmed from the 1958 rape and murder of his mother, when he was 10 years old. He worked with the LAPD for 15 months investigating the case, which still remains unsolved, and used the experience when penning his 1996 memoir, “My Dark Places.”
When it was time for the Q&A, an audience member asked Ellroy about the murder of his mother and what he would say to her if she were here today. “She’s not here,” he snapped.
“We weren’t close. I don’t think about my mother’s death much anymore.”
Connelly offered some levity to the awkward exchange, with a joke about closure being stuffed where the sun don’t shine, and Ellroy started to stroke the air, miming masturbation, and said, “Yeah I got your closure swingin’ 12 inches right here.”
