Ed jerked the trigger: once, twice—buckshot took off Coates' legs. Recoil—Ed braced against the doorway, aimed. Fontaine and Navarette stood up screaming; Ed SQUEEZED the trigger, blew them up in one spread. Recoil, a bad pull: half the back wall came down.
Blood spray thick—Ed stumbled, wiped his eyes.
—James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential
Two bald guys who are hung like mules take the stage. We're in a dark lounge in the Palms, it's noon on a Sunday, and one of these oldish guys is author James Ellroy, He's started the conversation the way readers of his crime novels would expect: Within two minutes of sitting down in the spotlight with fellow writer Bruce Wagner, he says something about the audience's drug habits, his and Wagner's genital likeness to mules, and tosses out a quick anecdote about how a doctor used a chain saw to give him a circumcision. There is mention of blood. It's fast and forward, unapologetic. Little old ladies in the audience don't flinch. No one really does. It's James Ellroy.
His most widely known story may be the mob-murder LA Confidential, turned into a feature film starring Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger. (When asked about the movie—as guest of a film fest, mind you—he says, "Books are profound. Movies are not.") But among readers, he's known as a viciously gifted stylist whose life and work are inspired by the unsolved 1958 murder of his mother in Los Angeles when he was 10. "My world view is informed by a dead woman," he tells the nearly full lounge of CineVegas attendees.
He once said that his terse, angry language in certain books, like LA Confidential, scared readers. You get the feeling he delights in that modus operandi. When asked what's the best thing about being a writer, he mentions his sprawling historical novels, American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and says, " You get to be the guy who elaborately recreates history. It's a benign megalomania."
Vegas turns up in his works on several occasions, such as in The Cold Six Thousand's look at the 1960s partly through a corrupt Vegas cop. Before writing it, he came to town in 1999 and took a tour of West Las Vegas—"a hellhole"—and got an Metro Police Department Historical Society fact packet. "And from that point, I made it up."
This summer, another of his books is being turned into a Hollywood movie. The Black Dahlia is being directed by Brian DePalma and stars Josh Hartnett and Mark Whalberg. Following that, he's writing a bio-movie about a mob lawyer.
In between projects, here at CineVegas, he sits on stage and makes devil-horns on his head with his fingers, quotes "pill-popping poetess supreme" Anne Sexton, and talks about death and mystery and internal agony with a lurid candor you can't get enough of.
Wait a minute—did he say he was writing about a mob lawyer?
A local in the audience asks if he'll be writing about Oscar Goodman, and Ellroy says, "I haven't the slightest idea who Oscar Goodman is." SQUEEZE.