THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH!
So says James Ellroy more than once in LAPD ’53, a slim new
volume of crime scene photographs from the L.A. Police Museum, with Ellroy providing
some tasty narrative spice.
It seems like a dream match – the self-proclaimed demon dog of American crime fiction,
paired up with scenes from America’s greatest crime town from a year that
featured, among other incidents, the murder of Mabel Monohan by Barbara Graham and two accomplices, a
heinous wrongdoing which inspired the film I
Want to Live!, where Susan Hayward won an Oscar. Of course, Hollywood turned the story of “Bloody
Babs” into a typical anti-death penalty weeper, with Hayward playing Graham as
an innocent. “Fuck that shit!!!,” writes
Ellroy. “Barbara Graham was a stone
junkie and a stone killer!!!! She deserved to fry!!!!!”
You get the idea. It’s that sort of book, with Ellroy
strutting his stuff and not looking back.
The LA police haven’t had a friend like Ellroy since the
glory days of Jack Webb and Dragnet.
He’s quite open about his love for the LA cops, and admits that he prefers the
company of cops to writers. I might
agree with him, for most of the writers I’ve met have lacked a certain
something. Then again, most of the cops
I’ve met have lacked a certain something, too.
So LAPD ’53 allows Ellroy to
wallow in his cop fetish, and this is
especially interesting since in 1953 the LA cops were tall, square-jawed
fellows who could’ve pulled weekend duty as Jack Kennedy’s bodyguards. One particular photo called “The Eagle”
focuses on a big blond cop poised on his idling motorcycle, looking out over
the new LA Freeway. In his bomber jacket
and boots he could be a Gestapo enforcer overlooking a vulnerable Jewish
village, but he’s a mere LA copper, “an
ardent proponent of the stern rule of law.”
Not surprisingly, Ellroy is at his best when the pic gives
him something specific to dig into, such as the one where a fellow has hanged
himself, but not before squeezing into a woman’s one piece bathing suit, a white bathing cap, and kinky white boots.
“Sexual identity horrifically asserted in death,” Ellroy notes. “The suicide
tableau for All-Fucking-Time. It’s artful. It’s ingenious. It bespeaks an unutterable
horror. The man could not take it one second longer. The man spent a full week
composing his own death.” The grim
suicide, the throat cutting, the body stuffed under a car’s backseat, give
Ellroy a target for his riffs. But some
of the crime scenes don’t give much on which Ellroy can reflect, so his mind
begins to wander. Ellroy’s idea of a
reverie is when he imagines himself as a five-year-old junkie, be-bopping in
some joint with Lenny Bruce. These
playful asides are distracting, and a bit jarring. And does Ellroy have to
mention his father’s schlong in every piece of autobiography he writes? Ellroy readers know what I’m talking
about. His old man’s tweaker appears in
Ellroy’s work as often as Mickey Cohen and the Black Dahlia.
Unfortunately, not
all of the subjects in LAPD ’53 are
as thought provoking as the dead dude in the bathing cap. A lot of them are
rather drab shots of police officers pointing to bullet holes. These shots don’t
give Ellroy much to work with, so he does a lot of vamping. And Theda Bara, he
aint. By page four, he has twice used the expression
“a snootful of jungle juice”. Were
Ellroy’s friends at the LAPD Museum so thrilled to have bestselling author
Ellroy working on their book that they let him do as he pleased, unedited and
unencumbered? The problem, or what
seemed to be a problem for me, is that Ellroy’s hyperkinetic writing style has degenerated
into “Ellroy shtick”. He’s like an old
Las Vegas stand-up comic who knows the audience has paid to hear the old stuff,
so he gives it to ‘em, gives it to ‘em goooood. It’s an easy day at the office. Jungle juice,
indeed.
Strangely, aside from a couple of mildly bloody scenes, the
pics feel polite and restrained. This,
according to Ellroy, was by design. “We’ve seen too many splatter shots with
artful disarray,” he writes, adding that
the pics in LAPD ’53 “seek to rebuke
crime scene chic.” Yet, by leaving out
the bloodier aspects of LA crime in that year, the book feels like a soft-pedal
of old Los Angeles, censored for family viewing. The truth is that violent scenes would’ve
totally overshadowed Ellroy’s essays.
Who wants to read Ellroy rhapsodizing about his hero, good ol’ LAPD
Chief “Whiskey Bill” Parker, when we could be looking at nasty crime pics, the
kind with hair on the wall and bits of skull on the ceiling? Who wants to be tasteful when we’re reading about
LA’s killer scum?
Still, there is at least one photo that burns into the
memory banks, and I wouldn’t have noticed it except for my habit of removing
the book jacket when I read a book. LAPD
’53 has a pic on the back inside cover of a young man with a flattop
haircut. He’s trying to affect a Robert
Mitchum glare, like he’s never given a damn about anything and wouldn’t know
how. But look closely, and you’ll see
that his left ear has been blown off.
It’s hanging from the side of his head like a hunk of cabbage. It’s startling. This is the image I want in a book like this,
not heroic cops “poised to righteously interdict and suppress.” Yet, it lurks hidden in the book’s rear car,
unmentioned by the superstar author, a smirking
hint of the book that could’ve been.
- Don Stradley
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