A review by takumo_n
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

5.0

The spanish version of the title "El Gran Desierto (The Big Desert)" doesn't really have much to do with the novel. 99% of the plot happens in the city, and the Big Nowhere refers to the empty spaces trying to figure out why psychopaths do the things they do, or the silence between a big jazz soliloquy. Maybe the translators didn't read the thing. Anyhow, this book is about three cops in 50s´ Los Angeles, a captain Mal Considine who sees an oportunity to become a big shot in the bureau by going against communist infiltration in Hollywood while dealing with a divorce lawsuit (which his going up the ladder in his job will help), taking with him an ex cop problem solver for Howard Hughes and a mob guy "Buzz" Meeks while taking the girl of the mob guy, and Danny Upshaw a brilliant young detective who is also investigating a series of psychosexual crimes with queer undertones. The plot thickens the moment the two investigations start crossing one another. Every criminal witness and "good guy" is interesting, from their motives to their psychological underpinnings. Ellroy is absolutely brutal with his characters, he doesn't let them take a breath throughout the whole novel. And with clear muscly and 50s´ LA idiomatic prose the pace is relentless.

Cliché shouters, sloganeers, fashion-conscious pseudoidealists. Locusts attacking social causes with the wrong information and bogus solutions, their one legit gripe - the Sleepy Lagoon case - almost blown through guilt by association: fellow travelers soliciting actual Party members for picketing and leaflet distribution, nearly discrediting everything the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee said and did. Hollywood writers and actors and hangers-on spouting cheap trauma, Pinko platitudes and guilt over raking in big money during the Depression, then penancing the bucks out to spurious leftist causes

Sounds familiar?