My previous Ellroy experience was with his Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood's A Rover), which chronicled the seedy underbelly of the late '50s through early '70s, mixing real and fictional characters to great effect. LA Confidential, an earlier work and part of his "LA Quartet," has many of the same exciting elements: a telegraphic style, gutter sensibilities, and abuse of power that goes to the top. It even loosely fictionalizes an infamous LA police brutality incident of the '50s, Bloody Christmas.

But where Underworld USA was bound more closely to historical events (and had to keep things running for a trilogy), LA Confidential doesn't have any such restraints and so feels free to blow the whole thing up in the final act. If anything, Ellroy is a little too maximalist in the tightness of his plotting, not including a single element that won't later be paid off. There are no sideways jags here, even though they may seem as much midway through.

That plotting, though, wow. Ellroy shares Pynchon's love of conspiracies, but where Pynchon's conspiracies sort of exist in a deliberate "maybe or maybe not" fuzz of confusion, Ellroy pays his off to satisfying ends. The only real analogy I can make to the totalizing effect of his conspiracies is watching The Wire, only amped up to 11. (The film adaptation, excellent in its own right, is like 10% of what's going on in the novel.)

Anyways, an astonishing book. Ellroy's American Tabloid is still my pick for bonafide "Great American Novel" status but damn does this book show up to the competition.