Women as a series of pulp fictions

Louis Nowra in The Australian December 04, 2010

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
By James Ellroy
William Heinemann, 203pp, A$32.95

AMERICAN crime writing has had some noble practitioners, none more so than Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who created lasting characters such as Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Nick and Nora of the Thin Man.

They wrote well, especially Chandler, whose graceful style was backed up by stunning metaphors and sharp observations: "Los Angeles is a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup."

If Chandler and Hammett attained critical respectability, later crime writers such as Jim Thompson languished in the garish rubbish dump of pulp fiction. In a way this helped them. Thompson could write without being morally judged or having his subject matter censored. Novels such as Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me are some of the most frightening and insidious portraits of the psychopathic mind. No highbrow publisher would have touched them.

If anyone has taken the baton from Thompson it is James Ellroy, who in novels such as American Tabloid (1995) combined Thompson's paranoiac view of the world with a vision of America sinking in a miasma of corruption, political conspiracies and moral emptiness.

However, unlike Thompson, whose prose was simple and direct, Ellroy pushed past the boundaries of grammar and sense. His sentences are sometimes without a verb or consist merely of one word. At times the lonely nouns and verbs seem lost in a fog of incoherence. It's a pulpy mixture of cod Hemingway, The National Enquirer and Mickey Spillane interspersed with anachronistic jive talk. As a prose style it might be summed up as baroque tabloid. The stories are driven by a sense of male hysteria.

Ellroy's new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, concerns the women in his life and, of course, he returns, as he always does, to the most horrific thing that happened to him when he was a boy.

In 1958, when he was 10, his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, was murdered. The killer was never caught. Emotionally unable to deal with this hideous event he transferred his feelings to another murderer victim, this time Elizabeth Short, known to crime fans as the Black Dahlia. Ellroy believes the trauma of his mother's death was a curse, one that manifested in his attitude towards women. This book is an attempt at exorcising his dismal relationships with them.
Read the full review in The Australian.