CRIME WAVE

Remember, dear readers, you heard it here first, off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.

With these words, the seedy and the shiny sides of L.A. reel out of the typewriter of the low-life scandal sheet editor in the movie L.A. Confidential.

Being the author of the hit-novel-turned-even-bigger-hit-movie is that for which James Ellroy is most celebrated. A sort of Raymond Chandler of the 90s, with a prose accordingly jacked up and acidified to match these less enchanted times, Ellroy is one of the most respected crime writers today to sling out stories ripped from the underside of American history. His heroes and villains crawl through dark worlds of dirty secrets but secrets which are paradoxically laid bare to a piercing, raking intellect. The subtext of the scandal sheet is that nothing is secret; everything can be known.

Crime Wave, a collection of reportage and short fiction, mixes truth and fiction without blinking. Ellroy investigates the unsolved murder of his mother, trying to make sense of the event that has determined the course of his life. He follows real-life L.A. Sheriff's Department Homicide men through their daily crime-ridden routines. He takes the O.J. Simpson trial as a launch pad for an insightful analysis of L.A. And he spices it all with two alliteratively lunatic novellas set on the tainted side of Hollywood's golden age. All in all, there is nothing particularly new about Crime Wave in Ellroy's career.

What is shocking this time around is the juxtaposition of reportage and fiction, creating a creepy sense of disjuncture in the collection. Ellroy has never been one to be bashful. One can read his memoir My Dark Places to get the full story on how he whored, drank and drugged most of his youth away. He readily talks about his heady days of breaking into houses on the other side of the track to sniff rich women's panties. Candor is not a surprise to anyone familiar with his work.

Ellroy's prose is hard-hitting and relentless. His self-revelations are just as unflinching. From the non-fiction side of the book, "I hated and lusted for my mother and went at her through postmortem surrogates. I buried her in haste and burned flames for other murdered women. My mother's death corrupted and emboldened my imagination....I majored in crime and minored in vivisected women." It becomes difficult,

almost cruel, to enjoy the no-nonsensecertainty of the prose in the fiction when, justthe page before, one sees the near-necrophilictendency which powers his writing.

Crime Waveis strewn with corpses-realcorpses, decaying corpses, missing corpses,decaying corpses, missing corpses, suspectedcorpses, celebrity corpse. If only they were alljust real or imaginary. If imaginary, they exert asort of gruesome grip on our appetite for thesafely distant world of violent crime. If real,they shed light on the fascinating method andmotivation of a major writer. Together, they makea hodge-podg

almost cruel, to enjoy the no-nonsensecertainty of the prose in the fiction when, justthe page before, one sees the near-necrophilictendency which powers his writing.

Crime Waveis strewn with corpses-realcorpses, decaying corpses, missing corpses,decaying corpses, missing corpses, suspectedcorpses, celebrity corpse. If only they were alljust real or imaginary. If imaginary, they exert asort of gruesome grip on our appetite for thesafely distant world of violent crime. If real,they shed light on the fascinating method andmotivation of a major writer. Together, they makea hodge-podg