James Ellroy, Perfidia, book review: The shock and awe of the author's propulsive vision remains visceral

There surely can’t be a more richly or brutally realised city in world literature than James Ellroy’s Los Angeles.

With his original LA Quartet, including The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, Ellroy threw out the rulebook of crime writing to create an immersive, dizzying kaleidoscope of corruption, deceit, conniving, and violence that left the reader punch-drunk and buzzing. He took that template to a wider political stage with his Underworld USA trilogy, but has now returned to the LA of his seediest, sweatiest nightmares with Perfidia, the first of a hugely ambitious Second LA Quartet that will act as a gigantic prequel to the first.

The action takes place in the city over the month of December 1941. The Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbour acts as the catalyst for everything, throwing the city, along with the rest of America, into a feverish war-rage. With America’s largest immigrant Japanese and Chinese populations, Los Angeles is ready to explode amid riots and random assaults, and the bait that leads the reader down the rabbit hole is a ritual suicide, or possible murder, of a Japanese family.

Dozens of characters from Ellroy’s other novels make appearances here, some more fleeting than others, but the central narrative is carried by four main players. “Whiskey Bill” Parker is an ambitious captain in the LAPD, struggling with alcoholism and brief bouts of Catholic guilt, while the irrepressible Sergeant Dudley Smith, hooked on opium and Benzedrine, swaggers around the city killing and beating indiscriminately, cutting deals any which way he can, and still finding time for a lurid affair with Bette Davis on the side.

These two struggle for control of the city amidst immigrant internments, land grabs, Japanese submarine threats, gang wars, pornography, eugenics, blackmail, and much more, while the American military and FBI loom over proceedings. Caught between them are a brilliant young forensic cop Hideo Ashida (the only Japanese person on the force) and leftist dilettante Kay Lake, recruited by Parker to infiltrate suspected fifth columnists amid Los Angeles’ high society.

As is the case in all Ellroy’s work there is no moral centre to Perfidia, no certainty of any kind. All the characters are always trying to play all the angles they can get away with, only very occasionally succumbing to quick pangs of conscience before diving down into the morass of the LA underbelly once more.

As the book progresses, the solving of the initial crime becomes less and less important, there is never any sense that anyone wants justice to be done, just that some characters would like to know the truth, so that they can use it against others.

The prose is still ultra-stripped back and punchy-jabby in the extreme, but Ellroy has retreated a little from the crazily condensed, almost code-like judder of his Underworld trilogy language. The shock and awe of Ellroy’s propulsive vision remains visceral, though, and reading him is about as physical as reading can get without being hit over the head by the book.

Perfidia By James Ellroy (William Heinemann £20)