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Blood's a Rover (Underworld USA #3)

3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 · rating details · 1,797 ratings · 241 reviews

Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it. The incendiary standalone sequel to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand—a massive tale of corruption and retribution, conspiracy and cover-up.

It is summer, 1968. The country is exploding. We are running point with three men: a Klan-raised, Yale-educated FBI agent infiltrating black-militant groups at J. Edgar Hoover’

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Published by Century (first published September 22nd 2009)

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Aug 03, 2009 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

barreling down the 101 in a '63 impala, psychojazz squawking outta busted speakers, sucking hard at a bottle of beam, poppin' dexies every few miles, truckstop whore's got your cock in her mouth, spots and stars and sunbursts all over the sky, the road, the windshield, and yer mainlining speedballing ramrodding straight through american history -- "everything looks different" "then maybe it is" -- and this is it in all its nastiness and it just ain't ever gonna stop. beam dripping all down your...more barreling down the 101 in a '63 impala, psychojazz squawking outta busted speakers, sucking hard at a bottle of beam, poppin' dexies every few miles, truckstop whore's got your cock in her mouth, spots and stars and sunbursts all over the sky, the road, the windshield, and yer mainlining speedballing ramrodding straight through american history -- "everything looks different" "then maybe it is" -- and this is it in all its nastiness and it just ain't ever gonna stop. beam dripping all down your shirt, runnin' low on whites, jizz all over her chin and history is formed forged and foisted on us by the wicked.

i.f. stone: 'history is a tragedy, not a melodrama'
james joyce: 'history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake'

after all the wars and lies and coups and assassinations, we are left with myths of nobility and virtue and honor. heh heh. blood's a rover ('clay lies still, but blood's a rover') is different than the two which preceded it in that we are at the end of the game and the proverbial 'cracked eggs' make up the whole damn omelette.

fuck the spics in guatemala if we want their bananas we take them. fuck the spics in chile if we don't like the results of a free election we'll take it. fuck the niggers in africa if we don't like what their leader says we kill him. and fuck the sandniggers in iraq. and the ones in iran. all the sandnigger dune-coon towelhead cameljockey motherfuckers are really the same sandnigger dune-coon towelhead cameljockey motherfuckers whether you spell it with a 'q' or an 'n' - and shit, the kikes are no different:

law #17: 'the more alike two peoples are the more they hate one another'.
law #24: 'the more arid ugly and horrible a piece of land is, the fiercer they'll fight for it.'

but it's a testament to something, really, that the united states of america is as free as it is. and it is free despite the cries of the far left. and it is free despite the tactics of the far right. and despite 'it', despite that quasi-mystical thing (give it a name: human folly or History or pure motherfucking satanic juju or military-industrial fuckoff) there is some reason, some conglomeration of reasons that we, here in america, move along in a predominately forward-moving fashion; that the niggers of yesterday are presidents of today and that matthew shepard is remembered years later and that the two largest groupings of people i've seen in my lifetime assembled to protest the war in iraq and to express rage at a bill that fears boys kissing boys. we are a nation whose citizens poll higher in favor of torture than china's (it's the evangelicals) and a nation which believes that free medical coverage for all her citizenry is a pandora's box of financial ruin and socialism, yes, but we're moving forward. old school imperialism is nearly discredited and racism isn't hip and the internet doesn't allow politicians to freely stab away at intern gash and secretary snatch and this is, by and large, a good thing. we're miles away from zimmy's dream of the president standing naked, but one feels a tingle of pleasure when one sees the bush criminals defending their legacies, aware, now, that they may very well go down in the books for the monsters that they are.

i think ellroy got spooked. the man'd never admit it, but i think the political climate of the past few years and the devotion of over a decade of life to these treacherous and honest and brilliant books gave him a right and raw beatdown -- and the exhaustion the nation felt at the end of the nixon era or the bush era, the disgust we've felt at the subtle and not-so-subtle awareness that it was picking up speed and devouring more and more, well, it's spread across the final sections of this book, the final volume of the 'USA' trilogy, in a kind of glorious shitsmash. it's something important and spooky and something i choose not to write about as i'm reviewing this book five weeks before it has even been released. so start with american tabloid and, if you dare, power through the cold six thousand, and, when there's nowhere lower to go, go lower: blood's a rover. (less)

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Jul 24, 2012 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-mystery, historical-fiction, modern-lit, 2012-reread

“I paid a dear and savage price to live History.”

And that’s the message of James Ellroy's bloody and brilliant Underworld USA trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover) summed up in one sentence. Here at the end, it’s all about remorse, radicals, revolution, rebellion, revenge and redemption. (To borrow some Ellroy-style alliteration.)

The book begins with a brief flashback to an armored car heist in 1964 that might have been planned by The Joker considering the body co...more

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Nov 29, 2009 Mike rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I just finished reading the latest James Ellroy book, "Blood's A Rover." It's a weighty slog to get through the novel at nearly 650 pages.

I used to be a big James Ellroy fan. Now I feel Ellroy is very much past his prime as a relevant writer. I finished the book because I wanted to see what happened--I read both (the good) "American Tabloid" and (the terrible) "The Cold Six Thousand" that preceded this (hopefully last) entry in the trilogy--to the characters involved.

Ellroy's mostly two-dimens...more I just finished reading the latest James Ellroy book, "Blood's A Rover." It's a weighty slog to get through the novel at nearly 650 pages.

I used to be a big James Ellroy fan. Now I feel Ellroy is very much past his prime as a relevant writer. I finished the book because I wanted to see what happened--I read both (the good) "American Tabloid" and (the terrible) "The Cold Six Thousand" that preceded this (hopefully last) entry in the trilogy--to the characters involved.

Ellroy's mostly two-dimensional characters and hipster late 60's jargon were wearying from the beginning. If you really like Ellroy, read "White Jazz" again instead.

Ellroy substitutes what he considers "style" for substance whenever possible in "Blood's A Rover." But since he includes characters like Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, various famous mobsters--and his main characters are responsible for the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations (and much more) in one way or another--he has some built in gravitas, which he tends to squander on characters who all seem to hate either African-Americans or homosexuals, or both.

Ellroy tosses so many famous characters into the blender of his revisionist history--where they emerge as little more than caricatures--that the tactic goes from being fun at first to just plain formulaic.

I'm a fan of sex and violence and hard-boiled fiction, but "Blood's A Rover" is so persistently ugly and pointless that it just bores me after a while, from endless repetition. The same puerile nonsense over and over.

The fascination with Communist insurgency--most of the characters either start "red" or go "red" during the book in one way or another (as a reaction to the fascism of J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon, etc.)--is constant in "Blood's A Rover." Yet that red fascination destroys or disfigures all of the main characters in the end.

By the end, it's hard to care about the big "mystery" Ellroy hangs his bloated tome on this time around. This time it's a stolen shipment of emeralds and cash. He lays out the "bad" guys' motivation in a bland chapter of exposition near the end--which seems to me to be bad storytelling craft, pure and simple.

I think I'm going to try to return the book and get my money back.(less)

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Oct 16, 2011 Jim rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: series-i-ve-finished

This trilogy seriously goes downhill after the excellent "American Tabloid." Not only does the writing style become increasingly more inscrutable (especially in the second book, "The Cold Six Thousand") but the characters become less well-defined and difficult to care about, and the historical stakes they're dealing with get far lower.

Whereas the first book deals largely with the JFK assassination and the lead-up to it (feeding into conspiracy theories and making the reader really think about w...more

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May 08, 2010 Morgan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Attention un James Ellroy dans la place. J'ai commencé ce livre le dimanche 11 avril 2010. Je suis en vacances à l'Ile d'Oleron et ai du temps pour dévorer l'objet.
Lecture exigeante comme d'habitude requise par cet Ellroy. Au bout de 50 pages (sur plus de 800) je me retrouve à faire un MindMap avec les 20 personnages principaux (du moment) ce n'est que le début.
Actuellement au alentour de la page 250, je me sens plus à l'aise avec les liens entre les différents groupe et ne confond plus les malf...more

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May 03, 2013 awbrey rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure if I should give this three stars or four? It's the first book by James Ellroy that I have read. It's full of gruesome violence and cynicism and horrible things happening to horrible people. At the same time, I feel like it was good for me to read something that's so different from the sanitized version of history you get in school - I'm always hearing about how things used to be so much worse, but this really showed me what that meant. However - although there's pretty constant rac...more

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Dec 07, 2012 catcarlo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Cinque personaggi principali, almeno altrettanti coprotagonisti, uno stuolo di ruoli secondari (tutti quanti, senza distinzioni, cattiiiivi). I romanzi di Ellroy tendono al labirintico, con infinite diramazioni che si staccano dal tronco principale e poi tornano a lambirlo o a intersecarlo in maniera complessa: queste ottocentosessanta pagine non sono da meno e il lettore, se non fosse trascinato dal consueto ritmo secco e mozzafiato, potrebbe essere tentato di prendere appunti per non smarrirsi...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Alek rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-mystery-spy

The publication of 'Blood's a Rover,' completes James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA Trilogy.' Covering the years from 1958 through 1973, Ellroy's fictional characters intersect with American History and its purported makers, including John F & Robert F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, J Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon. Find out how JFK, RFK and MLK really met their end.

According to Ellroy "America was never innocent," and its history was made by the shady and unheralded characters that inhabit the...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the third volume in James Ellroy's "American Underworld" series, a wild, wide-ranging trilogy stretching from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Gangsters, Feds, and rogue cops get caught up in the anti-Castro movement, the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, Vietnam, and heroin. Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon are all prominent characters in Blood's a Rover. Ellroy's blunt, maching-gun prose style moves the complex plot along briskly and this...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Dave rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A worth conclusion to the trilogy that starts out with American Tabloid and continues through The Cold Six Thousand. Blood's a Rover is written in that same staccato style which can be very hard to read, but once you get into the rhythm of it becomes impossible to put down. James Ellroy is a freak, there is no denying that, and he's really injected himself into this book much more so than in the proceeding novels.

The characters are complex, confused, torn apart and dark. The obsessions that dri...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Stephen rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fairly disappointing Ellroy. Still an exhilirating ride, but the pay-off was very unsatisfying. This is the conclusion to his American Tabloid trilogy. The first part was based around the assassination of JFK, and the second around those of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ellroy, justifiably, decided not to cover the Watergate scandal in the third volume, but that left no comparable historic events to anchor this book, making it feel a far less significant work. This sadly drags down the t...more Fairly disappointing Ellroy. Still an exhilirating ride, but the pay-off was very unsatisfying. This is the conclusion to his American Tabloid trilogy. The first part was based around the assassination of JFK, and the second around those of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ellroy, justifiably, decided not to cover the Watergate scandal in the third volume, but that left no comparable historic events to anchor this book, making it feel a far less significant work. This sadly drags down the two preceding tomes by association and leads to the question of whether he should have bothered making the series into a trilogy.

All of the major mysteries - set up in the early part of the book, and driving much of the plot throughout - fizzle out into perfunctory and largely unbelievable (even by Ellroy standards) conclusions. It really felt like he hadn't plotted the book fully enough and ended up writing himself into a corner. If he had been using them just to drive along the plot he really shouldn't have built them up so much.

It's a shame, because the Ellroy roller-coaster or misanthropy does still deliver. And he has curbed some of his more annoying tics, while maintaining his kinetic, punchy prose. His conflicted and compromised anti-heroes are still compelling (although his propensity to kill his characters off - while admirably shocking - does mean that you feel seen his archetypes several times before), and the hallucinatory passages, particularly in Haiti, are immersive. He still delivers a convincing vision of a familiar world refracted through a prism of violence, fear and hate. Perhaps best of all, he introduces a young and ingenuous (as far as an Ellroy character can be) character that seems to have a lot of the young and wayward Ellroy, and hence feels particularly believable. I would like to read more about him.

Unfortunately, by the end of what should have been the crowning work of an impressive and challenging trilogy, I felt that Ellroy had over-indulged himself, and perhaps believed his own hype a little too much.
(less)

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Jun 27, 2010 Shawn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I listened to the audio version of "Blood's A Rover" based on a Stephen King EW review in which he essentially called in the best audiobook ever. I guess I'd have to disagree.

Weighing in at over 24 hours it is a very long audio (no surprise, as it is a 640 page book) and I found it very hard to get interested. Eventually, I did become interested in the story, but never to the point I'd say I really liked it. Ellroy plays fast and loose with history, which I suppose is part of his appeal. Many of...more

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Feb 01, 2010 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

By the same author as LA Confidential, I was looking for something to read over vacation. The plot description was horribly convoluted, which made me mildly intrigued. At its heart, Blood's a Rover is the story of people who are largely controlled and manipulated by the forces around them but who seek to find some way to "do the right thing." Using J. Edgar Hoover as the evil force of hatred and bigotry that pulls the puppet strings on various shady characters, these wildly unpredictable charact...more

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Nov 02, 2009 Brayden rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved Ellroy's American Tabloid, I got really tired of The Cold Six Thousand, and I felt something in between enjoyment and weariness while reading this third part of the American Underground trilogy. The writing again was lean and mean and aggressive. No surprises there. The male characters were basically thugs caught up in a conspiratorial scheme to discredit leftist activists and black nationalists. The attitudes of the male protagonists roamed somewhere between extreme ambition and passive...more

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Oct 11, 2009 Jack rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I have to admit, "American Tabloid" ranks as one of my all-time favorites, and it probably colors how I read its successors. Anyway, probably 3.6 stars.

More "the cold six thousand" than "American Tabloid," sending characters to the third world to engage in hardcore geopolitical scheming. It suffers a bit from "more of the same syndrome, with Wayne Tedrow filling in for Ward Littell (one of my all time favorite ellroy characters), Mesplede filling in for Pete Bonderant, and a new (though less ca...more

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Oct 05, 2009 Tim Niland rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009-reads

The concluding volume of Ellroy's "Underground USA" trilogy is nothing less than an alternative history of the United States from the years 1968-1972. In Ellroy's novel, the conspiracy theorists were right - JFK, RFK and MLK were all assassinated through the machinations of an uneasy coalition of rogue CIA/FBI, mafia and patsies. Big plans are still afoot: J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with black militants, orders his "pet thug" agent Dwight Holly to design a counter-intelligence program to discredi...more The concluding volume of Ellroy's "Underground USA" trilogy is nothing less than an alternative history of the United States from the years 1968-1972. In Ellroy's novel, the conspiracy theorists were right - JFK, RFK and MLK were all assassinated through the machinations of an uneasy coalition of rogue CIA/FBI, mafia and patsies. Big plans are still afoot: J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with black militants, orders his "pet thug" agent Dwight Holly to design a counter-intelligence program to discredit them. The mafia looks to reclaim what it lost in Cuba by setting up a gambling empire in the Dominican Republic, spearheaded by ex-cop Wayne Tedrow and mercenary (and grassy knoll JFK shooter) Jean-Fillipe Mesplede. Bumbling young private-eye Don Chrutchfield (nicknamed "Dipshit" by the more seasoned killers) stumbles into an unsolved armored car heist, with a missing robber and millions of dollars in cash and gems still unaccounted for. As all these men focus on their own projects, it becomes clear that one person ties all of the threads of the story together: the enigmatic, beautiful and dangerous radical mastermind Joan Rosen Klein aka The Red Goddess Joan. The men realize that she is the pivot point for the whole story and obsess: who is she? what is her connection to the robbery, a socialist uprising in the Dominican Republic and the rising tide of black nationalism in Los Angeles? Ellroy is in top form throughout this 650 page doorstop, the story hurtles forward with a manic energy and staccato dialogue this is hypnotic and narcotic. Not for nothing is he called the "Demon Dog" of crime fiction - the language and violence of this novel will set your teeth on edge. Like most Ellroy stories (notably L.A. Confidential) this story has its root in loneliness - desperately lonely men haunted by the violence of their past willing to risk it all for love and that one final chance at redemption that has eluded them. By turns fascinating, infuriating and downright scary, this is the most ambitious story I have read this year. (less)

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Oct 03, 2009 Tony rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-crime-detection

Ellroy, James. BLOOD’S A ROVER. (2009). **. I’m a big fan of Ellroy, or at least I used to be. This novel, the third in his latest trilogy began with “American Tabloid,” and was followed by “The Cold Six Thousand.” It is a relatively stand-alone book, though some of the characters from the previous two show up again. It is written in his familiar – of late – staccato form, much like an old Walter Winchell broadcast. In fact, reading the book is like sitting through a six-hour Winchell marathon t...more

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Oct 03, 2009 Hood rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hard Print

http://theleadmiamibeach.com/2009/100...

Three the Hard Way

James Ellroy Chats about Underworld USA

By John Hood

Dig. Mau Mau militants knocking off ghetto liquor stores. An unhinged J. Edgar Hoover heaving heavy over Archie Bell & the Drells. An FBI cut-out cutting everybody else outta the rad action. A holed-up Howard Hughes buying up Vegas and scarfing down nuclear-strength narco-cocktails. MLK shot dead. RFK ditto. Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray on ice and spitting conspiracy.

Suc...more

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Sep 09, 2009 Plebar rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Just read the 10 questions for Ellroy interview here on goodreads and it clarified some of my ambiguity about Rover, particularly the Joan character. In a note from Ellroy on the back of the ARC, he describes her as "my greatest female character: the Red Goddess Joan". But listen to JE in the interview: (paraphrasing here) "Women are everything, I'm a total romantic, they're why I get up in the morning". This is why he can't write convincing women characters, and why I'm less enamored with Rover...more

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Aug 05, 2009 Erik Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Two things:

First: Ellroy is a great American novelist. This trilogy is one of the towering feats of American literature since WWII. He is not merely a crime novelist, though he has incredibly used the genre as a vehicle to become a great American novelist. This trilogy says as much about America in our day as any single novel in the last fifty years. His craft is unsurpassed. He is a ventriloquist on par with Faulkner. When Sonny Liston is speaking, you never doubt that it's Sonny Liston. When J...more

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Oct 23, 2012 Ubik 2.0 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Anime ossessionate dentro un mondo senza innocenza

Ho letto che alcuni non sono d'accordo ma secondo me "Il sangue è randagio" trova la sua connotazione, pressochè esclusiva, come seguito di "American Tabloid" e "Sei pezzi da mille", di cui ripropone pregi (tanti) e difetti (pochi): è quindi sconsigliabile a chi non abbia letto le prime due parti della trilogia e, a maggior ragione, a chi ne abbia abbandonato la lettura.

Di suo "Il sangue è randagio" vanta l'ambientazione molto suggestiva di una b...more Anime ossessionate dentro un mondo senza innocenza

Ho letto che alcuni non sono d'accordo ma secondo me "Il sangue è randagio" trova la sua connotazione, pressochè esclusiva, come seguito di "American Tabloid" e "Sei pezzi da mille", di cui ripropone pregi (tanti) e difetti (pochi): è quindi sconsigliabile a chi non abbia letto le prime due parti della trilogia e, a maggior ragione, a chi ne abbia abbandonato la lettura.

Di suo "Il sangue è randagio" vanta l'ambientazione molto suggestiva di una buona parte del romanzo ad Haiti e nella Dominicana, descritte con grande efficacia tra miseria dei villaggi, ferocia dei rispettivi regimi dittatoriali, riti vudù, coccodrilli ed erbe miracolose o letali, un inferno nel quale alcuni personaggi del racconto si nascondono, altri si perdono irrimediabilmente.

Per contro questo libro non ha un episodio storico saliente intorno a cui ancorare la trama, come accadeva per l'assassinio di John Kennedy in "American Tabloid" e per gli attentati a Bob Kennedy e Martin Luther King in "Sei pezzi da mille". Questa volta Ellroy sembra quasi rifiutare il ricorso a tale espediente, fermando la narrazione pochi giorni prima dell'esplosione dello scandalo "Watergate".

Resta comunque la caratteristica, che determinò a mio avviso buona parte del successo di "American Tabloid", di infarcire la narrazione di estratti di quotidiani, rapporti segreti, conversazioni telefoniche decrittate, pagine di diario, che accentuano a dismisura la spaesante sensazione di trovarsi all'interno di un intrigo in cui si sovrappongono manipolazioni e depistaggi, da parte sia dei centri di potere sia dei singoli protagonisti, esperti nell'infiltrazione, lo spionaggio e nella fabbricazione di dossier veri o falsi.

>La lettura di "Il sangue è randagio" è dunque molto impegnativa e lascia avvolti nel dubbio alcuni eventi e inesplicabili taluni comportamenti dei personaggi, ma ciò che conta non è tanto la rassicurante coerenza bensì l'impatto dell'insieme dell'opera, che genera un amarissimo senso di impotenza a far emergere valori come il coraggio, l'amicizia, la giustizia. Tutti i protagonsiti, senza eccezione, sono delle anime ossessionate, dal sesso, dal denaro, dal razzismo, dalle droghe, dal potere, da antichi segreti insoluti e tradiscono, uccidono, fuggono ed inseguono vivendo in una trance perenne tesa all'autodistruzione.(less)

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Jul 12, 2011 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The third and final book in Ellroy's "Underworld USA" trilogy, and perhaps the best. By now, readers now what to except: brutal violence, sublimely profane dialogue, terse, pulsating prose, insanely complex plots, and dozens of interconnected characters all fighting against, or being swept along, the ceaseless waves of History. What's different about this installment is that Ellroy examines the psychological toll that years of bloodshed and atrocity have taken on these characters. The final thir...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Laura C. rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Best part of this book? The fabulous poem snippet from which the book got its title, by A.E.Housman: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's a ware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey's over There'll be time enough to sleep." The book is stream of consciousness whack-a doodle craziness where the world must be another universe, where good is bad and the protagonist appears to be a sweaty patricidal young man who wastes his Mormon father who would have wasted him first if he coul...more

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Sep 06, 2009 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

There might be some spoilers. I will make sure that they pop up later in the review. Don't hit more if you don't want to see them.

The hump sucked up fear and hate wholesale. He was a stone shit magnet.

After 1600 plus pages in the past three weeks, slumming in the netherworld of Ellroy's vision of American history my brain has fried itself on staccato prose, excessive violence and a belief that we are all rotten to the core. I feel complicit. I want a sap. A few throw-down pieces. I want to walk...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Perry Whitford rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Non-PC crime lovers.

Not read an Ellroy novel for ages, having read most of his other books in a rush a few years back. Blood's A Rover is a carbon copy of the previous two books in this Underworld USA trilogy, but the absence has helped me to "re-situate" (in Ellroy's parlance) myself to his extraordinary, staccato, verb-less style.

Dwight Holly and Wayne Tedrow Jnr are back from The Cold Six Thousand, joined here by wannabe spot-tailer and obsessional "peeper" Donald Crutchfield. The men commit the most atrocious...more

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Aug 26, 2011 Tara Moss rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime

JAMES Ellroy's latest novel opens like a punch to the face, hard and unforgiving. An armoured car heist. Masked men. Cash. Emeralds. Silencers. Skull-cracking point-blank shots to the face. Gas bombs. Betrayal. Blowtorches.
In true Ellroy form, the punches don't stop.
Reading the self-proclaimed ``Demon dog of American crime fiction'' is an acquired taste, and once acquired, it can be addictive. His ``telegraphic'' prose style is relentlessly raw, staccato and at times eerily poetic:

'Bug work: Th...more

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Aug 08, 2010 Tom rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I trudged manfully through Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy. The percussive rat-a-tat-tat of all the short sentences and the endless re-stating of all the threads of the story (Hoover was gay! The Mob and the FBI killed JFK!) are rather a grind, but the characters seem even less defined than in his previous books. And the language, the endless repetition of pejorative epithets, that grinds too.

In contrast to Raymond Chandler's premise that "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himsel...more

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Aug 11, 2010 F.R. rated it 2 of 5 stars

This series really does fall victim to the law of diminished returns. I’ve already noted how ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ is not as good as ‘American Tabloid’, but ‘Blood’s A Rover’ is a considerable dip from all that went before.

It was never going to be easy. ‘American Tabloid’ focused on the assassination of JFK, while ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ built up to the deaths of RFK and Martin Luther King. And although the years after that were tumultuous and eventful ones in America’s history, there is no bi...more This series really does fall victim to the law of diminished returns. I’ve already noted how ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ is not as good as ‘American Tabloid’, but ‘Blood’s A Rover’ is a considerable dip from all that went before.

It was never going to be easy. ‘American Tabloid’ focused on the assassination of JFK, while ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ built up to the deaths of RFK and Martin Luther King. And although the years after that were tumultuous and eventful ones in America’s history, there is no big moment for Ellroy to latch onto and the book suffers from malaise as a consequence (well, I suppose there is Watergate, but that’s deliberately ignored). He then makes it even harder on himself, by having the least convincing and least rounded central character from ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ as the only surviving main character into this book. That problem is confounded by surrounding him by other truly unconvincing and unpleasant individuals, so that there’s no one at all for the reader to empathise with. Indeed one of the things which seems to have vanished in this volume is Ellroy’s sense of distinct character, as many of them just blend into each other. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that a fairly un-commonplace phrase, such as “my relationship with him is mutually usurious’, could be uttered by any single person in this book. They all speak in exactly the same way.

I guess the big villain of the piece is supposed to be J. Edgar Hoover, and indeed – since he’s the only major recurring figure in all three books – one could argue that the trilogy is about him. Once again though, Ellroy gets it wrong. The Director of the FBI is losing his marbles and whereas that gets some good chuckles, it means he stops being a huge scary monster. Instead we just have a sad and pathetic old man, someone who drools blank-eyed in restaurants – and what kind of villain does that make?

The book does open with a fantastic robbery scene, but then the plot twists and turns, many characters die along the way, and by the end the whole thing seems to have lost its point. The entire structure feels haphazard and all over the place. And so the question arises, all those years ago, when Ellroy started to write this trilogy – was this really how he conceived the ending? An epic tale which began by examining one of the most defining events of the last fifty years, finishes with a whole different set of characters (most of whom few people could care about), dealing with the consequences of a (fictional) robbery in a truly un-dramatic way.

Ellroy is too good a writer to produce a truly terrible book, but this a huge disappointment.(less)

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Dec 02, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: jan-feb-2010

With Blood's a Rover, Ellroy completes his epic of revisionist history, and critics agreed that it is a worthy finale. Action-packed scenes, narrated in Ellroy's trademark staccato prose, hurl the reader along towards a shocking conclusion, but this is no conventional thriller. Ellroy dissects people and events familiar to history buffs and reinvents them within the sordid underbelly of the mid-20th century, interspersing the narrative with invented police statements, transcripts, and FBI report...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Obviously no one would be reading reviews for this book if they did not already read the first two in this trilogy, so I will spare the time of going over that which could be dittoed from American Tabloid and Cold Six Thousand. That much is the same – the adjective-free sentences, the violence, the noir, the choppy sentence structure, the fictive versions of real people, political players from the day.

Honestly, I thought this was the lesser of the three. I’m trying to figure out why: am I just...more Obviously no one would be reading reviews for this book if they did not already read the first two in this trilogy, so I will spare the time of going over that which could be dittoed from American Tabloid and Cold Six Thousand. That much is the same – the adjective-free sentences, the violence, the noir, the choppy sentence structure, the fictive versions of real people, political players from the day.

Honestly, I thought this was the lesser of the three. I’m trying to figure out why: am I just burnt out on Ellroy? Has his uniqueness ceased to surprise me after the third go-around? Is this just a lesser book? Probably a bit of all three. But the differences in the plots, I think, are the biggest contributing factors. The first two surround major historical moments – assassinations, timeless characters like MLK and JFK, Bay of Pigs, The Teamsters and The Mob, the CIA and their roles, Vietnam, The Klan. The plot of this book seems kind of silly and frivolous compared to these other plots. Here we have an armored car heist that starts of the novel and a shitload of new characters all tied together in some way. The money and emeralds stolen from the heist seem to come back into the story at all points as each of these new characters has something to do with it, is obsessed with investigating it, has heard about it and learns about it, and so on; while all the while history is moving forward with Hoover trying to subvert the black militant movement, the Mob trying to put casinos in the Dominican Republic, certain Communist agendas moving forward, a mom tries to track down her son…. And the plots spiral down from there, losing intensity, wrapping together in a twisted but confusing fashion. There is no gigantic historical anchor here, like the other two. No huge plot that everything revolves around. Instead, these little subplots get in the way; these minor characters are too numerous to care about, to follow; and the way that each character learns about this point or that point, when they learn it, who they know that knows or doesn’t know what they know… it just gets to be too much. A lot of their motivations make no sense what so every. Ellroy always has to have characters that start as far right-wingers that gradually move left, and vice versa. But it’s that even that supposedly causes them to move that’s so hard to buy. A super cop just suddenly decides to go criminal? A murderer of Negroes and assassin of MLK decides to start a love affair with a black woman? It’s just like in American Tabloid, where Ward Little wants to work for Bobby Kennedy so bad. He goes in to talk to RKF, RFK says no, so Little decides to kill him? He swings that far, that hard, just because of that? Same here with these characters.

All that being said, I did like reading the trilogy. I thought it was an interesting take on the dark side of a romanticized era, albeit overloaded with conspiracies and fabrications that capitalize on myth and rumor. But I was interested in the history of all these issues, these moments; but I just appreciated it a lot more when it stuck so close to the truth you weren’t sure if Ellroy was fabricating it or not. It was a nice read over vacation, a pulpy mystery full of action. But with this especially, it was hard to follow his characters’ motivations, to feel for them, to fully comprehend the logic that Ellroy is giving us, to trust his storytelling when he so easily falls back on explanations like “It just wasn’t clicking,” or “He quickly memorized 45 addresses and created a potion to vaporize all the paper in the vault,” or “Something led him to the house, something told him to go in.”
(less)

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About James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York...more

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