REVIEW: American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Last Updated on March 18, 2025
The thirtieth anniversary of the publication of American Tabloid is the perfect time to experience one of the darkest fictional examinations of the murder of John F. Kennedy. It is more than arguable that his assassination slammed into overdrive the undermining of a segment of the American people’s belief in their government. For those of an academic bent, a reading of Richard Hofstadter’s essay published a year after the Kennedy assassination titled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ where the right cannot accept society as it currently is and uses demagoguery to undermine and replace it with their approved version, felt of a time then, and most certainly does today. American Tabloid takes all those elements and creates a crime noir tour de force.
The story of Kennedy’s assassination long ago curdled into myth and legend, the Ur-conspiracy of the American dream, an event upon which people of a certain inclination painted their wildest, weirdest, and darkest fantasies as a way of understanding what they believe American secretly is. Cuba, Castro, Communism, the Mafia, grassy knoll, second shooter, Garrison, Stone are all names, peoples and places that have become inextricably entwined into a knot of madness and darkness that people continue to obsess over today.
American Tabloid, written by the great demon dog himself, James Ellroy, examines in heart pounding detail the five years leading up to that terrible day in Dallas. It is, without a doubt, one of the most intensely feverish reading experiences I have ever had the privilege to experience. We all know that Michael Moorcock popped some great pills in the 60s before retiring to his bed on Friday nights and pumping out an Elric novel over the weekend in a fugue-like, ecstatic state. American Tabloid feels exactly like that – a fever dream wrapped around a hectic narrative that grips you by the throat from page one and never, ever lets go.
Told through a tight third person narrative via three characters – Pete Bondurant (World War II marine, Howard Hughes’s right-hand man and Jimmy Hoffa’s hitman), Kemper Boyd (scion of a fallen dynasty, FBI agent and Hoover’s inside man in the Kennedy campaign) and Ward Littel (failed Jesuit seminarian, FBI agent lawyer and Mob hater), American Tabloid examines in minute details their personal interactions, the power dynamics between each man, and how contact with the Kennedy family corroded them in all sorts of damaging ways.
American Tabloid can be read in a number of ways. There is its surface charm; a bleak, noirish tale of how various elements within American society – organs of the state itself such as the FBI and CIA – used anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia to undermine the rule of law in their war against Communism. This version of the novel, where fictional and real life characters smash together, is exciting, violent, tense and a brilliant example of how to sustain reader interest where we all know how November 22, 1963 turns out, but are captivated by the sheer power of the writing which carries us along until the grim conclusion.
American Tabloid is a singular achievement – an examination of the links between money and power, and how both are, in effect, the same. The supposed good guys (Hoover, the FBI, the CIA) are just as bad as the bad guys (the Mafia) in that all they wish is to accumulate power on the one hand, and wealth on the other, and that these needs are indistinguishable. It is this truth that exposes the larger truth about American power – that with enough money, violence, or a combination of both, anything, no matter how ghastly, can be achieved. And that anyone threatening that power structure, whether from rogue elements inside and outside that structure, up to and including John F Kennedy, leave themselves exposed to the ultimate sanction.
I was utterly gripped and compelled by American Tabloid. The pace is breakneck, the atmosphere is feverish and the writing staccato in tone and delivery, the violence hyperactive, amoral, and cinematic. The racism and homophobia are off the charts, so be warned, but are totally true to the era.
American Tabloid is grimdark to the core – an examination of morally damaged individuals helping to birth a new dark age, where power and its accumulation is the only things that matters. Ellroy’s creed is this: that if good men have to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency, then whet that knife faster and show me their throats, God damn it all to Hell.
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