James Ellroy’s Perfidia: Mid-tier from the best there is.

Up front, Perfidia is a James Ellroy murder mystery set in Los Angeles in the 1940s. It’s big, complex, mean, and ugly in all the ways that make Ellroy the best crime writer alive today, and probably the best crime writer there’s ever been.

But it’s not a perfect book, not like L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, and American Tabloid. Still, even imperfect Ellroy’s a whole hell of a lot better than just about anything else.

Beginning with The Black Dahlia in 1987 and continuing through the rest of the L.A. Quartet and then the American Underworld trilogy, Ellroy’s novels have advanced chronologically through a secret history of America, from 1947 and the most famous murder in L.A. history—though perhaps eclipsed by the O.J. Simpson killings—through the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. With Perfidia, he begins a second L.A. Quartet, this one set during World War II and kicking off with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

On the one hand, this is great. Nobody writes mid-century L.A. like Ellroy. But it also means he’s filling in the backstory of the characters who populated those prior seven books—and I’m just not convinced he pulls it off. Granted, it’s be a while since I read the first L.A. Quartet, but my sense is the events of Perfidia don’t jibe with the way those characters think and behave in their later appearances. There’s also an attempt to shoehorn relationships that needn’t exist. One such example—and I chose it because it’s made clear early in the book and so isn’t a spoiler, and is particularly egregious—is the discovery that Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia herself, is in fact the daughter of Dudley Smith, the arch villain of, and arguably best character in, Ellroy’s corpus. It’s silly and unnecessary, and makes this carefully constructed world Ellroy’s built over his career suddenly seem too neat and too, well, constructed.

A second issue I had with Perfidia is the writing itself. Ellroy’s never satisfied with his prose, and his evolving style sets him apart from other writers in the genre. Every new Ellroy book features his voice, but often in radically new garb.

Perfidia sticks with late-Ellroy style, which is too bad. We can divide Ellroy’s prose into three periods. The first covers his early novels through The Big Nowhere. Here, Ellroy was writing conventional prose, albeit high quality conventional prose, which got better with each new novel. But then something happened with L.A. Confidential. I asked him about this year ago at an author signing. What he told me was that the manuscript for that book ran long. Really, really long. His publisher said, “This is great, but you need to cut it in half.” L.A. Confidential has a famously dense plot. You can’t really pull any events from it. So Ellroy instead pulled words. He slashed every word that wasn’t necessary to convey the meaning of each sentence. The result is some of the most dazzling prose in the English language.

He took this a step further in White Jazz, the most stylistically perfect book I’ve ever read. American Tabloid remained minimal, but wasn’t as out there. The Cold Six Thousand went even more minimal and is probably the low point of Ellroy’s evolving style. He recognized this, recognized that he’d alienated even his fans. Between that book and the final in the American Underworld trilogy, he released a collection of stories, Destination: Morgue!. Here we can see, in exaggerated form, Ellroy’s turn to what I’ll call his “poetry slam” style of prose. Lots of alliteration. Lots of repetition of phrases. Lots of italics. This is prose meant to be read aloud in Ellroy’s voice, the voice he affects for book events and talk shows. It’s the prose he uses in Blood’s a Rover and now in Perfidia. And, compared to the later books of the L.A. Quartet, it’s still hard and beautiful mostly, but it’s also often distracting and sometimes comical.

Then there’s the problem of Ellroy’s women. The murder of his mother when he was a child shapes Ellroy’s life and writing. Anyone who’s read him knows that. He has one memoir on it, and another on how it impacted his relationships with women. Many of his novels deal with his mother’s death in one way or another, none more explicitly than The Black Dahlia, where he metaphorically solves her murder by way of finding Elizabeth Short’s killer. Ellroy’s spent his life chasing women in pursuit of and in reconciliation with one lost woman.

It’s a tragic tale and a tragic psychology, and it’s arguably responsible for a great deal of his novels’ power. But it’s also begun to hurt his fiction. You can see it in Blood’s a Rover and now Perfidia. Women who aren’t minor characters end up as variations of Ellroy’s ideal woman, his vision of a perfect woman. But the problem is perfection allows no variation. There’s only one way to be perfect. And so all Ellroy’s women come off the same. Joan Rosen Klein in Blood’s a Rover is the same woman as Kay Lake and Claire DeHaven in Perfidia. All have Ellroy’s expansive vocabulary. All speak with baroque syntax and possess unrealistically keen psychological insight. Take chunks of dialog or inner monologue from each and they’d be indistinguishable. They’re just not believable as characters. Ellroy’s men have flaws. They live and breathe and make mistakes. They’re noble and nasty. But Joan and Claire and Kate exist like goddesses come down to wade among mortals. They feel detached from the narrative. They break the verisimilitude of Ellroy’s America. I don’t know if, given his past, Ellroy is capable of writing women characters who don’t drown in the tedium of their own perfection. Which is too bad.

I fear I’m coming off as overwhelmingly critical of Perfidia. And I am critical, but only because I know what Ellroy’s capable of. He’s likely the best crime novelist of all time. He’s, in my mind, the best writer, regardless of genre, working today. And among quintessentially Americanauthors—the ones who speak to something deep at the core of the American identity—Ellroy ranks with the best the country’s produced. Nobody understands the ugliness and flirtations with fascism that haunt this country’s greatness like he does. Perfidia is a great book. It’s better than The Black Dahlia, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover. But it doesn’t reach quite the dizzying heights of The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, and American Tabloid.

Still, if the second L.A. Quartet follows the trajectory of quality seen in the first (a tall order, I know), we’re in for something amazing.M