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Crime Wave
James Ellroy
Century hardback, 288 pages, £15.99 
Review by David Seabrook (1999)

Crime Wave is a collection of essays and stories originally commissioned by American GQ. However, its dedication is not to the magazine's editor, who supplies his own adoring introduction, but the film director Curtis Hanson, whose screen version of LA Confidential has doubtless netted Ellroy far more money via book sales.

It could prove the last time an Ellroy novel makes it this far, for Hanson's effort is brutally bland - Dudley Smith might as well be Dudley Moore - and points up the flick-teasing perversity of Ellroy's LA Quartet, screenplays that effectively write off the film.

'Body Dumps'. 'Glamour Jungle'. 'My Mother's Killer' (is it too late to re-close the case?). 'Hush-Hush'. Crime Wave is business as usual with the most forensic jazzer in goredom. 'Howard Hughes had a hard-on for a high-yellow hooker named Dusky Deelite. Rin Tin Tin ripped Lassie into renal distress at a recent kiddie roundup.’ I could lie here reading the lowdown on 50s Los Angeles forever and a day - dig that Spillane/Coltrane mix - though I realise it's all over now, the good times gone. 'I left the secret LA one book and one memoir ago,' Ellroy tells us in one of the pieces collected here. 'I made a conscious decision to drop LA as a fictional locale. I had taken it as far as I could.'

American Tabloid, his most recent novel, gives us our first taste of life after Lana and it bores. Over-familiar figures and events in US post-war history are subjected to the familiar speed freak treatment and the novel becomes a showcase for the yearning limitations of the Demon Dog's style, a checklist of the things it just can't do. According to a recent interview the second volume of his Underworld USA trilogy will run to 800 pages. Heartbreak beckons.

So make the most of Crime Wave, its vanished, unvarnished world. Raise a glass to the mobsters, starlets and scandal-mongers as they whizz by in monochrome one last time. It has been an exhilarating joyride, no question, and it looks set to end in jail. •

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