Customer Reviews

American Tabloid: A Novel

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I am not going to recap the book because after 110 reviews I am sure that has been done to death. I am just going to give you my opinion on this book I read about ten years ago.

When I was in college I picked up this book completely as a fluke. It looked interesting, I am big into history and the book jacket peaked my interest. From the first moment I started to read I couldn't put it down. I carried it to the kitchen five hours later while I threw together a sandwich and read while the bread toasted. I read all night and into the next day. I blew off my classes. I didn't do anything else but read. When I was done that afternoon I was not exhausted as one would think. I was exhilarated. This book is so well written, so complex, so dark, so funny, so much more than the average book I was physically excited.
Over the next few months my friends read it and each one read it with the same kind of fervor I did. People who hated to read loved this book.
READ IT! BUY IT! Do not hesitate. If you love a good book then you will completely flip out over this one! It is truly an amazing book and one of the best pieces of fiction ever. I cannot tell you strong enough how wonderful this treasure is for someone who loves to read. It is a perfectly written novel.

Cops act like criminals, criminals act like cops, and the twain collides and melds over and over again. There are no good guys in "American Tabloid," just guys who are mired in various levels of corruption. Ankle deep, waist deep, and in over their heads. One of the lessons James Ellroy gives us is that once you've touched your toe to the muck it will eventually suck you down. Redemption may present itself, but Ellroy's characters are so far around the bend that even good things are done for all the wrong reasons. In an introduction Mr. Ellroy tells us he's going to create the new myth of the Camelot years - the dark myth - and he succeeds admirably.

In the tautest prose between covers we follow a handful of near and complete psychopaths as their lives intersect through John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, and his 1000 day reign. Big shots and underlings alike. Their machinations are complex, and almost always involve extortion, but solutions are often simple - a beating for a lesson, a bullet to the head for the more recalcitrant. But why stop there when torture, and dismemberment are so fulfilling. The lead characters suffer, but except for one ex-Jesuit seminarian become FBI agent, become mob lawyer, the suffering is physical rather than existential, and it's so much easier to deal with a migraine than a crisis of conscience.

"American Tabloid," for all the horror contained therein, is one of the best books I've read in the past five years. It's right up there with Cormack McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," but where McCarthy can go sentimental, James Ellroy never lets up.

James Ellroy writes "hard boiled" fiction. If you hard boil an egg for about a week,perhaps. Ellroy inhabits a world all his own in crime literature. Having somehow survived a childhood from dantes seventh circle, he grew up to write these angry books where the bad guys are powerful white men{thinking of inherent power structures, he's quite correct}.American tabloid tells the story ,in all its vainglorious insanity, of that sweet time in Americana called "Camelot". This riveting novel actually is a meditation on power, who has it, and what it does. Betrayal{Bay of Pigs, Kennedy blowing off a CIA agent, everybody BUT the Kennedy's racking Marilyn Monoroe, J edgar Hoover, Joe Kennedy, Howard Hughes} all amke appearances leading to Dealy Plaza. s always, Ellroys descriptive powers are unmatched in describing viloence{the Cuban cab front company has some interesting moments}, and no one, no one, comes off as good in this. A profoundly disturbing book, a meditation on power, America, and who really runs things.One of our better writers in any genre has written another would be classic. Very very well done . Highest recommendation.

"They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and f****t lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here's to them.

--from the introduction

James Ellroy has never been afraid to explore the sordid. His heroes (anti heroes?) are amoral creeps (usually cops) who'd betray their own mothers in the pursuit of quick cash. There are three such men in American Tabloid, Ellroy's fictional take on the Kennedy assassination--Kemper Boyd (who serves the Kennedy brothers, the FBI and the CIA simultaneously), Ward Littell (a disillusioned G-man turned Mob lawyer), and Pete Bondurant (a Howard Hughes bag man who becomes a linchpin in the ill fated Bay of Pigs operation). Three men, blinded by greed, patriotism, ambition and hate. Three men that history knows nothing about, but whose actions ultimately lead to the brutal murder of John F. Kennedy.

At the request of J. Edgar Hoover, Kemper Boyd ingratiates himself with the Kennedy brothers, first serving on the McClellan committee, then in the Kennedy administration. While serving in this capacity, Boyd finds time to align himself with the CIA, the Mafia, drug runners and anti-Castro refugees. Boyd lives in a world where no one is pure, deceit is commonplace and strange bedfellows are the rule. At first, he easily negotiates the complexities of this world. Eventually, however, things fall apart, and an American president dies as a result.

This book will shock, horrify, entertain and amuse. It's truly a tour de force in crime fiction. Ellroy's writing is hypnotic--the best analogy I can come up with is to compare it to improvised jazz. Especially amusing is his use of alliteration when he drops into the style of Hush-Hush magazine, a gossip rag supported by Howard Hughes. Lines like "Cancerous Castro communistically calcifies Cuba while heroic hermanos hunger for homeland" proliferate.

Read American Tabloid and see why many consider James Ellroy to be the premiere crime novelist of his generation.

Let's get one thing straight. This book is bigger than your house. Taller, wider, deeper and more powerful than anything you have beheld up to now, it takes the myth that was once 'nice' John F Kennedy, fleeces it, rips the guts out of it and blasts the remains into the gutter from where it started.



This is a 600 page novel with a world-famous ending, the assassination of JFK. So you think, why should I read it? Well, it will change your knowledge (or what you had been taught) about one of the most significant periods in American History, and it will tell you things you definitely didn't know about a whole string of household names : Jack Kennedy, kid brother Robert, their seriously bad-news father 'Irish Joe' Kennedy, J.Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B Johnson, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and a colourful list of 'made-guy' underworld gangsters such as Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana. One of the low-life gangsters featured is a certain Jack Ruby, and I think we all know what he is best known for. In fact this novel is so daringly matter-of-fact about the lives (and loves) of most of the above-named that it makes me wonder how it ever came to be published at all. And it's no over-statement to suggest that you could write a book about this book.



It is, at the end of the day, a novel, which is to say a work of fiction, but I for one wanted to believe that every element of it was true because it helped me to understand so much more than I had been 'educated' to believe in the newspapers and other media down the years. But essentially American Tabloid surrounds the inter-twining lives of three men : hit-man Pete Bondurant, and two federal agents Kemper Boyd and his once protégé Ward Littell. Boyd devotes his career and in turn his life to the Kennedy cause and is nearly ruined when they ultimately turn against him. Littell dedicates his life, and takes life-threatening risks in doing so, to help expose the corruption behind the Kennedy family and the Jimmy Hoffa union rackets - and again gets trodden on by those he thinks he is working for. These two men end up in very different positions and with inverted political attitudes as a result. Meanwhile Bondurant flits between hits for Hughes, Hoffa, the FBI and the CIA and at times rightly regards himself as a CIA agent. Drugs abound, indeed heroin seems to be the leading if not traditional currency for the CIA in its financing of plans to invade Cuba and oust the new leader Fidel Castro.



The time period covered is 22nd November 1958 to the same date in 1963 - the two-year run-up to the 1960 US Election and the 1000-day tenure of JFK as President until his assassination in Dallas. But if like me you've always wanted to know who shot him, why he was shot, and many other questions surrounding his brief presidency, then American Tabloid must surely be the most eye-opening source of information even if it must presumably have its inaccuracies. The writing style may not be to everyone's taste (although I quickly became accustomed to it), but if you're only half interested in What Really Happened to JFK (and the Bay of Pigs disaster), you really must read American Tabloid. It truly is a revelation.



And if you love this, the great news is that you can then read The Cold Six Thousand, which is as instant a sequel as you could ask for, as it begins on the day of the John F Kennedy assassination and leads up to the killing of baby brother Bobby. Be in no doubt - James Ellroy stands tall among all peers and is, in my considered view, one of the very best writers alive today.

The pro Castro Cubans, the anti Castro Cubans, the FBI, the mob, the CIA, Howard Hughes, Donald Duck...... Ellroy would have us believe that all of these factions/individuals and more were somehow caught up in the conspiracy to assassinate JFK and thereby loosen the Kennedy clan's righteous grip on the reins of American power (the irrepressibly corrupt patriarch, Joseph, being the main exception). And who are we to argue? Ellroy's marvellously twisted imagination has conjured up something terrifyingly compelling in 'American Tabloid'. Terrifying for its extreme paranoia but more terrifying for the fact that you can't help feeling that it may not be so far away from the truth. Think Oliver Stone's JFK and multiply by 10. Hell, Ellroy had me thinking that I may have somehow been involved (though not sure whether I'd have been on the side of the feds or the mob. Plus I hadn't actually been born yet.....).

The novel centres on the relationship between three characters - Kemper Boyd, the charming, cold blooded, Kennedy wannabe, Ward Littell, the neurotic, morally upstanding, deadbeat, and Pete Bondurant, the psychotically violent mercenary. These men walk on both sides of the fence and all have different motives that shape what they do, and what they eventually become. Ellroy shows us, ominously, that nobody who is involved in violence and corruption can remain untouched by it. And the different journey that each of the men takes twists him into something unrecognisable by the time of the ominous events of 1963.

Ellroy's writing is downbeat, efficient, bruisingly evocative. His use of the vernacular imbues the book with authenticity and gives it a visceral quality which renders it all the more vicariously fascinating for the average middle class, law abiding reader. Where Ellroy's main appeal lies, I suspect, is in the fiendishly complicated plots he manages to conjure up, where at times you can scarcely process what is happening, but can't wait to find out what will happen next. There is no second guessing either - 'American Tabloid' avoids the obvious unerringly yet still manages to convince. What dark conspiracies lie beneath the public veneer of American politics is anyone's guess, but I'd bet my few meagre possessions on the fact that Ellroy knows a thing or two the authorities wish he didn't. And how he didn't get sued for libel, by any one of the dozens of real life figures that feature in the book (luckily most of them deceased) is beyond me. Fascinating.

This is the first Ellroy I've read and I'm hooked. It's a real wallow in the mire, a wade through the gutter but exhilarating all the way. Elroy leads us a labyrinth of connections involving the Mob, the Kennedys, showbiz, Cuban emigres,the FBI, Cia, Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover.If you think these connections are outlandish then have a look at "Ratpack Confidental". He leads us into a world where there is no right or wrong, no morality,no scruples,not even idealologies, ultimately not even trust between "lifelong friends". Brotherhood and fratricide is just one theme among many. Ultimately the only thing that matters in this nightmarish world is power,it's pursuit and it's retention. It's one of those books that achieve catharsis by displaying a truely rotten, totally corrupt world you're just so glad not to be a part of. And yes it's unputdownable.

History has always been written by the victors - and they have the tendency to iron-out all its bloody details and hide all their dirty secrets. This a TRUE CLASSIC: imagine a history book that reads like a tabloid. Every story up close and personal, complete with every gory detail described. IN CINEMASCOPE & TECHNICOLOR.

The dirty making of the Kennedy fortune. Hoover as a hypochondriac cross-dressing extortionist. Everybody wiretapping everybody. The Camelot President clocked at 6 minutes. The Mob rigs the election for said President; invades Cuba with clansmen and Castro's exiles in blood-lust frenzy; gets burned - and then gets even the only way it knows how. And in the middle of it all, two FBI agents trapped in a downwards spiral of serving multiple masters.

JAMES ELLROY does not pretend to write the dark side: he has barely escaped it himself and knows all its intoxicating scents and shadows. Read for the plausible details of history's margins. Enjoy the staccato prose of natural wit, verbatim FBI communication files and 50's Tabloid lingo.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

I loved Elroy's LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz), so was looking forward to this book and really wanted to like it, so much so that I read it a second time to give it another chance after not liking it much the first time.

But American Tabloid doesn't work nearly as well for me as the Quartet, mainly because I bought into the noirish world of the first four books, but not into the interlocking conspiracies of American Tabloid. It was too over-the-top, and frequently seemed a parody of itself. How could Boyd, Littell, and Bondurant be in the middle of everything? American Tabloid also lacked the narrative drive and focus and the deeper characterizations of the Quartet. Elroy has written some of my favorite books, but this wasn't among them.

To say this is a great book is like saying Ingrid Bergman was sort of attractive. Ellroy is my favorite author, and this is, to date anyway, his magnum opus. With Ellroy it's never about the plot. Style and characters are what is most important. That being said, the story here is wonderful. Starting in the 50's it weaves fictional characters with Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, JFK and RFK, and L.A. mobsters Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato. The three main characters (all fictional) range from a brutal, viscious lackey of Howard Hughes, a preppie Justice Department social climber, and a cowardly (at first) ethicial (at first) G-man. The way these three characters change and evolve is amazing. You may start off hating one, and later admiring him, and vice versa. This is one of Ellroy's constant themes: that nobody is all good, and nobody (well almost nobody) is all bad. His books are populated by people who do the right things, but for the wrong reasons, and people who do the wrong things, but for the right reasons. Ellroy's hard-boiled noir style brings these characters through events including the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assisination. It is a long book, and the last few chapters seem a little rushed, but it is a book that stay with you long after it is read. I'd like to see a movie made out of this one, it would make the dark L.A. Confidential seem like the SOund of Music.