The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy, 2001)

It grieves me to say this with regards to a James Ellroy novel, especially when said novel is actually really rather good, but I had issues with The Cold Six Thousand, a shame seeing as the Ellroy novels I've read to date have been literature gold. But The Cold Six Thousand is somewhat flawed, a fact that Ellroy himself has noted and it is a novel that he agrees was written at a bad time in his life, a fact that rubbed off in about everything of it.

Taking off immediately from American Tabloid (which I still consider to be a modern masterpiece), the surviving characters are cleaning up after the assassination of JFK. Their aim: make sure Oswald acted alone. Concurrently a cop by the name of Wayne Tedrow Jr has been paid six thousand dollars to kill a pimp who resides in Dallas (hence the cold six thousand of the title). As is the norm with Ellroy, all plot points intertwine into one epic labyrinth of a plot which goes on to include the mob's take over of Las Vegas (using swindled money from Howard Hughes) and the FBI's black-ops drug operations during the Vietnam war, all of which leads to the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

As interesting as that sounds (and there are moments of absolute brilliance to be found here) I just couldn't finish it. The first thing that strikes is the prose which is at once terse and aggressive, confrontational even. The staccato delivery has gone into overdrive here and at times it's difficult to keep up with even the simplest of things. To demonstrate, a character sitting in a bar with be explained as such: "Pete sat. Pete drank. Pete perused talent. Pete eyed niggers. Pete eyed them sloooooow". The inclusion of documentation such as letters and telephone transcripts break up the simplicity but the general style is extraordinarily difficult to get into.

Whilst I also have no problem with the inclusion of difficult material, so long as it's within the context of the material (rape, racism, etc), the tough stuff here is relentless. Ellroy is known for being moral yet pessimistic, however I found that every protagonist here was utterly repugnant, a surprise considering Ellroy's usual troupe of characters but there is not a single moral compass here to latch onto. Those that are decent end up racist and those that were horrid to begin fail to redeem themselves in anyway. Spending time with these people just made me feel dirty.

I guess there will be a soft spot for this work over time but I consider it a failure. An honourable failure but a failure non the less. It is intermittently brilliant but it's a case of allowing ones personal issues get in the way of their work.

I will leave it a while before I read anymore Ellroy. For the time being I feel The Cold Six Thousand has left me desperate for something more simplistic.

3/5