This Storm
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4.4 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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'Ellroy writes with raw power … undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time' THE TIMES
'a tangled fever-dream … Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA' SUNDAY TIMES
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A brilliant historical crime novel, set in Los Angeles and Mexico during the pulse-pounding aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
January, ’42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park.
The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early-warning signal of Chaos.
There’s a murderous fire and a gold heist exploding out of the past. There’s Fifth Column treason – at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There’s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with History.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He’s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is a PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He’s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She’s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
L.A., ’42. Homefront madness ascendant. Early-wartime inferno – This Storm is James Ellroy’s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes.
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‘Epic crime writing from a master’ DAILY MAIL
‘Ellroy is unique. There is nobody writing this way … Nobody has done or is doing what he is doing’ BOOKMUNCH
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MWA Grand Master Ellroy's stunning sequel to 2014's Perfidia opens in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve 1941. Anti-Japanese hysteria has reached a fever pitch and shifting alliances of left-wing and right-wing groups struggle to work out the best way to profit off the war. Dudley Smith, a police sergeant, has taken an Army commission south of the border, ostensibly to thwart Fifth Column pro-Nazi subversives and suspected Japanese submarine encroachments in Baja, but in reality to set up a lucrative wartime business smuggling heroin and illegal immigrant labor. Meanwhile, the L.A. police uncover a body in Griffith Park. Brilliant forensics expert Hideo Ashida, assisted by a talented young scientist with secrets of her own, must grapple with his devotion to Smith and his own conscience as he begins to piece together an intricate story involving a decade-old gold heist and a lethal fire in the park. As Smith squares off against Bill Parker, an LAPD captain on the rise, things get complicated and ugly very quickly. Just when it seems that things couldn't get darker, Ellroy peels back a deeper level of corruption. This obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership.
Customer Reviews
Same old
The author hails from LA and writes historical crime fiction that is the noirest noir going around. Best known is the LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), LA Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992).
After that came the Underworld USA Trilogy: American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood's A Rover (2009).
Mr Ellroy's books are long, densely plotted, violent, pessimistic about the human condition, prone to moralising, and include real life events and persons. His idiosynchratic style is characterised by short, staccato sentences, which eschew connecting words. It's intensely masculine prose in an age dominated by female writers
The second LA Quartet are prequels to the first. This Storm is the second volume, and follows on from Perfidia (2014) exposing graft and corruption in LA during wartime. (Perfidia starts with the bombing of Pearl Harbor). The action unfolds over a shorter time frame than Mr Ellroy's earlier novels, which makes it feel more intense. Familiar characters reappear. Familiar tropes ditto.
This Storm is an extremely professional job by Mr Ellroy, back breaks no new literary ground, which is why I rate the original LA Quartet more highly.