We are conformists; this is one of humanity's most fundamental truths. Most of us grow up to reflect the environment we were born into. If that environment is marked by racism, abusiveness, or cruelty, then odds are we will be racist, abusive or cruel. This is not only a self-defense mechanism, the normalization and externalization of the pain we felt, the pain we now want to inflict, it is a natural byproduct of a species designed to be social, a species programmed to participate in communities. And communities cannot exist without conformity. Consequently, nothing is more important to the health of a community than the actualization of fairness, lawfulness, and kindness. Conversely, there is nothing more damaging than the institutionalization of brutality, criminality and exploitation. It is difficult to imagine a piece of crime fiction getting at this truism any more effectively than Mr. Ellroy's dizzying 1990 classic, L.A. Confidential.
Set against the backdrop of 1950s Hollywood, L.A. Confidential is a serpentine chronicle of the corrupt practices of the Los Angeles Police Department as exemplified by three officers. Bud White is the survivor of a broken and abusive home who exercises his demons by punishing wifebeaters. His penchant for ruthless violence is cultivated by Captain Dudley Smith, a sinister Irishman who appears to have his fingers in many, disreputable pies. Jack Vincennes, the high-flying Big V, is the second leg of L.A. Confidential's cop tripod. A participant in the Bloody Christmas beatings, Vincennes is dangerously unstable, capable of episodes of ugliness and violence that would make Bud White blush. Finally, Ed Exley, college graduate and hero of WWII... An opportunist, Exley uses a mixture of competence, cunning and political connections to rise through the LAPD, attempting to remain a clean skin even while he swims through the cesspool of seedy L.A. And its even seedier police department.
The lives of these four men entwine when an apparent robbery gone wrong leaves employees of the Night Owl cafe grotesquely murdered. Initially, suspicion for the foul crimes falls on a trio of African Americans who are brutalized by police eager for a confession. When the three men are exonerated of the murders, it's far too late. They are already dead, crushed under the bootheels of ambitious men who care more about achieving their own ends than they do about justice. Slowly, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the Night Owl murders are far more than they originally seemed, the tip of an iceberg floating in waters soiled by pornography, child prostitution, and sadistic perversion the likes of which not even the hardened men of the LAPD can conceive.
L.A. Confidential is both a rewarding and a challenging work. Told in a stream-of-consciousness staccato, it unleashes upon the reader a bewildering array of sleazy characters and smutty deeds only some of which are explicable. But while the prose offers only blurry snapshots of L.A.'s 1950s underbelly, it succeeds in imbedding the reader in the heads of its dirty protagonists, forcing him to live in the twisted minds of men who each have their own ways of coping with the brutality of the police department and the depravity of the streets it is ostensibly sworn to protect. In this, we watch Mr. Ellroy explore how these men came to be what they are, how they were primed by their upbringings and then infected by the LAPD's ugly culture, a combination which transformed them into nightmares, ignoble men clutching at the tatters of their humanity.
If L.A. Confidential 's strength is its characters and their plights, its weakness is its mystery which is bogged down by labyrinthine twists and turns which leave the reader dizzy and confused. Too many names, too many moving parts, too many pieces of disconnected information, all of which Mr. Ellroy packs into a big, filthy ball and hurls at the reader like a Nolan Ryan fastball. As such, Mr. Ellroy's furious piece is far more crime fiction than it is mystery fiction, far more an indictment of corrupt cultures than an opportunity to catch the bad guy. But then it's impossible for L.A. Confidential can't catch the bad guys. There'd be no one left to walk the streets.
Quality work, but difficult at times to follow. (3/5 Stars)
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