Author James Ellroy: 'I'm a genius'
Updated on 07 November 2009
LA Confidential author James Ellroy speaks to Nicholas Glass about living in history, lying in dark rooms and why his newest tale of "realistic intrigue" is his greatest work yet.
The self-proclaimed "Beethoven of crime fiction" is, in his own words, a "genius".
His 16 books of historical fiction are set in the 40s, 50s and 60s - the most famous of which, LA Confidential, was made into a Hollywood film in 1997.
The latest is his first novel in eight years. Blood's a Rover, a "historical romance", was created from a 400-page plot outline and completes Ellroy's crime trilogy.
Ellroy told Nicholas Glass that his love of words was born through "creating them", but he insists he is still "finding his voice."
"Every book mandates a new voice. I plot assiduously, I outline copiously and that allows me to live extemporaneously in the individual scenes that I write.
"Thus, if there is a chance to make something funny - to take a hard 'c' word and make it into a 'k' word to goof on the Ku Klux Klan - then I'm going to do it.
"I love to live in history. It started when my mother was killed when I was 10 in the 50s. I needed to go back and find a context that worked.
"I'm a genius, that's the truth.
"Language lives in me in a very big way, dramatic scope lives in me in a very big way. I can imagine the way people talked; I can recall a different era.
"I am a poet of realistic intrigue in American history.
Obsessiveness
Ellroy says that his writing is obsessive, and when he sits down to pen his latest prose he "goes at it with fierce concentration" until he "can't take it any more".
"It has to be perfect. I want to perform it and burn the room down, I need to impress people - specifically women.
"I want to write books that nobody else has the balls to write, the stamina to write. Books that require obsessive comprehension. I want people's reading experience to approximate my writing experience. That level of intensity.
"I want people to read my books in fewer rather than more increments in order to better get the obsessiveness that I wrote the books in.
"If it means in my lifetime that I sell fewer books because my books are too strenuous, then so be it.
"Where does it come from? I lay in the dark and I think. What do I think? History and women - that's what I think about.
"It's really f***ing simple.
"I think it's my greatest book."
