Kadomi reviewed White jazz by James Ellroy
Review of 'White jazz' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
White Jazz finishes off the L.A. Quartet and was my least favorite of the four. I did not care for the change in style here. In the previous 3 books we had 2-3 different PoV characters, all working towards the same issue, third person.
This time we only get one narrator, in first person: Dave Klein is a dirty cop and lawyer, works as bagman for Howard Hughes, is a slumlord, lusts after his sister. Your average cop in Ellroy's work, basically. Head of Detectives Ed Exley, one of the protagonists from L.A. Confidential, puts Klein to work on the burglary of an Armenian-American family, the Kafesjians. Turns out quickly that the head of the family and his son push drugs all under the protection of the Narco division.
Soon there are different threads of plot developments, and it gets kinda crazy, in a good way.
Not so good: the …
White Jazz finishes off the L.A. Quartet and was my least favorite of the four. I did not care for the change in style here. In the previous 3 books we had 2-3 different PoV characters, all working towards the same issue, third person.
This time we only get one narrator, in first person: Dave Klein is a dirty cop and lawyer, works as bagman for Howard Hughes, is a slumlord, lusts after his sister. Your average cop in Ellroy's work, basically. Head of Detectives Ed Exley, one of the protagonists from L.A. Confidential, puts Klein to work on the burglary of an Armenian-American family, the Kafesjians. Turns out quickly that the head of the family and his son push drugs all under the protection of the Narco division.
Soon there are different threads of plot developments, and it gets kinda crazy, in a good way.
Not so good: the usual clipped style of Ellroy's is multiplied in this book by being Klein's first person perspective. Klein's train of thought is so clipped that some paragraphs read like total gibberish. It's so full of peculiar terms of the time and so clipped that I could not understand him a lot of the time. That was frustrating.
I have no regrets reading this, but I wish it had followed the style that I loved so much in the previous books.