Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Metamorphosis 4

After the sometimes flowery Victorianism of Stevenson, the abrupt, slangy writing style of James Ellroy was, to say the least, jarring. This, and the huge cast of characters introduced at a rapidfire pace, made L.A. Confidential a bit hard to get into at first. But by the end of the book I couldn't wait to find out who the bad guys were... I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but let's just say this novel paints a very unflattering picture of the corruption of the oft-interwined LAPD and Hollywood in the 1950s.

This 1990 novel was later made into a movie starrting Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kim Basinger. A few years later a TV movie with Kiefer Sutherland was made by Fox - a pilot for a 13-part miniseries which never materialized. Dang, now that I looked at the IMDB entries my visualizations of how I thought the characters looked are all messed up...

I also find out from imdb.com that it's the third book in a four-part series called "L.A. Quartet". I suppose I'll have to check out the others now.

No comments: