A Body Without a Soul

I do not kill innocent bystanders because it’s a mitzvah not to and because I adhere to the Ten Commandments except when it is bad for business.

Re-watching the movie version of this is what kicked off this whole James Ellroy re-read, so it’s interesting to compare the two.  As complicated as the movie plot was, it was a drastically simplified version of the book’s, but the movie did an admirable job giving form to the main characters: Bud White, Jack Vincennes and Edmund Exley.  It also portrayed most of the really visually exciting bits of the book, like the motel shoot-out and the discovery of the body under the house.  Interestingly, though, it did so by completely changing who was involved, where in the story they happened, and what they meant.  I can’t think of another example of a movie managing to be so true to the spirit and feel of a book while straying so far from the narrative.

Reading this dramatically pointed out the benefits of reading on the Kindle: when a name is dropped two thirds of the way through the book, is it a brand new one or one that was mentioned once 150 pages ago?  With Kindle, I’d know; without, I either reread, google, or go without.  And Googling is spoiler-dangerous.  In this case, it didn’t answer the question I was asking, and it didn’t give bad spilers, but it did find a very interesting blog post about the making of the movie.  I commend it in particular to anyone who’s both read the book and seen the movie.

But, back to the book…

The narrative form is 3rd person observant, rotating amongst our 3 main characters, interspersed with news clippings and headlines; the news clippings are used both to skip over time (the book covers 8 years, but several of those years are skipped over in a page or two of headlines) and to show what the events look like to the general public, contrasting that with the (differing and incomplete) views each of our characters has.  Only the reader has anything close to a complete picture, and even for us it takes a long time for the threads to come together.

The basic story is an investigation into the Nite Owl Massacre, where 6 people are murdered at an all-night diner.  The investigation spreads out to cover, among other things: pornography; high-end prostitution; an entertainment company that is certainly Not At All Disney, despite the animated mice and new theme park; mob-on-mob violence; corrupt cops of multiple varieties; scandal magazines.

Or maybe it’s the story of clean cop Ed Exley versus dirty cop Dudley Smith.  Or maybe it’s the story of would-be-clean-cop Ed Exley versus his ex-cop father, and how it turns him dirty to save justice.  Or maybe it’s all of those things, wrapped up in one fabulous huge complicated bundle that I still don’t have my head all the way around.