A Body Without a Soul

The final book of the LA Quartet brings us to 1959, and the final solution to the Ed Exley vs Dudley Smith rivalry.  It also introduces Pete Bondurant, who’s a character in Ellroy’s next series, blurring the lines of what exactly makes a series a series.

Stylistically, it’s a new direction: mostly first person narrative, written in the character’s idiosyncratic style, very choppy and fast, almost a stream of consciousness.  The news clippings and headlines introduced in LA Confidential are continued and are now more important, since they’re the only way we see anything the narrator, Dave Klein, doesn’t see.

Dave Klein is a corrupt cop, in the employ of the LAPD, mobster Mickey Cohen, crazy billionaire Howard Hughes, and his own slumlord real-estate business.  The Feds are in town, investigating the LAPD’s rampant corruption, protection of certain favored criminal elements, and the institutional disregard for black-on-black crime.  Combine that with the US Attorney’s political ambitions, the new DA’s ambitions, and Edmund Exley’s possible ambitions and certain desire to protec tthe LAPD and himself above all else, and you have a recipe for manouvering and mayhem  And that’s before we even get to the LA Dodgers’ desire for a new ballpark even if it means evicting Mexican-Americans from their homes, not to mention Ed Exley & Dudley Smith’s ongoing antagonism.

Klein is used, run, nudged, by everyone.  Will he get to the bottom of his case?  Will he manage to get out of his situation alive, much less free?  Do we even want our slumlord mob hitman hero to survive?  You’ll have to read to find out.

IMDB says a movie version of this is in progress.  I wonder how they’ll deal with the fact that Dudley Smith is an integral part to the plot, but he died at the end of the movie version of LA Confidential: perhaps they’ll simply ignore it and not market this as a sequel to LA Confidential at all.