LAPD '53

Policing; Freudian psychology; personality research; films noir; jazz; murder; crime fiction

Life is a cocktail and everything is better mixed. Everything is better with its reverse, or its opposite. A green square looks better with a red line slashed across it. Film noir was much better than anything in Technicolour.

Better yet, juice up something nice with a jolt of something nasty. You’ll taste a hint of why adventurous diners love a jalapeño. Liven up your dull day with a novel about homicide, or a newsletter called Crime & Psychology. There’s a certain ambiguity there, sure, but why not?

Ambiguity: love it or you hate it, you can’t be ambivalent.

Sigmund Freud, father of Psychology, wrote of the continual war waged inside every person’s skull, the id tempting us in one direction while the superego yanks us in the opposite. It takes a whole third structure – Freud called it the ego – to hold us together when half of us wants to eat, drink, sleep, and fuck, while the other simultaneously mandates work, household chores, picking up the kids from school. Fail in fealty to either and who can say what the consequences will be?

It’s a zero-sum zeitgeist but who would have it any other way? James Ellroy sure wouldn’t. This is the vibe that James Ellroy grooves on; This is the melody that James Ellroy plays. James Ellroy writes about the Good by writing about the Bad. James Ellroy loves Cops and James Ellroy shows it by writing about Crooks. James Ellroy likes to italicise Words and give them Capital Letters. James Ellroy possesses a stuttering style that always allows alliteration. It’s hard-hitting, hyper-caffeinated, and hip. It’s addictive as adrenaline and convincingly contagious.

‘Profoundly profane’ Ellroy calls himself, ‘and always striking my own chord of theocratic Tory rectitude melded with street jive’. Oh yes. This is nothing less than alliteration as incantation. The words themselves aren’t exactly necessary. Their precise meaning is negotiable. But they sure do something. Each one is another eye of newt tossed into to the weird cauldron of Ellroy’s prose. Maybe this time – this time - the sinister spell will spiel and malevolent magic manifest. Pablo Picasso thought the same way. He too fashioned fetishes, totems, occult objects bearing preternatural power. And yes, I did just compare James Ellroy to Pablo Picasso.  And yes, I do agree it isn’t a comparison we want to stretch beyond its natural limits. So let’s think some more about James Ellroy.

James Ellroy is the Demon Dog of American Literature.

It’s James Ellroy (by which I mean James Ellroy the man as much as James Ellroy the writer) who makes this book far more than a mere collection of old crime-scene photos with captions attached.  I mean, it is a collection of old crime-scene photos with captions attached, but it’s not just that. Honest. Let’s see.

LAPD ’53 - a collaboration between a great crime-writer and the Los Angeles Police Museum. A team of researchers sorted a stack of old photos and then another stack and another. They handled black-and-white evidence of crimes and crime-scenes, perps and cops, hopheads and jazz junkies, that no one had viewed for decades. They edited them carefully, removing most of the splatter shots, the blood-pools, the wrecked limbs and dismantled bodies, leaving us with a panoptic, 207-page cinematic establishing-shot worthy of La-La Land in the mid-50s. And then one of the researchers – the world-famous one – wrote the text.

He built that text around an isolated man-monument, constructed it like a film-script around a single theme. That man-monument is William H Parker, Chief of the LAPD from 1950 to 1966. Ellroy calls him ‘Whiskey Bill’. One of the book’s many recurring phrases goes this way: ‘It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. We just live in it’.

‘William H Parker III. The greatest American policeman of the 20^th century […] Reformer. Reactionary. Town tamer. Progressive. Profligate, pious, soused on the sauce.’

No one else writes like that. This is Police Officer Ellroy’s beat. We just walk it with him for a while.

Ellroy tells us about the ‘tub-thumping theocrat’ who ‘possessed a pulsing passion for the stern rule of law’, brilliant and maddening as a flawed engagement-ring rock. Parker ‘loathed and feared chaos – in large part because of his alcoholic affliction and chaotic temperament’. The rule-of-law society that he envisioned and struggled so hard to establish proves that ‘Freedom isn’t free’. If Parker is the presiding genius of the book, he is a genius who looks both right and left, both dexter and sinister, Freudian superego and id.

‘You dig the trade-off don’t you? We needed Whiskey Bill Parker’s methods in 1953. We need a reinstatement of them today. Parker’s beloved Pueblo Grande built up and out during the time of his stewardship. He could not contain its growth nor cutail its change of complexion. He wanted to keep it the way it was Then. I cannot fault him for that. It’s why I’m writing the text for this book. Then to Now. All notions of the ordered society and the civil contract have been trashed. Where’s Whiskey Bill Parker when we really need him?’

Ellroy’s character sketch comes close to what psychologists call an idiographic study – that is, a cold deep-dive into a single personality, without regard for generalisation, wide-angle scope, or complementary colour. Idiographic studies contrast with nomothetic ones, which do the opposite. The word ‘nomothetic’ means ‘lawful’. And this book contains plenty about lawfulness. It contains plenty about the individual and how the individual butts his head against the lawful.

Another of Ellroy’s recurrent tropes runs this way: ‘Crime is an individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale’. He doesn’t care for your fancy sociological shenanigans. ‘The root causes do not apply. Your right to hit your neighbor ends where his nose begins. Your shitty childhood and the established facts of historical racism do not mean shit’.

In one revealing picture, a motorcycle cop looks out over the road like a homeowner looking out over his newly-mowed lawn. He wants everyone to obey the law. He wants everyone to stay safe. He wants his panorama nomothetic. Why? Because he wants his ‘magical concrete ribbon’ kept clean and tidy. He doesn’t want to see it messed up with anarchistic bits from idiographic automobile crashes. Stay in your lane, drivers, and concentrate.

Reactionary author James Ellroy does not care for ‘poverty creates crime’ or ‘capitalism manufactures crime in the same way a hat-maker manufactures hats’. Ellroy points the finger right at Him, and Her, and Them. They did it, make them pay. It’s an ‘individual moral forfeit’, even if it does take place on an ‘epidemic scale’. Cops ‘must feel free to judiciously kick ass’. Nothing else is going to save us. Crime-loving author James Ellroy, on the other hand (the man who invented the phrase ‘The Big Nowhere’ - the man who seems to have spent much of his career on a psychological and sometimes physical search for his murdered mother)…well, that James Ellroy is a different matter.

This is how the book lights up, in the arc lamp flickering across this psychological space. Film noir and bebop ride shotgun to the text. The photographs are irresistibly noir, in fact (‘the sad demography of trouble in paradise’): spilling over with those black blacks and white whites that the expressionist directors made their own. Film noir haunts the reader’s mind from the beginning of the book anyway – this is Los Angeles after all – and so do its lessons. Film noir teaches us that it’s all a game, and you have to follow the rules. If you don’t, you’re dead. But if you do, you’re dead anyway. Nothing makes any difference because the game is rigged from the start and we’re all going to die. If you love film noir, you love a bleak lesson in life.

Bebop, meanwhile, is the raucous, rigorous antithesis to the very concept of rules. It’s ‘decadently discordant. It’s the sock-it-to-me sonics of interminable chord changes off a recognisable main theme. It’s music for cultured cognoscenti that Bill Parker cannot acknowledge. It takes brains and patience to groove the gist of this shit. It’s the musical equivalent of the chaos Bill Parker deplores’. Dexter Gordon, no less, is playing the sax out at Chino, busted on a dope jolt. What law-loving hepcat has a superego so over-active he would not be willing to commit a crime just in order to get busted alongside him? Maybe Bill Parker secretly longed for a black polo-neck, a goatee, and beret. We can only speculate.

Ellroy gives us a flesh-and blood example. In the soul of a young man named Rickey White lurks the whole thesis of his book. Rickey White was just the kind of person ‘Whiskey Bill’ Parker hated, hated: ‘because he lives a slothful life devoted to SIN’. Rickey White was a petty thief, and a burglar, too. Not just any sort of burglar, but the worst kind. If burglars were stored in a barrel, Rickey White would be the scrapings of that barrel. He’s what they call an ‘acquaintance burglar’ – meaning Rickey White would befriend you, buy you a drink, take you out for the evening, Then, while you were at the club, he’d sneak back to your pad and burgle you. Now, that’s low.

Here’s White’s rap sheet: ‘when acquaintance leaves house, subject leaves with him and then doubles back and burglarizes house by entering through a rear bedroom or bathroom window. Subject does not work, but hangs out in pool halls in the Watts area, where he is well known’.

You know what makes it worse? White looks cool. White has a ‘kool Then, kool Now pencil mustache’. White, in fact, is cool. He plays sax. He’s a hepcat like Dexter Gordon himself. ‘He’s a felonious feline about town. He fulfills our basest urge to morally forfeit. Individual responsibility is a shuck. His kool kat-outlaw look tells us that. Bebop says, “FUCK THE MAN!”’ White may well ‘extol the wisdom of an unwavering moral compass’, but, hell, he looks agreeable while he’s doing it.

This is Police Officer Ellroy’s beat. We just walk it with him for a while.

True-crime fans receive a small bonus. No less a star that Pierce Brooks gets a cameo. If you are unfamiliar with the name, let me fill you in: Brooks was the LAPD’s ‘philosopher king’. In one of the Department’s most celebrated cases, he caught the appalling Harvey Glatman, who liked to kidnap women, tie them up, and strangle them. When Glatman was executed in 1959, Brooks was there to watch. Brooks also got involved in the famous Onion Field case in which a police officer was executed without reason or mercy. A book about the case – also called The Onion Field - was written by then-LAPD officer Joseph Wambaugh, who is sometimes credited with inventing the American police procedural. His books were picked up and ravenously read by a young miscreant and small-time crook. They made him feel both ashamed and righteously ambitious. That young miscreant was James Ellroy, who went on to put Pierce Brooks’ picture across two pages of LAPD ’53.

Brooks himself went on to write police manuals and invent VICAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension program - in response to America’s contemporaneous wave of serial crime.

In the picture, young Brooks is a narcotics cops, contemplating a haul of marijuana from someone’s garage. He is not celebrated yet. No one is putting him in their books. The future lies before him.

I love this book. Perhaps I shouldn’t. The author doesn’t do much to reassure me. A certain itch of hypocrisy bothers him more than somewhat. Here he is, berating his younger, 1953-era, self:

‘Get off that pulpit, five-year-old Ellroy! You’re the biggest bop and noir hypocrite in the world! There’s Rickey White, blatting his sax at Club Zombie. That’s you, snapping your fingers and grooving the scene with a spike in your arm!’

Hypocrite? I’m not so sure. Either way, maybe you will love this book, too. It’s worth your time, I promise you. Whether you emerge from it cleaner or dirtier, though - that’s beyond my ability to promise:

‘It’s 1953. The victim is most likely being attended by a police physician. A properly-solicitous police-woman is surely standing by’.

Be brilliant: biff, bop, or beep a blue button below:

All quotes from James Ellroy with Glynn Martin: LAPD ’53, Abrams, New York, 2015. It’s available wherever you get your books – and, if it’s not, yell at them till it is.