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Category Archives: James Ellroy
Mid-summer reading report back: Perfidia, Japanese tattoos, eighties sleaze
Summer in Melbourne is usually the one time of the year I can be guaranteed to get a fair amount of personal reading done. As has become my annual practice, a short report back on the books I have got through is in order.
Perfidia, James Ellroy
I need to preface my comments on Perfidia by stressing I am a massive Ellroy fan. I have read all of his books – ALL of them – many more than once. I even liked The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover, the two books that most divided readers. So, it is with a heavy heart that I say Perfidia is very disappointing. The long awaited prelude to Ellroy’s LA Quintet, Perfidia takes place in Los Angeles over 23 days in December 1941, a period in which American went from being at piece to the attack on Pearl Harbour and the country being at war.
The focal point of the book is the brutal murder on the eve of Pearl Harbour of a Japanese family. The killings have all the hallmarks of traditional Japanese ritual deaths. Drawn into the murder investigation are future LAPD chief William H Parker, the meanest crime fiction cop ever created, Dudley Smith, a brilliant young Japanese police forensic scientist, and Kay Lake, a woman with a major thing for bad men.… Read more
Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Japan, Eurocrime, James Ellroy, True crime
Tagged Akimitsu Takagi, Blood's A Rover, Dudley Smith, Eric Beetner, Jacks and Jokers, James Ellroy, James Hopwood, LA Quintet, Massimo Carlotto, Matthew Condon, Paul Bishop, Perfidia, Pulse Fiction, Scott Alderberg, Spiders and Flies, The Cold Six Thousand, The Master of Knots, The Tattoo Murder Case, Three Crooked Kings, Tommy Hancock, Vol 1
The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books
I love poking around in second-hand bookshops. The more disorganised and dishevelled, the better. I can’t remember the last time I found one with a curtained off section where they stashed the adult stuff, the pulp fiction and true crime, but those ones were best of all.
It’s always sad to hear about the closure of a second handbook shop and they’ve been closing with alarming frequency in Melbourne over the last few years.
The latest casualty is Flinders Books, which had operated out of the basement at 119 Swanston Street, for 18 years. Before that it had reportedly been a trading card shop, and going back even further, a rest and recreation area for military personnel after World War II.
Basement Books, located at 342 Flinders Street is, as far as I know, the last second-hand bookshop in the Melbourne CBD.
The reasons behind the closure are nothing new: changing book buying habits, including the rise of e-books, coupled with a massive rent increase, all of which, according to the owner, made the business impossible to sustain at its current location.
As if the end of a good second-hand bookstore is not sad enough, the passing of Flinders Books has a wider historical significance. For the last eight years of its existence it also hosted the remnants of Kill City Books, once Melbourne’s premier bookshop specialising in crime fiction and true crime.… Read more
Summer reading report back 2013
As the summer holiday’s draw to an end and the business part of 2013 kicks off, it’s time for a little run down of what I’ve read over the Christmas/New Year period and how I’m going to approach my reading in the year ahead.
I’ve seen the 1972 movie Fat City, directed by John Huston, many times but never read the 1969 book of the same name by Leonard Gardner. It was hands down my read of the summer. Indeed, I’ll go as far as saying it’s one of the most beautifully written novels I can remember reading in a while.
Set in the fifties, Fat City is the story of two amateur boxers, Ernie Munger and Billy Tully. Tully is the older of the two, a former fighter who wants another shot at the big time. The fact he’s an alcoholic means he’s got no chance. Munger is a young man with potential, but you know from the first time we meet him, he’s not going to amount to much. The book follows the hopes, dreams and most of all, anxieties of these two men through a series of bars, flop houses and dead end jobs. As I said, there’s never any doubt the two won’t amount to much, the question is just how far they’ll slide.… Read more
Posted in Crime Factory, Crime fiction, James Ellroy, Lee Marvin, Noir fiction
Tagged American Death Songs, Blood of Paradise, Crime Wave Press, David Corbett, Dead Sea, Dwaybe Epstein, Fat City, James Ellroy, Jim Nisbet, Jordan Harper, Lee Marvin: Point Blank, Leonard Gardner, Lethal Injection, Nicole Moore, Patricia Hindsmith, Sam Lopez, Shakedown, The Censor's Library, The Talented Mr Ripley