The Structure of the Whole: James Ellroy’s LA Quartet Series

Abstract

The Los Angeles Quartet comprises some of the most critically praised work in the career of American crime writer James Ellroy, yet despite its influence on the genre, the LA Quartet is not easy to define or quantify in terms of which works belong to the series, nor is its identity as a series fixed. Most sources, including the author himself, refer to theQuartet as the following four works: The Black Dahlia (1987), a novelization of the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short; The Big Nowhere (1988), in which a string of homosexual murders are set against the backdrop of the Second Red Scare; L.A. Confidential (1990), a sprawling noir thriller which satirizes Hollywood and the Disney Corporation; and the concluding volume White Jazz (1992), where an uncontrollable outburst of violence takes LA to the brink of anarchy. The novels, however, are not bound together in strict narrative lines, but broadly cover the years 1947 to 1959: White Jazz, for instance, is narrated by the protagonist Dave Klein in an indeterminate present day looking back on events in LA in 1959. The titles of the second and fourth novels refer specifically to music, and the novels flow through Ellroy’s fictional reimagining of LA history not as direct sequels but as a form of literary music in which the narrative voice is another instrument added to the plotting and milieu, which is exemplified on an individual level: Ellroy once described his characters as people who ‘dance to the music in their own heads’ (Tucker 2012, 5).