THE REAL PULP FICTION

By Paul Gray

A FEW YEARS AGO, JAMES ELLROY picked up a copy of Libra, Don DeLillo's 1988 fictional meditation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At the time, Ellroy was a writer with a growing cult reputation; his crime novels, set in his native Los Angeles--The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential--had shown up on paperback best-seller lists and inspired much chatter among mystery fans: here was a guy who had pushed the genre way, way past hardboiled, into the realm of the terminally scalded. Ellroy seemed set on a path toward at least a shot at the ambition he had brashly revealed to interviewers who began seeking him out: "I want to be known as the greatest crime novelist who ever lived!"

But something about Libra unsettled Ellroy. It was too good. DeLillo's imagined journeys into the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, among others, had an eerie density and plausibility that Ellroy admired and did not want to emulate. "When I finished the book," he remembers, "I said, 'Now I can never write about that subject.' "

This thought immediately proved intolerable. How could the greatest crime-novelist-in-waiting be denied the subject of the greatest crime? The answer struck Ellroy as simple: he couldn't and wouldn't. "I said, 'Wait a minute. I can write an epic in which the assassination is only one crime in a long series of crimes. I can write a novel of collusion about the unsung leg breakers of history. I can do a tabloid sewer crawl through the private nightmare of public policy.' "

Hence, American Tabloid (Knopf; 576 pages; $25). One month after publication, the novel is in its fourth printing and is creeping up the best-seller lists. It has attracted favorable, though sometimes nervous, reviews, understandably so. Recommending a book like American Tabloid--and there is no other book quite like American Tabloid-is most safely done to close friends, whose tastes and tolerances are familiar. Where do they stand on wall-to-wall violence? What is their position on over-the-top sleaze and the reduction of nearly all human conduct to the narrow, insistent lust of self-interest? Pushing such stuff to total strangers could get a person arrested.

If so, bring in the stenographer for a full confession. At a time when storytelling has largely been ceded to film-makers--when Pulp Fiction causes more chatter than pulp fiction--American Tabloid is a big, boisterous, rude and shameless reminder of why reading can be so engrossing and so much fun. The secret, of course, is language. When it is used well-which in Ellroy's case means being pared down to taut, telegraphic sentences, subject-verb-blooey!-one word is worth a thousand pictures.

The mayhem begins in 1958, unfolding through the eyes and deeds of three men in their early 40s who have not yet learned that they are out-and-out psychopaths. Pete Bondurant is a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff who now works for Howard Hughes; Pete's duties include overseeing the staffing of Hush-Hush, a scandal rag Hughes has bought for titillation and political smears, plus procuring drugs for and keeping process servers away from his billionaire boss. One day Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, who is being hounded by the Senate's McClellan committee and chief counsel Robert Kennedy, calls to offer Pete $10,000 to kill a man in Miami.

Then there is Kemper Boyd, a corrupt FBI agent from a once illustrious and then bankrupt Tennessee family ("My father went broke and killed himself. He willed me ninety-one dollars and the gun he did it with"). Recognizing an accomplished sneak when he sees one, Director J. Edgar Hoover persuades Kemper to tender a sham resignation from the agency--while retaining his salary--and to hire on with Bobby Kennedy's Senate investigative team as a spy. Hoover hates the Kennedys. But Kemper, who gets the job, takes to the brothers, especially Jack, in whom he recognizes his own libidinous tendencies slated for greatness.

Finally, there is Ward Littell, another FBI agent and Kemper's protege, a former Jesuit seminarian who works in the Chicago office tracking drab, hopeless domestic communists and hungering for a chance to put his massive idealism to better use. Kemper gives him the chance to do some sub rosa snooping for Bobby Kennedy, thereby condemning a number of people, including John F. Kennedy, to untimely death.

Ellroy sends these three rogue enforcers off on a bizarre fictionalized trek through five years of U.S. history: the pursuit of Hoffa, the Mob's unhappiness over the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the loss of the Havana casino revenues, the 1960 presidential campaign, the long debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Pete, Kemper and Ward play hair-raising roles in all of this, and much more besides.

American Tabloid is history as Hellzapoppin, a long slapstick routine careering around a manic premise: What if the fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon."

It can be argued rather persuasively that such descriptions are now unconscionable, that fiction should be a genteel escape from the encroaching horrors of contemporary life rather than a blueprint for more of the same. The weakness of this case is that it denies narrative art its taproot into the muck and mire of the subconscious; it forgets that private nightmares will fester in solitary confinement instead of finding cathartic company in the public community of stories.

Ellroy, 47, is a 6-ft. 2-in. walking testimonial to the redeeming power of reading and writing fiction; his life has been, in patches, as rough and messy as many of the scenes in his books. His parents divorced when he was six, and he shuttled between them for four years until his mother, a registered nurse and an alcoholic, was found murdered near a high school playground in a small town east of Los Angeles. "At the time, my bereavement was ambiguous," Ellroy says. "My mother was a volatile woman, and I thought she'd been mean to me. It took me years to understand that thinking of her in that way did us both a disservice." The crime was never solved, but Ellroy has spent the past five months investigating it and plans to write a book about what he discovers.

Living full time with his father, a small-time entrepreneur who had once been Rita Hayworth's business manager, the teenage Ellroy discovered a taste for Hardy Boys novels and trouble. He was kicked out of high school for misbehavior and then out of the U.S. Army--after an ill-considered enlistment--when he feigned uncontrollable stuttering and ran naked about his boot camp. He got home in time to care for and then bury his father, dead of a series of strokes and heart attacks, and to lapse into a lost decade of what he calls "booze and drugs and Mickey Mouse crimes." At 27 he blacked out and was rushed to a hospital, where post-alcoholic brain syndrome was diagnosed. Eventually he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, took caddying jobs to support himself and mustered the courage to start writing his first mystery novel.

The steady ascent of Ellroy's career was abetted by a flair for self-promotion. He told everyone who would listen about his checkered past and posed as the tough ex-hood who was going to raze the house of crime fiction. Reporters who interviewed him found strange messages on their answering machines: "It's James Ellroy. Woof, woof! Demon Dog of American Literature."

Ellroy now seems embarrassed at such bravado. "It was a way of getting attention," he says. "Actually, as a criminal I was a joke. After the profligate way I've lived, I fear disorder." He keeps it at bay through hard work-at least five hours a day scrawling block letters on three-hole notebook paper-and quiet living. He and his second wife, journalist and author Helen Knode, are buying a house in Kansas City, Missouri, where her mother lives. "It's peaceful there," Ellroy says. "It's normal."

American Tabloid is the first installment of a trilogy he plans to call Underworld, U.S.A. "The next one will begin 15 minutes after the first one ends and run through 1968. The third will pick up there and finish in 1973." Vietnam. More assassinations. Watergate. Years of work "swimming around," as he says, "in the gutter of history." Does he have, for old time's sake, anything outrageous to say? Ellroy pauses for a beat: "I think American Tabloid is an outrageously great book." That is not, come to think of it, such a wild surmise.