I want
to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their
humanity.
-James Ellroy
-James Ellroy
I
recently finished reading Ellroy’s epic crime novel, The Cold Six
Thousand. It's a classic. Starting with the FBI-orchestrated Kennedy
assassination (detailed in Ellroy’s fore-running novel American
Tabloid), we’re introduced to hitman Wayne Tedrow Jr, who has
arrived in Dallas to kill a black pimp. The moment he gets off the
plane, he’s caught up in the JFK conspiracy. FBI man Ward Littell
and Howard Hughes’ hitman Pete Bondurant return to clear up the
mess of their slightly botched Kennedy hit (fall guy Oswald is still
alive after he kills the policeman sent to kill him). Littell and
Bondurant then continue to shape American history via ‘Nam war dope
dealing, further JFK cover-ups, a link-up with Tedrow Jr and
eventually the whacking of both Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy.
The
Cold Six Thousand is a riveting, violent-as-hell read and a great
retelling of history, although Ellroy’s choppy sentence structure
becomes testing after a few hundred pages. There's also a couple of
instances when things become unrealistic. For instance, a man has
been paid to kill someone- someone who, it emerges, is the same
individual the hitman has been tracking down for some time, for his
own reasons. I thought I'd misunderstood this, but a quick Google
search shows this as a bizarre coincidence within the story.
That
said, I love conspiracy stories where the author shows us flashes of
a history that we’re already familiar with, only accompanied with a
very different back story, tempting us to change our beliefs about
the past. Ellroy is the master of this. As is usual from Ellroy,
it's ridiculously complex so be prepared for a head fuck. An
incredible, 700-page, Sunday-Times-Bestselling head fuck. Read
American Tabloid. Then read The Cold Six Thousand.
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