the essential
Wild cries, profanities and outbursts, humor and talent: the great James Ellroy put on his show yesterday at Ombres Blanches.
The conference room on rue Mirepoix is packed. We’ve been waiting for half an hour – some arrived well before everyone else to get a place in front. Suddenly, there he is: huge, wearing a black fedora and wearing one of his famous flowered shirts, James Ellroy climbs onto the small stage, grabs the microphone and screams a cry that would make the Metallica singer look like a little boy Choirs. The Ellroy show can begin.
“We come to see the author, but also the character”
A few moments before, in the bookstore, Bruno, a thirty-year-old from Toulouse, holds “LA Confidential” and “Le Dahlia Noir” in his hands: “I came to Ellroy through the films adapted from his novels,” he confides. “I am a lover of detective novels and comics – I rarely come to writers’ meetings, but here…”
Bouchra doesn’t travel to meet the authors either: today is even her first time! “It’s still James Ellroy, an illustrious figure in men’s literature. Everything is hyper-documented, rich and very well written, she observes. And then he had such an incredible life…” From incredible, we move on to rock’n’roll: Jérôme, 62 years old and boxer’s build, is impatient: “I’ve been reading Ellroy since the beginning and the “Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy”. I like his style, his characters, his rhythm. And then hey , we come to see the author, but also the character…” Evelyne, a little further on, has little taste for the excesses of the character but has every intention of having a book signed by the one whose son, who has just celebrated his birthday, is an absolute fan – a few minutes later she will send a photo of her and the master to the son, who must be framing it…
A “good customer”
Flash forward. Bouchra, Evelyne and Jérôme were joined by a good hundred other fans of the author of “Lune Sanglante”. After the battle cry, the conversation begins, mainly around the latest opus, “The Enchanters”, a thorough and very high-tension takedown of the American dream through two of its most powerful symbols: Hollywood and Marylin Monroe. Many English speakers came – there was no question of missing the Pope of American noir novels, who knows that he is a “good customer” – he told us just before the meeting. “I want to make you obsessed with the year 1962,” he said; “I’m not going to dump utter shit on your lap after 600 pages,” speaking of its central character, Freddy Otash, the “biggest shitbag in Los Angeles – and that’s saying something!”
Behind the sulphurous writer hides a kid battered by life and a man of faith. “It wasn’t writing that saved my life, it was God,” he told us before the meeting, half-heartedly evoking the terrible tragedy he experienced at age 10, when his mother was killed in horrific circumstances. All his work, all the violence of his prose comes from this original crime, from this first and almost primal pain.
James Ellroy gets up, pulls up his pants, grabs his hat and resumes the signing session. Another day in the life of one of the greatest writers of the last 40 years.
