L.A. Confidential

⚖The case for it

Ellroy cut a much longer manuscript to this length by stripping words out of sentences rather than removing scenes, and the sentences left “go off like a shotgun at close range.” Three cops carry it: Exley the careerist, White the enforcer built by a childhood he watched, Vincennes the vice cop moonlighting for a television show and feeding a scandal magazine. None of them is a hero and the book never pretends otherwise. A decade of interlocking cases turns out to be “an intricate mystery that fits together neatly at the end,” and readers call this “the heart of Ellroy’s four-novel masterpiece.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

One reader counted forty named characters inside the first fifteen pages and put the book down. The telegraphic style is the divide, since the “rat-a-tat style can be headache-inducing” and sentences have to be reparsed to work out who did what: “the movie is complicated. The book is confounding.” The cases sprawl across a decade until “the story was repeating itself too much” around the two-thirds mark. The racist and homophobic language runs constantly, period-accurate to some and reaching for shock to others. Even a sympathetic trade review calls it a “rambling farrago in need of editing.”

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings