Blood's a Rover Book

There have been few books as keenly awaited as this final volume of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, Blood’s A Rover (the title is from A E Housman), set during the incendiary period of 1968-1972. As ever, we have an amazingly ambitious synthesis of crime and political chicanery, with the social mores of the day forensically examined. And all of this is delivered with the gusto we have to come to expect from one of the world’s most accomplished crime novelists (with, thankfully, the curiously alienating stylistic tics of the earlier The Cold Six Thousand a distant memory).Apart from the roles for such compromised real-life characters as Richard Nixon, Ellroy focuses (in a large dramatis personae) on three protagonists: Wayne Tedrow, Jr, one of Ellroy's almost operatically off-kilter characters: a killer (numbering parricide among his many crimes) who plays every side against each other with total dedication; Dwight Holly, a hard man and facilitator for J Edgar Hoover at his most sinister, who senses that the rising of Richard Nixon’s star might be good for him, and Don Crutchfield, known as ‘Crutch’, a low-rent private eye who finds himself mired in a conspiracy reaching from the upper echelons of power to the farthest reaches of America’s underclass. All of these damaged protagonists are stirred into a brew as heady as anything Ellroy has ever concocted – and the result is a state-of-the-nation (circa late 60s-early 70s) novel as scarifying as anything American literature has seen. Blood’s A Rover is most definitely not for all tastes, but those who esteem James Ellroy highly (and there are legions who do) will be transfixed – if not elated (it’s a caustic world view Ellroy serves up). --Barry ForshawRead More