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The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy.

(Written for a book about Hollywood novels, edited by David Pringle and as yet unpublished.)

Nothing is what it once was, but Hollywood never could live up to its glitzy portrayal in the Golden Age of movies. When I was living in Los Angeles in the 1980's, Hollywood was one of two places that English visitors had to see (the other being Disneyland), and I worked out a route from LAX to my apartment that took in Hollywood Boulevard because driving through Hollywood as quickly as possible was the safest way of seeing it. My visitors, bleary with jet-lag, took in its tawdriness, with Korean grocery stores to the east and leather bars to the west bracketing the hotsheet motels where whores of all five sexes prowled, and resolved that it wasn't worth returning to -- nor is it, given that the big studios have moved out to Burbank and beyond, and the only remnants of past glory are the fossilised footprints of dead stars outside Mann's Chinese Theatre, the municipally-sponsored stars on the sidewalk and the Hollywood Wax Museum.

It is the action on the streets rather than that on the soundstages that James Ellroy brilliantly evokes in his historical thriller, The Big Nowhere, the second volume of hisL.A. Quartet (the other novels are The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz). Set at the beginning of the fifties, The Big Nowhere eschews the usual Hollywood glitz for the darker demi-monde glimpsed in the noir films and pulp fictions of the '40's and '50's, a world of sleazy nightclubs and kinky sex, hair-trigger violence and horrific murders, Z-grade westerns made on a two-week turnaround, jazz and drugs. Ellroy refurbishes these elements with breakneck pacing, huge casts and widescreen scenarios, and mystery plots in which there is an absence of any moral restraint on the part of criminals or cops.

The plot of The Big Nowhere fuses police department politics and communist witch-hunts with a series of homosexual-related murders of unrestrained brutality. Two senior detectives, Mal Considine and Dudley Smith, aided by an ex-policeman, Buzz Meeks, bagman and fixer for Howard Hughes, are investigating communist infiltration of studio unions. Their evidence will be used in a Grand Jury investigation which will aid the political ambitions of the head of the District Attorney's Criminal Division and help studio bosses remove legitimate unions and replace them with the more compliant, mob-led Teamsters. A young, hot-shot detective, Danny Upshaw, obsessed with solving the serial murders (and denying to himself that his fascination has anything to do with his own repressed homosexuality), agrees to infiltrate a communist cell and seduce the woman who bankrolls it in exchange for man-power to help solve the killings.

But Upshaw delves too deep, fails in his seduction, and is driven to suicide. Considine and Meeks follow through on his investigations, and unearth not only the serial killer, but a buried secret of Dudley Smith, a powerful and deeply corrupt Mephistophelean figure who appears, in this and other novels in the sequence, as the nemesis against whom the struggles and ambitions of the other cops are defined. Only Meeks survives to give Considine and Upshaw their valediction.

The novel, propelled at a terrific rate by Ellroy's compressed, urgent, telegraphic prose, delivers a triple punch. It is an intricate and carefully plotted mystery; a graphic depiction of cops as violent, obsessed (a word that is difficult to avoid in any exposition of Ellroy's fiction) men working within a system of hierarchical patronage; and a densely worked recreation of Hollywood and Los Angeles in the early fifties, when hysterical communist witch-hunts divided Hollywood. Upshaw, Considine and Meeks are lost souls caught in the gears of machine politics, driven and obsessed, each hiding a tragic flaw. A considerable part of the strength of the narrative comes from the way Ellroy filters the action through the flawed perceptions of the three men, and the way in which he plays them against each other, like an inverted image of the Three Musketeers.

Although not derived from direct experience (although he was once an alcoholic petty thief living rough in the most dangerous parts of downtown L.A.), and far removed from the painstaking police procedural novels of the school of Ed McBain, Ellroy's depiction of the police as a barely contained, almost elemental force, has the ring of internal consistency. To Ellroy's detectives, solving crimes is no more important than their internecine feuding: closed cases are the currency by which promotion and political advantages are won. More than this, Ellroy's plumbing of the moronic inferno behind Hollywood's tinsel glitz, from the depths of L.A.'s seamy underculture to the machinations of corrupt studio bosses is unflinching and richly detailed, with bit-parts for Howard Hughes and his chain of starlets, and real-life gangsters such as Johnny Stompanato (Lana Turner's gigolo) and Mickey Cohen.

It is the milieu glimpsed in the intersections of sleaze and stardom that are gossipingly recorded in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, a brutal time in which right-wing organisations, such as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (president: John Wayne) were encouraging anti-communist trials which destroyed the careers and dozens of actors, directors and writers, including the godfather of noir fiction, Dashiell Hammett. But Hollywood, like its product, is a self-engulfing illusion which continually rewrites its own history. The baby moguls who, in their Range Rovers and Mazdas, cruise past the tawdry spectacle of Hollywood Boulevard in air-conditioned, tinted-windscreen comfort, have probably never heard of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, but it is a part of the Hollywood story that should not be forgotten. The Big Nowhere, and the two novels which continue and conclude Ellroy's widescreen depiction of the underside of Los Angelean history, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz, are enduring and original evocations of the brawling reality that surrounded and permeated the mannered make-believe played out on the sound stages of the big studios

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