James Ellroy: ‘Whatever I can conceive I can execute’

He's the self-proclaimed "demon dog" of American fiction, the foul-mouthed writer with the lurid past whose lightning-paced, viscerally plotted novels form a violent alternative history of the US. Today, however, James Ellroy merely seems dog tired. Slumped on a banquette at a Dublin hotel, he apologises for being "utterly hammered" while stretching his arms dramatically. "I gotta yawn, brother."

Even as he describes his new novel, Perfidia, in swaggering terms – "It's a romance, about bigness, about scope, about the huge metamorphosis that the world went into when the fascist and Soviet drum beat began to roll" – Ellroy cannot fight back his weary ennui. The man known as the profane and provocative chronicler of the United States' darkest impulses yawns once more. "This means I'm bored with myself."

Then the talk turns to the political landscape of the US and the wider world on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, the era in which Perfidia is set, and Ellroy begins to stir. "Good, this is keeping me awake, this is some new shit," he says, perking up. "In the great totalitarian dictatorships there's really scant distinction between left and right. The key bad guys of the era – Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Soviet Russia – they're all psychopathic, racially motivated, genocidal f***heads. The evil these motherf***ers perpetrated is staggering."

There follows an animated, free-associating spiel about the Great Depression, the rise of the Nazis and the concurrent emergence of right-wing populist demagogues in America, such as Gerald LK Smith, a real-life 1940s rabble-rouser who features in the new novel. “As a 17-year-old I heard Gerald LK Smith speak in the Embassy Auditorium in downtown LA,” Ellroy says. “He could still crank it up. There were always some good right-wing fiends around Los Angeles when I was a kid.”

It's a quintessential Ellroy riff, full of the exaggerated slang and historical intrigue that run through his work, particularly his epic Underworld USA trilogy of American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover. It's full of the sordid local lore and personal resonances that mark his earlier LA Quartet of crime novels.

Above all his impromptu monologue speaks of just how connected the writer feels to the world in which the new novel takes place. “It was in my bones,” he says. “I’m not trying to pass myself off as a contemporary writer addressing these times. Los Angeles in 1941 is my prism.”

New quartet

As the first volume in a proposed new quartet that will link with those seven previous novels and “cover LA and America at large from 1941 to 1972”,

Perfidia

features a cast familiar to readers of the writer’s earlier works. Set in the febrile atmosphere of early wartime, when Japanese-Americans were interned and rumours of treachery abounded, the novel follows four characters whose paths cross after a Japanese family is murdered. There’s the ambitious, alcoholic William H Parker, a real-life police captain who turns up in the LA Quartet; the adventurous Kay Lake, also the protagonist in Ellroy’s breakthrough novel,

The Black Dahlia

; Hideo Ashida, a brilliant chemist marginalised by homosexuality and Japanese ancestry; and Dudley Smith, the Irish-born cop whose charm, corruption and ruthlessness were memorably portrayed by

James Cromwell

in the film version of Ellroy’s

LA Confidential

.

Ellroy chose the period because “it’s as dramatic an opening as the two hammer blows that began Beethoven’s third symphony”. But the setting also allowed further exploration of the questions of racial and national identity that have run through his novels in graphically epithetical form. Ellroy dismisses any connections between the “enemy within” paranoia of his novel and the atmosphere of the United States since 9/11: “It’s too easy to say this is a book about 9/11 when it had nothing to do with that. And I don’t see mass internment of Arab Americans in the US.”

Instead Ellroy sees Perfidia as a new departure, calling it a "historical romance". For all the labyrinthine conspiracies and blood-soaked set pieces, he says it is ultimately about "these heart-stopping, brilliant, libidinous, crazy human beings looking for love". Sure enough, the book has some uncharacteristically reflective and even tender passages. Even the casually homicidal Dudley Smith, arguably Ellroy's most enduringly menacing character, finds himself smitten, while being haunted by his bloody past as an IRA gunman.

“It comes back to my basic metier, depicting the secret human infrastructure of large public events,” he says. “What I’ve learned from the Underworld USA trilogy is that if my depiction of that human infrastructure is moving and dramatically plausible, then the history will follow suit.”

Such vaulting ambition has long been an Ellroy trait. He may have started out as a crime novelist, but, he says, he has long outgrown the tag. "I think grandly, truth be told." He has written in My Dark Places, his memoir, about devouring crime fiction as a way of dealing with the unsolved murder of his mother, Jean Ellroy (nee Hilliker), in 1958, when he was 10 years old. But even then, he says, he was thinking bigger.

"In the months following my mother's death I turned to crime fiction, but I also turned to the novel," he says. "I would have these summer reading projects. I'd get big books like James Jones's novels, From Here to Eternity and Some Came Running, a total of 2,100 pages, maybe a million words, in the summer of 1961, when I was 13. So then of course I would want to write big novels."

Sober alcoholic

It was some time before he achieved his goal. Ellroy spent his teens and 20s in an alcoholic and narcotic haze, as a vagrant petty criminal, before kicking his addictions in the late 1970s. “I’m a sober alcoholic,” he says. “It’s not a conscious battle with me: I’ve turned my life and will over to the care of God, and I’m happily sober.”

Finding employment as a caddy, he started writing, publishing his first novel, Brown's Requiem, in 1981. "I only had ambition and instinct in the world, but no art. The Black Dahlia is the start of history and me."

As well as being the opening salvo of the LA Quartet, the 1987 novel was the culmination of Ellroy’s long obsession with the gory and misogynistic 1947 murder on to which he had projected the persona of his murdered mother. Writing books brought some stability to his previously chaotic existence. “This is something I’ve seen in great homicide detectives. They are men and women whose internal lives are personally disordered, so they must impose order on external events. It’s very much who I am. I have to create from scratch on a grand scale.”

At times it seems he hasn't yet banished the ghosts of his past. His novels often feature elusive female characters with the same red hair as his mother. He has also written a second memoir, The Hilliker Curse, about how the absent Jean, by turns resented and coveted, shaped his own tortured relationship with women: he has been married twice. But he feels he has moved on.

"I think I've gotten beyond it, however tenuously, though my second ex-wife and very good friend, Joan Knode, would disagree. But yearning, as I say in The Hilliker Curse, is my chief fount of inspiration. Wanting what I cannot have leads me to create large-scale compensation. And Perfidia is fuelled by yearning, entirely." In particular, he says, he gave "a version of my own longing for women" to his depiction of William Parker, who pines after a tall redhead – "Guess who in my particular canon."

Ellroy concedes that his single-minded pursuit of his vocation has made him difficult to live with. “I like to be alone most of the time,” he says. Even still, he is in a new relationship, with a woman in London.

He is full of seemingly contradictory elements. He owns no television, computer or mobile phone but works on scripts, such as a forthcoming remake of Laura, the 1944 film noir. "You don't have to be a genius to work out the attraction: the cop falls in love with the portrait of the dead woman, and she shows up alive. Hey, Mom!"

Similarly, his novels seem bleak, but Ellroy is personally optimistic. “I’m a Christian. I believe we are all one soul united in God.” He declares that he is “conservative and theocratic”, but he can speak with the wide-eyed eagerness of a New Age hippy. “This book is so much about the human imagination, about mysticism, about this whacked-out metaphysic of mine, about being a Christian whose every other word is f*** or sh*t.” Just as his uncharacteristic slump disappears in a blaze of crackling conversation, so Ellroy’s talent has kept its bite.

"I'll go one on one with anyone with this book," he says. "And I know where the next one is going. I just have to keep rising to the conception. It's a revelation I had as a kid writing The Black Dahlia: whatever I can conceive I can execute. I just keep conceiving on a grander scale."

Perfida is published by Heinemann