Shining light on dark history

CRIME: STUART NEVILLEreviews Blood's a RoverBy James Ellroy, Century, 64pp, £18.99

IT'S BEEN a long eight years for James Ellroy fans. The self-proclaimed "Demon Dog of Crime Fiction" took his sweet time delivering the concluding novel of the Underworld USA trilogy, but was Blood's a Roverworth the wait? The answer, at least for this fan, is absolutely yes.

Ellroy began his deconstruction of late 20th century US history back in 1995 with American Tabloid, an incendiary blend of fact and fiction that covered John F Kennedy's rise to power and ultimate doom. The 2001 sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, began with the cover up of the events in Dallas and ended with the assassination of another political icon of the 1960s. Blood's a Roveragain trawls the muddy depths of politics, this time spanning 1968 to 1972, taking in Richard Nixon's ascendancy and J Edgar Hoover's decline.

Interestingly, Ellroy does not make Watergate the focus of his attention, despite it seeming the obvious choice; after all, historical villains don’t get much better than Tricky Dick Nixon. Instead, the author’s plot is more about the personal journeys of his trio of anti-heroes than the landmark events of the time. And that’s the key word to describe this novel: personal.

Cop-turned-narco-chemist Wayne Tedrow Jr returns harder and more cynical than when we left him in The Cold Six Thousand. The bloodshed to which he has been party has left him hollowed out, but a love affair with a woman who should despise him offers the hope of rediscovering his humanity. FBI agent, and Hoover's pet thug, Dwight Holly, is promoted from supporting player to centre stage, and like Tedrow, a woman gives him a shred of decency to cling to even as he sinks deeper into the mire. A new character rounds out the three: Don "Crutch" Crutchfield, a young private eye who bluffs and blackmails his way into the circles of corrupt power.

And it's this third protagonist that gives the novel its human centre. Although Crutch is ostensibly based on a real life LA investigator, his character clearly owes more to Ellroy himself. The author has spoken openly about his misspent youth, peeping on women, breaking into their homes to rummage through drawers of underwear. Likewise, Crutch uses his private eye gig to indulge this seedy pastime. This, and other autobiographical morsels, results in Ellroy's most personal novel since he channelled his own mother's murder through The Black Dahlia.

Those familiar with Ellroy's oeuvre will find the novel's female characters a departure from his earlier work. Some things are as we expect – older women become objects of borderline oedipal fixations for both Tedrow and Crutch, and at least one woman is physically scarred – but they are much more rounded human beings than we've ever seen from Ellroy in the past. They are not there simply to bewitch and betray the male protagonists, but instead are central to the plot. One woman in particular, the "Red Goddess" Joan Klein, is a driving force, a character that lives and breathes through the story. This balance of the sexes makes Blood's a Roverpossibly the most mature novel of Ellroy's lengthy career.

Its also a considerably smoother read than The Cold Six Thousand. While that book's prose is famously jagged and angular, and its plot so dense as to be almost impenetrable, Blood's a Roveris perhaps closer in style to American Tabloid. It still requires some investment from the reader, as with all Ellroy's novels, but that investment is rewarded with a virtuoso display from an author clearly at the top of his game.

His writerly chops are most apparent when he toys with the reader’s expectations, leading us on with familiar stylistic tics for much of the book, before turning the story on its head and using those very expectations against us. As the revelations come thick and fast, we realise that at times not even the narrative itself is all it seems.

The biggest surprise the author has up his sleeve, however, is the novel's politics. James Ellroy wilfully plays up his public persona, that of an irascible right-winger, gleefully bursting any politically correct bubble he can get his hands on. But Blood's a Roverbelies that carefully cultivated image. When standing back to view the trilogy's arc as a whole, the underlying theme becomes clear. This series is about the cost of fascism to both individual human beings, and society in general. One could view the overall story's moral as a simple one – bad things happen to bad people – but Ellroy's reach is far wider, his ambition greater. He points a finger at an entire country, challenging the integrity of the world's most powerful nation, and the foundations upon which it was built. The symbolism of the gemstones that reappear throughout the novel crystallises when a Haitian character explains: "Emeralds represent 'Green Fire' in voodoo text. They shine light on a dark history". His portrayal of America is scathing, brutal and unflinching. Where the line between fact and fiction lies is hard to tell, but it all feels terrifyingly real.

Blood's a Rovertakes its title from the AE Housman poem Reveille. The couplet in question reads: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's a ware that will not keep". In considering these lines, and the poem as a whole, we see the soul of the novel. Housman describes the brevity of life, and the imperative to live it well, in abstract terms. Ellroy describes it in the hard language of violence and guilt, leavened only slightly by the possibility of redemption. It's a rare writer who can tell a story of such emotional weight that genre becomes meaningless. That's why James Ellroy is the best crime writer in the world.

Stuart Neville is a thriller writer . His novel The Twelvewas published by Harvill Secker earlier this year