Items related to Blood's A Rover
It’s 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. The Mob, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover are in a struggle for America’s soul, drawing into their murderous conspiracies the dammed and the soon-to-be damned. Wayne Tedrow Jr.: parricide, assassin, dope cooker, mouthpiece for all sides, loyal to none. His journey will take him away from the darkness and into an even greater darkness. Dwight Holly: Hoover’s enforcer and hellish conspirator in terrible crimes. As Hoover’s power wanes his destiny lurches towards Richard Nixon and self-annihilation Don Crutchfield: is a kid, a nobody, a wheelman and a private detective who stumbles upon an ungodly conspiracy from which he and the country may never recover. All three men are drawn to women on the opposite side of the political and moral spectrum; all are compromised and ripe for destruction. Only one of them will survive. The final part of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy is set during the social and political upheaval of 1968-72. Blood’s a Rover is an incandescent fusion of fact and fiction and is James Ellroy’s greatest masterpiece.
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Review:
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).
Review:
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 Forshaw
It's impossible not to read it without a sense of awe. The violence is as frequent as it is extreme, the treachery is tremendous, and the blending of cold ambition and colder political maeuvering is brazen, all of it filtered through diamond-cut prose. It's a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters. Publishers Weekly
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- PublisherArrow
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 009989310X
- ISBN 13 9780099893103
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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