The Cold Six Thousand - Hardcover

Ellroy, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0712648178 ISBN 13: 9780712648172

Publisher: Century, 2001

Synopsis

Dallas, November '63 - the heart of the American Dream detonated. ayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got six thousand in cash and no idea he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around the assassination of JFK, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy. llroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's journey- Dallas to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches. . .

About this title

Review

It is the day of Jack Kennedy's assassination--Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr arrives in Dallas with instructions to arrest a pimp and make sure he does not survive the arrest. By the time James Ellroy's monumental thriller The Cold Six Thousand reaches its climax, Wayne has taken his own private journey into the heart of American corruption, into a cold hell of betrayal, prejudice and paranoia. In staccato sentences, brief paragraphs of narration and stacks of documentation whose essential truthfulness we dread, we learn the truth about the great assassinations of liberal hope, about the inner-city epidemic of heroin addiction, about the war in Vietnam and the American conflict with Cuba. Wayne and others like him--the ageing hit man Bondurant, the fallen, liberal FBI-man Littell--are the weapons through which the likes of Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover work their will. This is a convincingly depressing picture of a world in which the worst things you can imagine regularly come true (because there is always someone who will profit by them). It is a nightmare picture of America-as-Hell which sustains dramatic tension from dateline to dateline, from crisis to crisis. --Roz Kaveney

Review

"The quality mark of The Cold Six Thousand is that it can give heavyweight punch to even that most worked-over image, the shooting of JFK ... Knockout" (Guardian)

"Richer and darker than ever, this story ... reminds us how far ahead of his peers Ellroy really is" (New Statesman)

"The Cold Six Thousand is as brutal and honest an exposure of the American Dream as anyone could hope for" (Scotsman)

"Astonishing ... not America corrupted, but America in its purest, uncut form" (Independent)

"Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written" (New York Times)

Edition details

• Publisher: Century
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0712648178
• ISBN 13: 9780712648172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688