Fair warning; this post might delve into some heavy themes including suicide and homophobia.
I’m reading a history books about gay life in Washington DC during the 20th century, which spends a decent page count on the concurrent Red and Lavender Scares of the early 1950’s. If you’re unaware and can’t guess, the Lavender Scare the expunging of queer people from governmental roles. It began roughly the same time as Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting bullshit, but if this book I’m reading is to be believed, it lasted much, MUCH longer than the Red Scare, well into the late 1960’s. This expunging largely targeted gay men by the look of it, or at least this book doesn’t go into fate of lesbians that much. (btw, I won’t name this book because the author is - apparently - a jackass and I don’t want you to support him. It’s a shame because this is a fascinating side of history that needs to be recognized; while there are apparently other books on this subject out there - such as this one - I’m finishing this book before I move on.)
Anyway, this book I will not name has produced several good effects in me, namely, it’s led me back to today’s subject, The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy.
If you’re unfamiliar with Ellroy’s output, I can’t adequately express what a kick in the head it is to read him for the first time. He seems off-putting at first, and that’s way too tame a descriptor. Even if you know his works, you you might assume he’s a horror writer rather than a crime writer or the Historical Romance writer title that Ellroy prefers. You could call his books copaganda the way the LAPD is glorified, but at the same time, every police officer in Ellroy’s books are unfailingly presented as draw-string shitbags barely better than the criminals they catch or kill. Watching any of Ellroy’s interviews leaves the (accurate) impression of a raconteur with a vocabulary from a 1940’s GOP locker room. He’s big, he’s bold, he’s the self-proclaimed Demon Dog of American Literature, literally in your face and barking. The hardest thing about reading an Ellroy book is the violence, the raw sexuality, the aberrant criminality that abounds on every single page. Very few cops are not corrupt, bigoted, arrogant or unreliable and very frequently are dealing with criminals barely worse than the cops themselves. These are stories about bad men hunting worse men, while beautiful women look on.
That’s Ellroy’s surface. His critical reception has largely been positive thanks to his peerless ability to write stories about LA, but there’s much more to him than historical fiction. There’s a reason Joyce Carol Oats called him the American Dostoevsky. The slightest amount of digging into his story reveals someone intimately familiar with the true darkness humanity is capable of expressing, and the light that is so often buried underneath. Ellroy has tried to find that light for himself many times. His mother Jean was murdered when he was 10, and he’s has stated that her murder haunts him and influences his writing. He’s tried to solved her murder on his own several times, documenting his investigation and their overall relationship in several memoirs. He never found his mother’s killer, never even came close, but he did find some kind of light in the darkness. Usually, his characters will too. His protagonists are very rarely better than the criminals they catch, but on rare occasions, you may even see a glimpse of nobility in them, buried under miles and miles of genuinely unpleasant actions.
The Big Nowhere is where I finally understood what James Ellroy was trying to do with his books. It’s the second book in a series of four novels collectively known as the LA Quartet, the other volumes being The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential, and White Jazz. (LA Confidential was adapted into a movie in 1997 and remains how most people - including myself - are introduced to Ellroy.) The Quartet is a sort of secret history, telling the story of LA from 1948 through 1960. It’s fiction, but to aid with historical verisimilitude Ellroy includes real crimes, providing fictional solutions to events as diverse as the Black Dahlia murder to the Sleepy Lagoon killings. The Big Nowhere runs concurrently with the infamous HUAC hearings that produced the Hollywood Ten blacklist, with the main plot thrust being a red-baiting LAPD investigation into a stagehand union. The second main plot running through the book is about a young and naive LA County Sheriff as he traces a serial killer who mimics the killing patterns of Wolverines - and who exclusively targets gay men.
Beware - major spoilers lie beyond. I’m doing my best to minimize.
In crime fiction, the private eye’s greatest motivation is obsession, and Ellroy’s detectives are masters of that sordid art. They get obsessed with the usual suspects, women, drugs, money, and the all-important elusive solution. This sheriff in The Big Nowhere, Danny, becomes obsessed with his case, obsessed with catching this killer of men. The only problem is - his colleagues and his enemies wonder why he’s so obsessed about a homo snuff killing.
You can draw your own conclusions, conclusions Danny is reluctant to draw himself.
For understandable reasons, as it turns out. When Danny is outed (and framed for the murders he’s investigating) his life is ruined. Faced with the decision of suicide or being outed under a lie detector questionnaire, Danny chose the less painful option. If my most recent history read is accurate, that was a fate all too common in the era.
From the perspective of a person familiar with Ellroy’s style of protagonist, I was amazed that he didn’t treat either Danny or the serial killer - who is also gay - as simplistic character. Yes, bury your gays applies and they’re not exactly positive depictions of gay people, but they are first and foremost complete characters - complex, tragic and strangely sympathetic. (I won’t describe the events that drove the killer to violence, but they are horrific and make an almost irredeemable monster into a disturbingly sympathetic character.)
I want to show that kind of sympathy to the characters in the books and stories I write. Hell, that’s the kind of sympathy / empathy I want to have for people in the real world. That really is the miracle of Ellroy’s style. Beneath the bluster and the conservative raconteur persona lies a sympathetic, remarkably kind author who understands the depths humans can sink to. He respects his characters, but they don’t get special treatment. The good leave for the big nowhere and the bad live on. That’s life, depressingly enough. That’s our history as a country.
On a personal note, The Big Nowhere is the book I was reading when I was finally starting to accept my own sexuality. That is largely why it's remained my favorite book. As you can imagine, Danny’s story resonated with me - especially in his final scene. That moment... wooof. It’s one of those rare times where you just have to put the book down and stare out the window after reading.
At the time that I read it, I realized I was facing a decision like Danny. I want to be clear, I wasn't facing the same stakes, I was never that desperate. But the choice was similar. Acceptance or letting my soul step into the big nowhere. I know I made the right decision.
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