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Customer Reviews of L.A. Confidential

Fit into a couple hours and what feels like a year's worth of time, the movie is more concise. The book is far more sprawling, taking place over almost a decade --- and it connects to both the prequel (The Big Nowhere, excellent) and sequel (White Jazz, also excellent). The screenwriters actually did a fine job capturing the essence of the book while truncating the plot.

The book is, of course, far more involved, with more seamy threads, the plot much more byzantine. I was having a tough time figuring out how the Evil Scheme tied together, but Ellroy does a surprisingly good job of tying it together in a short time at the end, so read closely and stick with it.

The book's larger scope lets the three main characters get more face time and more depth. Not to slight Guy Pearce's fine performance, but Ed Exley is a whole new level of fascinating here. And Jack Vincenes isn't quite the super-slick hepcat that Kevin Spacey memorably embodied. Bud White is far less restrained than Russell Crowe made him look. The actors who played smaller roles in the movie (James Cromwell, Danny Devito and David Straithairn) were dead on.

Ellroy's prose is a thing of beauty, with its raw expose of violence and corruption and 50's slang (though not quite as polished or stylized as in White Jazz). While the movie was chock-full of badness, it didn't come close to the book. For those unfamiliar with the author: let's put it mildly and say he doesn't have a good opinion of human nature. No nice guys here.

If you like down and dirty crime fiction or film noir at all, this is the book for you. Personally, I'd recommend reading The Big Nowhere first, and then White Jazz, for a terrific trio of ungoodness.

This book will blow you away!
As a huge fan of film noir and a sometime writer focusing on short crime stories, I was in awe of this book. At first I was daunted by the size of this volume, but I loved the movie so I figured I'd give it a shot. Dark, complex, full of flawed heroes, this book was the DEFINITION of noir. I dove into Ellroy's detailed explanations of why his characters are the way they are. I found myself holding my breath during the action scenes as if I were a hack reporter for a scandal rag watching the events unfold before me. Ellroy's tense prose made me feel a part of the investigation behind the Nite Owl murders. I wanted this mystery solved as surely as if I were investigating it, thanks to the caliber of writing (and Ellroy has a gift of transporting you to L.A. in the 1950's...opening this book is like jumping in a time machine). All-in-all a top-notch, must-read by the best crime writer of our age

Noir saga with mythic journey at its heart
It's a spider web. It's a labyrinth, and the minotaur at its heart is both a psychotic murderer and the central selves of its three main characters. As a surface read, this novel is a stellar exemplar of the noir California genre. The Los Angeles it conjures up is both a nightmare and a reality (Johnny Stompanato, the gangster lover of Lana Turner, is a character, and his murder by Turner's daughter provides a final knife-twist in the plot). Ellroy's dark city exhibits more seething, foul vice crawling over itself than I have ever encountered between the covers of one book. Yet it turns out to be about the ultimate redemption, or at least coming to terms with self, of the three primary characters. Ed Exley, a privileged son whose apparently burnished war record is a sham; Jack Vincennes, whose weakness for pills and booze has led him into a shameful error he can't shake; and Bud White, who is trying to overcome his powerlessness to prevent his mother's brutal murder by finding wife-beaters and rapists and punishing them all to a bloody pulp. This trio of damaged and damaging cops all converge on an insanely ramified late night slaying at the Nite Owl cafe. It lines to prostitution, drugs, plastic surgery as a racket, harder than hard-core porn, organized crime, blackmail, extortion, and a host of petty and major criminals both inside the LAPD and outside. Ultimately, though, the lines go way further back by 35 years, to a series of child murders done to create a grotesque little eros--a thing composed of the wings of birds and parts of children. This horrific image should tip you off--you are in the presence of something more epic and mythic than mere noir. What these policemen are searching for and combating is the destruction of innocence and love--their own innocence and ability to love as well as the long-dead children. Ultimately, despite distrust, rivalry and even hatred, they combine forces and experience to untangle the whole ghastly mess. Vincennes dies redeemed by full confession to his loving wife, Bud pushes through tremendous temptations to succumb to Neanderthal violence to actually use his mind to fight evil, and Exley confronts his own and his father's secrets. The psychotic murderer at the root of it all proves to have been the kind of monster we keep inside ourselves--repeatedly altered by plastic surgery and imperfectly controlled by drugs, he keeps destroying until he is unmasked and dis-enabled. Finally--this IS a noir novel--the consciously wicked man remains standing, and powerful, at the close. Read it if you can. It's a hell of a trip to redemption.