the usual sermon

Ellroy is celebrated as one of the best crime fiction, more accurately hard boiled noir, writers, and as he never stops to tell us so.
...the stories are mean, the characters are meaner and usually make a contest out of meanness. The style is an crescendo of "rapid fired phrases and machine gunned stutter of hast descriptions (paraphrasing Owen here)".
The world portrayed- mostly the 40ies, 50ies and 60ies of US history- is unforgiven and only consists of "thirty shades of black"- a hypocritic, double phased chauvinistic, racist , xenophobic and homophobic society, in which bad guys loom: toxic masculines, usually with a soft spot for women in danger and their own moral values, that know how to talk the talk. The usual story is about one or some of those bad guys who think that something is even too fishy "in this stink" and start to act.

Yet, as it is often the case in his novels, this particular story lacks of a clear path and characters I consider worth to follow, by this I mean something else than the usual the usual violent and self righteous/destructive masculines on their "war path through history". After some pages I got the picture:

It vividly portrays some troubled times in US politics'' Cuba, Castro, the Kennedys, the CIA and the mob. however the usual telegram style descriptions of various crimes and staccato style conversations just get tiresome, and withit my will to follow the story until the end evaporates.

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