Perfidia

by James Ellroy

Overview

It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.

The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He’s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.
           
Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307956996
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers.
           
Perfidia is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II. The design of this extended work is unprecedented. Ellroy will take characters from the original quartet and trilogy, set between 1946 and 1972, and detail their lives as significantly younger people. Ellroy currently lives in Los Angeles.

www.jamesellroy.net

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with James Ellroy

"My relationship with L.A. is largely imaginative; it allows me to ignore the untenable aspects of L.A. today," says the author of Perfidia, the first book in his second L.A. Quartet (a series that includes L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, and White Jazz). --Nick Curley

What is your earliest memory of writing a story?

The first story I ever wrote was my first novel, Brown?s Requiem -- which I wrote in 1979, at the age of thirty- one, when I was working as a country club golf caddy in L.A.

Perfidia is the first in a planned quartet of novels: how extensive has your plotting and outlining of the quartet been to date? Would you say you already know how the fourth book will end, for instance?

Midway through the writing of Perfidia, which is a 700-page novel told in real time, I began making mental notes for the second book, which will cover the first seven and a half months of 1942. The broad arc of the two concluding novels is unfurling in my war-fevered brain as I write this.

What?s the secret to writing a long novel? Are you a fast writer? Do you take several years to conceive and finish a book of this length? Or is writing something of such scope simply a matter of good planning?

The secret to writing a long novel is developing the ability to sustain concentration! I outline and rewrite extensively; I am not a fast writer; the door-to-door, conception-to- execution arc of Perfidia took three years.

How has Los Angeles changed in your lifetime?

It has become overpopulated, smog-smacked, and indecorous. I prefer the L.A. of December 1941 -- the timespan of Perfidia. My relationship with L.A. is largely imaginative; it allows me to ignore the untenable aspects of L.A. today.

What has been your proudest moment as a writer?

Signing on with the illustrious publisher Alfred A. Knopf -- the home of the Sacred Borzoi.

What are the most challenging aspects of writing as a profession? What are its greatest rewards?

The greatest reward of being a novelist is living the stories as I write them. The greatest challenge is the simple, day-to-day hard work.

You told Time magazine that in your office you like being surrounded by copies of your own books, "like a predatory animal in his den." Do you ever reread your own books after writing them, and if so, what is the experience like?

Since Perfidia is the first volume of the Second L.A. Quartet, set earlier than my preceding seven novels but with many recurring characters, I have had to go back and annotate my own preceding books. I only did this because it was technically essential.

What do you do to relax?

Brood. Yearn. Indulge my passionate emotional state.

--November 5, 2014

Editorial Reviews

It all begins with a fairly routine stakeout of a pharmacy by the LAPD's only Japanese-American officer on December 6th, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. From there, James Ellroy's Perfidia reveals sides of the City of the Angels never disclosed in visitor's guides. The novel is told from the perspectives of four different characters: that of the aforementioned police officer; a restless, adventuring dilettante woman; real-life LAPD police legend William Parker; and Dudley Smith, one of several characters who has appeared in Ellroy's seven previous L.A. and Underworld novels. A rich panoramic novel from an author who can be justly compared to both Thomas Pynchon and Raymond Chandler.

In Dudley Smith, Ellroy has found the hellhound guide for his neon-noir Los Angeles underbelly…Smith casts the same shadow over Perfidia that Judge Holden cast over Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. He's writ large and writ evil, a monolith of corruption and utilitarian expediency. But unlike what Ellroy did with Smith's previous appearances, here he sets his sights, to varying degrees of success, on the devil's heart and the ways in which satanic charms often coexist with paternal benevolence. For Smith engenders loyalty as much as he does fear. In a world as sordid and chaotic as the one Ellroy depicts, the simple purity of Smith's evil attains a kind of nobility.

The New York Times Book Review - Dennis Lehane

06/23/2014
Ellroy launches his second L.A. Quartet with a sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity, with admirable characters few and far between. The action spans about three weeks during December 1941, opening the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the deaths of four members of the Watanabe family, who were possibly victims of a ritual murder-suicide. A note left at the scene written in Japanese, disclaiming responsibility for a “looming apocalypse,” suggests foreknowledge of the attack. The investigation and its ramifications are explored from the perspectives of the LAPD’s Japanese crime-scene specialist Hideo Ashida; William Parker, the future LAPD head; and two figures familiar from Ellroy’s earlier books—Dudley Smith, a murderous and bent cop, and the enigmatic Kay Lake, who’s roped into going undercover in L.A.’s communist community. Cynical schemes to profit from the planned internment of the Japanese may have played a part in the killings as well. This is as good a sample of Ellroy as any for newcomers, and old hands will find new perspectives on old characters intriguing. Author tour. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Perfidia is a brilliant, breakneck ride. Nobody except James Ellroy could pull this off. He doesn't merely write—he ignites and demolishes.”
     —Carl Hiaasen
 
“A return to the scene of Ellroy’s greatest success and a triumphant return to form. . . . His character portrayals have never been more nuanced or—dare we say it—sympathetic. . . . A disturbing, unforgettable, and inflammatory vision of how the men in charge respond to the threat of war. It’s an ugly picture, but just try looking away.”
     —Booklist, starred review
 
“A sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity.”
     —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 2014-07-01
Though it pivots on the Pearl Harborattack, this worm's-eye view from thoroughly corrupt Los Angeles is a war novellike no other.It's complicated, and the author (TheHilliker Curse, 2010, etc.) wouldn't have it any other way. There's notelling the good guys from the bad in Ellroy's Los Angeles, because there areno good guys. The major distinction between cops and criminals is that theformer have the power to frame the latter and kill the innocent with impunity,which they (or at least some) do without conscience or moral compunction, oftenin complicity with the government and even the Catholic Church. With hisoutrageously oversized ambition, Ellroy has announced that this sprawling butcompelling novel is the beginning of a Second L.A. Quartet, which will coverthe city during World War II and serve as a prequel to his L.A. Quartet, hismost powerful and popular fiction, which spans the postwar decade. Thus, itincludes plenty of characters who appear in other Ellroy novels, sowing theseeds of their conflicts and corruption. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the fourcorpses of a Japanese family are discovered in what appears to be a gruesomeritual suicide. It seems they had advance knowledge of the attack (which, bythe end of the novel, appears to have been the worst-kept secret in history).The investigation, or coverup, pits Sgt. Dudley Smith, full of charm but devoidof scruples ("I am in no way constrained by the law," he boasts), against Capt.William Parker, who's plagued by demons of alcoholism, faith and ambition (andwho is one of the real-life characters fictionalized in a novel where BetteDavis plays a particularly sleazy role). Caught between the rivalry of the twoare a young police chemist of Japanese descent and a former leftist callgirl-turned-informant. The plot follows a tick-tock progression over the courseof three weeks, in which "dark desires sizzle" and explode with a furiousclimax.Ellroy is not only back in form—he'sraised the stakes.

Kirkus Reviews