Perfidia

James Ellroy's Perfidia (2014) is book one of the second planned "LA Quartet" series. It has characters from his First LA Quartet (Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz)-which I read and liked a lot as well as the Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six-Thousand, Blood's A Rover). This novel had a lot of features that appealed to me: the 40s Hollywood culture where Ellroy mixed in with actual historical figures (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, the Kenndeys, Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, J Edgar Hoover, etc.) and some dark noir criminal activities and crimes. There is a significant amount of hyperbole that is too over the top for my taste in regards to some of the violence, language, drug and alcohol consumption, and criminal activities of the crooked cops. I know its fiction and all but some times the fact that it is mixed in with realistic historical precedent-the contrast is too much. Some characters talk like psychology undergraduate students. It seems every character has some glaring flaw: crooked, like black women, gay, alcoholic, drug addicted, overly violent, impotent, etc. It makes me wonder how much of this is based in reality, I am no prig and assume drugs and deviant sex and crimes were being committed in these days but also weren't the normal citizens more innocent? Perhaps not. For some reason, the larger than life exploits of the characters behaviors stuck in my caw more this time around. The labyrinthine plot seemed needlessly over complex. But all in all I enjoyed the ride, but not as much as the First LA Quartet.