by Damien Seaman
Well I wouldn’t
for one second presume to tell you whether or not you should. It’s entirely up
to you.
Though here’s
what happened to me when I met my favourite author. Learn from it such lessons
as please you.
Ellroy has long
been my favourite crime writer – principally for his well-known LA Quartet,
which I’d recommend to anyone with a taste for good, dense prose and even
denser plotting. Granted, to be entirely honest I’ve always found “LA
Confidential” does sag in the middle. But the rest of the book more than makes
up for that – and I don’t think there’s an ounce of spare fat on any other of
the other three in the series.
So it turned out
Ellroy was in town – London town that is – for One Night Only to plug his most
recent work, “Perfidia”.
How did I find
this out? Through a lovely romantic gesture from my girlfriend, who had
discovered this and booked us tickets for Ellroy’s only promotional talk
anywhere in the UK. Or, at least, that’s what the promotional material said,
though I believe he did end up doing a few more talks at other venues afterwards.
Still, that’s
ok. Just the usual marketing enthusiasm for unkeepable promises. Needless to
say, I was excited at the prospect of meeting my hero. But then something
strange happened.
With the daily
grind of getting to grips with a new job, I kinda… just forgot about the whole
Ellroy thing.
I didn’t
prepare, is what I’m trying to say. Which is maybe why it went off the way it
did.
Anyway, picture
the scene. There we are, my girlfriend, me, and maybe 60 or 70 assorted
hipsters and liberals, after a busy day at work, taking our seats for an
evening of being growled at.
“I hate
hipsters, I hate liberals, I hate rock’n’rollers, I hate the counter-culture, I
hate movie people.”
This was the Ellroy
quote the advertisers went with before the event, adding, “So as long as you
don’t fit into any of those categories, we’ll see you there”… And then going on
to hold the talk at one of the most achingly-hip hipster hangouts in London. I
mean, it was in Shoreditch, for Christ’s sake.
I mention this
because context is everything.
And important to
see why it was so funny when, at one point during his talk, Ellroy exclaimed
that Britain and the US should have pressed on after the fall of Berlin in 1945
and invaded the Soviet Union to kick out Joseph Stalin. You could practically
hear the sound of contracting sphincters around the room; this sort of
anti-leftist talk is still discomforting for the hipster liberal.
But, no matter.
It amused some of us in the room. Here, in no particular order, is a quick run-
down of his other show-stopping statements on the night:
1. Growing up, Ellroy had a (very much
sexual) thing for high-cheekboned British actresses of the 60s – think Julie
Christie and the like. This had led both to an appreciation for the gritty
‘kitchen-sink’ social realist British dramas of the time and a lifelong desire for
a British girlfriend…. And I am happy to tell you he has recently furnished
himself with an example of the latter. He reported himself happy, and
threatened to spend more time in London as a result. Our motley crowd of
liberal hipster rock’n’rollers beamed with regional pride.
2. He proclaimed the women in the crowd to
be “porn widows”. Young men these days are obsessed with online pornography, he
announced with the confidence of a Daily Mail op ed column. As a result, we are
neglecting our significant others, leaving them bereft of true, manly love.
3. Once he’s finished writing the “second LA
quartet”, of which new book “Perfidia” is the first instalment, he’s toying
with the idea of tackling an espionage thriller. This was what brought on the
“we should have stuck it to Uncle Joe back in the 40s” talk that had made so
many of us uncomfortable.
4. He apparently makes quite a lot of money
writing pilot TV episodes and movie scripts that have never reached the screen
– and are unlikely ever to do so. Despite his cache as the liberal hipster’s
novelist of choice. An odd situation, but one he seemed cheerfully resigned to.
Or as cheerful as Ellroy ever gets, anyway. On anyone else it would have looked
like annoyance, but I think he found it amusing.
5. Ellroy claims to know nothing of
contemporary politics or the news. He watches no television, dislikes the
internet, and spends all of his time immersed in the literature and music of
the time and place he’s writing about. “I could tell you everything about
politics in LA and the United States of America in the early 1940s,” he said,
“but virtually nothing about what’s going on in the world today.”
Having thus
fulfilled his unspoken contract to provide arresting copy for the magazine
writer who was interviewing him, we moved on to book signing.
Aha, I thought,
this is my chance to shake hands with my hero. Ellroy walked to the back of the
room, casting a sly glance at my girlfriend as he did so.
Briefly, I
wondered if he thought her to be a high-cheekboned British actress of some
sort. (Yes on the cheek bones, no to the other two.)
Finally, having
hung back a little, she and I went to what was more-or-less the back of the
signing queue. And we waited. And waited.
The line grew
slowly shorter. She grew more and more bored. I wrestled with what I was going
to say to my literary idol of a decade or more.
Should I tell
him how much I loved his work?
Hmmn – a bit starry-eyed.
What about how
he helped inspire me to start writing my own books?
Ugh – too crass.
What areas of London
would he be hanging around in now he had a girlfriend here?
God – too stalkerish.
Turned out this
was more difficult than I thought it would be. Bloody hell – why hadn’t I thought about this beforehand?
It hadn’t been
like this five or so years ago when I met Dirk Benedict outside the theatre in
Peterborough where I was due to watch him perform as Columbo. Oh no, then the
conversation had flowed like wine – and this was a man who’d been a hero for a
hell of a lot longer than Ellroy. More profoundly so, since he was my childhood
idol from the A-Team – not to mention the original Battlestar Galactica.
Perhaps the ease
of this early hero-meeting had given me a false sense of security. Or maybe it
was just different because that meeting had been unplanned, and hence no
preparation had been possible.
Well, whatever
the reason, as my meeting with Ellroy approached I was floundering. And the
queue just kept on shortening.
What would I
say?
In the end, it
was fine but disappointing. Ellroy gestured towards the kinship he and I shared
over being bald. I proffered a weak joke about how I’d started shaving my head
to look like him.
Didn’t matter
really. At that point he had eyes only for my bored girlfriend.
Was I just
intimidated by him? Was he overly smitten by my comely companion?
Ah, who knows.
Who cares, really. All I can say for sure is that neither he nor I managed to
display the laid-back elan of Dirk Benedict on a sunny summer evening in a town
you’ve probably never even heard of (though it does boast a cathedral said to
be one of England’s finest).
Now all I have
to show for my evening with James Ellroy are some awkward memories and my
signed hardback of “Perfidia”.
No personal
message. Just my name and a random squiggle that could belong to anyone.
Damien Seaman is the author of the novella Berlin Burning (US)and novel The Killing Of Emma Gross (US)
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