A. ConfidentialA Crime or Detective novel has many characteristics. It can combine mystery, suspense, romance, and maybe even a bit of comedy into an intriguing story that you just can’t walk away from. James Ellroy, the self proclaimed Demon Dog of American Literature, has produced a masterpiece in the third book in his L. A. Quartet. L. A. Confidential is a great example of this genre of literature. It combines multiple love stories, multiple crimes, and a slew of characters into a work of art that is as highly dramatic as it is suspenseful. This is a book that will literally change you be affecting your way of speaking and may even cause you lose of sleep in order to get another couple pages in before calling it a night. “James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential is almost five hundred pages long, it has over one hundred characters, it is set over a period of eight years. Mainly the thought processes of the three main characters tell the story. The Plot is so complex and intricate that reading it is the literary equivalent of studying particle physics” (Reder). L. A. Confidential is a so confusing at first that you end up re-reading pages just to make sure you understand what just happened. The story is written from a first person point of view from three different characters and it switches back and fourth each chapter which may only be a couple of pages long. This makes the story move extremely quickly back and fourth between scenes, settings and characters. Although this can be confusing and lead to your flipping back a couple chapters to see where that character popped up in the first place, the story is so fast paced that it hooks you and you can do nothing but keep reading in hopes of solving the endless numbers of mysteries in each section. “Ed grabbed at it, caught it. ‘YOU CALL.’Trash ran out. Ed stood up, breathed chaos: cops, shattered glass, an ambulance through the ...
