Blood's a Rover-James Ellroy

Blood's a Rover
James Ellroy
Knopf, Sep 22 2009, $28.95
ISBN: 9780679403937

In 1964 in Los Angeles, a Well Fargo armored car is shockingly robbed. By 1968 Howard “Dracula” Hughes moves in on the Vegas Strip with help from voodoo medicine and the mob. The same group behind the killings of Kennedy and King creates havoc in Chicago as Nixon must be elected president because the mob and J. Edgar Hoover know Tricky Dick is one of them, albeit a moronic one. The Mafia sets up casinos in the Dominican Republic to replace Havana with an advanced party Mesplede (of Grassy Knoll notoriety) and Tredow running heroin from Haiti to raise money for assaults on Cuba. The FBI’s “Old Girl” knows Nixon will endorse spying, jailing and assassinating anti Vietnam rabbles, Black Militants like King, and women libber communists under the American dream BS.

The government-mobster-industrial complex easily prevents leftists like Karen Sifakis and Joan Rosen Klein from power through betrayal, back stabbing and legal robbery with the only cost being the democratic dumbing down of the masses. All those who actively rule pretend to be honorable with blood on the hands delegated to do those who do dirty jobs. In this mire of self righteousness FBI Agent Dwight Holly has an agenda radically different from either woman he manipulates. Yet the convergence of American apple pie at the earth mother Saint Joan began in 1964 when a milk truck accidentally rammed a Well Fargo armored car; although some might argue her roots are her communist ancestors.

The cynical final “Underworld USA” saga (see AMERICAN TABLOID and THE COLD SIX THOUSAND) comes full circle as the right wing real heroes (though hidden away in the closet as Reagan is more acceptable in public) Nixon, Hoover and Hughes seek salvation the American way: use chaos theory to manipulate the media and the public. The exciting story line is like the DNA matrix as subplots intertwine around one another leading to some repetitiveness when they conjoin, but impossible not to read as it has a tabloid exposing feel. American history comes alive with this fictional account of the Nixon-Hoover era as the shortest point between the back streets of L.A. and the White House run through Chicago, Vegas, Havana, and Hispaniola.

Harriet Klausner