Resumo de The Cold Six Thousand

Novels such as ?The Black Dahlia?, ?L.A Confidential?, ?American Tabloid? and ?White Jazz ?along with his personal testimony ?My Dark Places? have elevated ex-junkie drop-out James Elroy to a colossus of American literature and eminent man of letters. Or, as a currently interred bank robber acquaintance of mine recently put it, ?His name should be mentioned in the same breath as Steinbeck.? Elroy?s world, littered as it is, with gangsters, pimps, hookers, movie stars, racists and politicians has basically mugged the retro-pulp of Chandler, Thompson and Spillane and run with his kill-gotten gains straight over the wild side and into the abyss of the American nightmare. His latest ?The Cold Six Thousand? is an epic journey - book-ended by the Kennedy assassinations of 63 and 68. Fact and fiction collide as father hating cop Wayne Tedrow Jnr finds himself embroiled in the JFK conspiracy and the vortex of world shaking tragedies that followed. The men that made modern America flicker before us like a scratched Super 8 of moral degeneracy and decay as Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, The Klan, Jimmy Hoffa, The CIA, The Mob, The FBI, Fidel Castro, Sam Giancana, Sonny Liston, Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray lie, cheat, maim and kill, against an horrific tableaux on par with the hellish depictions of painter Hieronymus Bosch. With the' The Cold Six Thousand? Elroy appears to have split his critics with its almost impenetrable staccato stylings and hipster-speak which would be more at home in the mouths of the 50?s beatniks ? certainly the delivery is at odds with the timbre of the books corporate gangsters and hoodlum politicians. It?s almost as if Elroy was in such a hurry to tell the story that he barely had time to write it; an epileptic Jack Kerouac on an amphetamine comedown. ?The Cold Six Thousand? is, never-the-less, a terrifying thrill ride through an era which has branded world events ever since. Those five terrifying years in which the world was apparently swinging was, if this book is anything to go by, actually ?Turning on, tuning in and dropping out? towards annihilation. Today?s America was forged in the fires of that terrible half decade and I can hardly wait for Oliver Stone to commit it to celluloid so we can all rest easy and say? ?It?s only a film.?

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