Blood's a Rover: Underworld USA 3

By James Ellroy

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.

A rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960's. It's dark baby, and hot hot hot.
 
Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracies theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime, are replacing free-love and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president’s strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroine runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. With his trademark deadly staccato prose, James Ellroy holds nothing back in this wild, startling and much anticipated conclusion to his Underworld USA trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307273031

Reviews for Blood's a Rover

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the third volume of Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy, in which historical figures from mid-20th century America mix with fictional characters to give us an inside look at dirty politics, corrupt law officers, and the criminal underworld (Mafia). I loved the first volume, American Tabloid, which took us through the assassination of JFK in Dallas in November 1963. Volume 2, The Cold Six Thousand began in Dallas on the day of JFK's assassination, and brought us through the 1968 assassinations of RFK and MLK. I also liked the second volume, in which many of the same characters from the first book carried through. There's lots about the Vietnam War, LBJ, drugs, the Mafia moving on Las Vegas, and Howard Hughes also making a move on Las Vegas.This final volume begins with the RFK assassination, brings us through the 1968 election of Nixon, continues on with the activities of the Mafia, as well as the decline and corruption of J. Edgar Hoover, and ends as Watergate is beginning. However, I didn't like this one as much as the first two. It seemed more scattered and less focused, and either I began to tire of Ellroy's staccato prose, or it wasn't as compelling as in the first two volumes. In fact, the only reason I kept reading is because the book began with the brutal heist of an armored car, and the failed attempts to solve that crime constitute a sort of leit motif throughout the novel. I kept reading because I wanted answers regarding that crime.Overall, I highly, highly recommend American Tabloid and also recommend The Cold Six Thousand. Read this one only if you are a completist.2 1/2 stars

[5hrdrive · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've never been so disappointed in the concluding book in a series before. The first two books open up the possibilities to LOTS of conspiracies involving some of the biggest stories and personalities of the 20th century. You feel as though you're on the inside of the FBI, CIA, Mafia, and anti-Castro movement during the Bay of Pigs and multiple political assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK). Then you finish with this 600 page slog... it's like Ellroy ran out of story before his three-book contract was up.

[ameise1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the third part of the Underworld USA trilogy. At first it was again a summary of all the protagonists, before it was about Nixon's campaign on the one hand, but also about how Hoover clings to his position with all the tricks. It is about drugs, gang wars, money laundering and shows once again how corrupt the police and various secret services are. In doing so, their peers fight to the blood and go over dead bodies.Once again it was extremely interesting.

[jasonchambers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not for the fainthearted. Brutal but pretty damn great.

[ehines_20 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In the past, I've enjoyed Ellroy's writing. I've read this trilogy with an increasing sense of disappointment each step of the way. The conspiracy theories behind these novels are derivative and tired. the characters unlikable and unlikely. The language, more and more, a kind of faux-gritty ("so contrived, it's hyper-real!" we hear the announcer bark) that achieves a level of unintended humor in this last novel. Though it's not even funny for long.Ellroy's writing now seems to come out of a place where Ellroy says he knows what's real, he knows the truth behind the illusion. he knows how people really live & talk & how the big events really come down.But the sad truth behind these books is that what Ellroy really knows is a very little, very circumscribed world akin to a masturbatory fantasy. And he knows that some people will be sucker enough to buy into it. Sad.

[andy475uk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A long, complex novel which befits the last of the trilogy. It's a worthy although long-winded challenge to get through it and I didn't enjoy it as much as parts one (American Tabloid) or two (The Cold Six Thousand) and overall still prefer the LA Confidential trilogy.

[sinaloa237_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Incredibly complex and it does not always seem necessary.The story is definitely compelling but it makes me think of these movies: everything is here, well written of course but way too long.

[electricray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Whatever your view about James Ellroy, his Underworld USA trilogy is quite a piece of work and Blood's A Rover, its culmination, is one hell of a way to go out. He may have had the indelicacy to say it, but having closed the cover it's hard to disagree with Ellroy's own assessment of this novel's matchless quality. This is a really, really outstanding novel from an outstanding and unique writer.Many of Ellroy's stylistic hallmarks, love 'em or hate 'em (for the record, I love 'em) are here: grandiloquent authorial claims to greatness, unremittingly bleak Hobbesian worldview (though here it is ultimately, if brutally, suffused with a sort of redemption), casual and unsettlingly entertaining violence and depravity, assorted strands of bigotry and a Byzantine, conspiracy-theory-goosing plot - all counterpointed with almost unbearably sparse, non-adjectival prose. It's all here. Most remarkable is the book's style and economy. James Ellroy says the plot outline for Blood's A Rover ran to 400 pages; the finished article is well shy of 650. In the hands of any other writer, this sort of enterprise would never get done short of 1500.On that score, many detractors bitterly and bizarrely complain about Ellroy's prose style. On this site, the weaker ones lampoon it poorly. I find this complaint particularly absurd. If you like your prose style conventional, stay away: there are literally millions of workaday writers whose published works will keep you happy in your reading till your dying day. If there are millions of elegant stylists; there's only one James Ellroy; I can't think of another author (perhaps Cormac McCarthy) with as singular a stylistic vision, let alone such a stubbornness and bloody-minded commitment to his craft. Celebrate a writer with the talent, attitude and fortitude to do something different.Ellroy's writing generally, and the Underworld USA series particularly, take some getting used to, for sure - it's virtually a dialect: a condensed, shorthand patois where half as many words carry twice as much content as conventional sentence. The temptation is to study every word hard, so as not to miss a vital clue. But to do this is to miss the vibrancy, the flow, the rhythm - the *vibe* - which is as important to grasp as the content itself. Like waterskiing, you need to aquaplane through the text to manage it.And when you do, it's just exhilarating reading - short passages magically concertina into complex images. On the other hand, Ellroy's narrative method counterpoints the curtness of his prose: he tends to reframe the same information from multiple perspectives (the book is told from the point of view of three principle protagonists, together with diaries, reports and transcripts of conversations between half a dozen others), so if you keep the speed up, the shorthand argot miraculously and brilliantly coheres. At times it's like beat poetry; it syncopates, it grooves.For all that (and despite some claims to the contrary) James Ellroy *has* eased up his prose styling from the three-word sentence limit on display in The Cold Six Thousand. Particularly with some helpful expository diaries, this is an easier - but no less rewarding - read.The book's unusual title, taken from an A E Housman poem, jars at first - difficult at first glance to see the resonance between late 20th century American high-political intrigue and 19th century English poem cycle called A Shropshire Lad, conjuring as it does images of a cloth-capped teen in tweed plus-fours wheeling an iron bicycle up a narrow country lane. But Housman's work, in its way, was as unrelentingly grim an essay on the waste of life as is Ellroy's: a sort of grim inversion of a carpe diem where the moral is "don't lie a-bed, lad - get up and get out there ... But, come to think of it, while you're hard at it fighting Boers and so forth, most likely your best mate will be busily stealing your sweetheart away".Now there is a "lad" herein - Don Crutchfield - who in his ascribed habits and history (a small time private eye with a missing mother and a penchant for popping pills and peeping windows) bears no small resemblance to a certain J Ellroy (as revealed in the autobiographical My Dark Places), so you do wonder whether the title and character are some sort of note to self.In any case it's an extraordinary note. Without a doubt one of the best books of the decade.

[lamontcranston_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The third and final part of the American Underworld.Ellroys 'telegraph' style has been abandoned for straight prose, but this enhances the stories juggernaut & heightens the final emotional crescendo.