James Ellroy (1988) The Big Nowhere.

The Big Nowhere comes at the end of James Ellroy’s take on 1950s Los Angeles. Angels in The City of Angels are in short supply. Every crummy cop is on the take and it works all the way up the ladder to the city bosses and studio heads such as Howard Hughes. In walkies and talkies only money matters. Hughes can fill his studios with starlets and have apartment’s at ready to be filled with the fifteen-year-old farm girls with big knockers that he likes with no knickers and no frills. Hughes has got money and muscle. But he wants to cut a deal. Drive down the cost of producing movies by hooking into an angle that’s driving the city bosses all the way to the top jobs. Reds in the bed. Red Scare. It plays good with the press. Those on the streets eat it up all the way to Washington.

A special team of cops and a former cop, Meeks has been fed the juice and told to find out names that can used and faces that can be paraded in front of cameras and newshounds to show how something is being done about this infiltration of the American way of life.

Meeks is so crooked that he works for Howard Hughes as a fixer. As a former cop, he wasn’t sure if it was crooks or his own cops that shot him. His thinking fingered Lt. Considine. A cert to be promoted to Captain after they sort out the Reds. He’s killed a Nazi. Shot him in the head at close range while interrogating him during the war. Hushed up, of course. Meeks is a gambler. Bets big. Loses big. He’s on loan from Hughes but in hock to a nigger bookmaker that doesn’t do any sweetheart deals. Mickey Cohen does. It would be sweet madness to take Cohen’s Va Va Voom girl from him.

Detective Deputy Danny Upshaw. There’s something boyish and likeable about him. He runs his way around the station commander and works the stiffs on the front desk and whispers to the girl on the phone, sweet nothings. But he’s fallowing a curve ball. New Year on The Strip finds a mutilated body. But it’s a nobody. No more to worry about than a slew of drunks and some Iowa yokels getting outmuscled and taken for everything in nigger town. The body is a fruit.

When three other fruits, homos mutilated in same but different ways, Upshaw wants to carry the case and shine lights were most outstanding citizens don’t want to see. His quest seems more personal than a fender bender.

But he’s got work to do. More important work, he keeps getting reminded, putting reds to bed and nailing them to the wall. All for the greater good. A jazz note. The Big Nowhere. Greed on. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6