白色爵士 (1992)

White Jazz is a 1992 crime fiction novel by James Ellroy. It is the fourth in his L.A. Quartet, preceded by The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, and L.A. Confidential.

Lieutenant David Klein is a veteran policeman who moonlights as a hitman for organized crime. When he is assigned to investigate a robbery at the home of the Los Angeles Police Department's (L.A.P.D.) sanctioned heroin dealer, he uncovers a plot to bring the city's crime syndicates into collusion with the channels of justice.

The stories of many characters that appeared in earlier L.A. Quartet novels, including Edmund Exley and Dudley Smith, have their ends tied up in White Jazz, which also introduces Pete Bondurant, one of the central characters in Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy.

Prologue

James Ellroy dedicated the novel to Helen Knode. The epigraph is a quote by Ross Macdonald: "In the end I possess my birthplace and I am possessed by its language."

The novel's prologue is told by protagonist David Douglas Klein, years after the events have taken place:

All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams-I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget. Pictures keep the woman young. L.A., fall 1958. Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events-so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down-the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell. I'm old, afraid I'll forget: I killed innocent men. I betrayed sacred oaths. I reaped profit from horror. Fever-that time burning. I want to go with the music-spin, fall with it.

Plot

Dave Klein is a lieutenant in the L.A.P.D.'s vice unit. He has a sister named Meg, with whom he shares an incestuous attraction, and performs contract killings for the mob to cover the costs for law school. Klein has committed several murders, including the unsolved killings of Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, who were killed in revenge for hurting Meg. He seeks to get out of mob work and begs the dying Jack Dragna to let him go. When he refuses, Klein suffocates him.

After setting up a raid on a bookmaking operation, Klein and his partner, George "Junior" Stemmons, are ordered to protect a witness in a probe into organized crime in boxing. Having been told by gangster Mickey Cohen that another crime figure, Sam Giancana, wants the witness dead, Klein throws the witness out of a high window and makes it look like an accident. Later that night, Captain Wilhite, of the corrupt Narcotics Squad, summons Klein to investigate a burglary at the home of J. C. Kafesjian, a drug dealer sanctioned by the L.A.P.D.

Klein gets a side job from Howard Hughes to obtain information on an actress named Glenda Bledsoe that would violate the morality clause of her full-service contract. Klein learns through Cohen that Glenda has a "publicity date" with actor Rock Rockwell which violates the clause. During surveillance of Glenda, Klein finds out she, Rockwell, Touch Vecchio, and George Ainge are planning a fake kidnapping. Klein falls for Glenda and decides not to aid Hughes in getting her blacklisted by the film industry. He begins to aid Glenda as he continues investigating the Kafesjian burglary.

Klein discovers that Edmund Exley is still trying to prosecute Dudley Smith and begins working with him. When he meets an undercover officer, Johnny Duhamel, Klein is shot up with drugs and kills Duhamel in an act caught on film. Klein is arrested by federal agents and becomes a witness, but is given forty-eight hours before he is taken into custody. Klein and Exley discover that Smith is selling heroin exclusively to the black population in the Southside to keep crime in that area "contained". The two track down the Kafesjians' burglar, Wylie Bullock.

Finding himself grappling with all of his crimes and everything that is happening, Klein decides to meet Smith, who had earlier offered him a deal. Klein brings Bullock but is forced to shoot him when he attacks and maims Smith. Klein tries to flee but is soon caught. While in federal custody, Klein writes a full confession and has copies sent to various press outlets. Only the tabloid magazine Hush-Hush is willing to print it, but is prevented from doing so by an injunction. Klein manages to escape from custody and hide out with Pete Bondurant; Hughes has Bondurant beat him up, causing Klein to be hospitalized.

Exley sends Klein a package in the hospital, which includes a blank passport and a silencer-fitted .38 revolver. In a note, Exley says he will allow Klein to kill Smith if he feels justice has not been absolute. Instead, Klein murders J. C. and Tommy Kafesjian. He spends one last night with Glenda, takes pictures to remember her by and flies to Rio de Janeiro. In the epilogue, set many years later, Klein plans to return to Los Angeles intending to destroy Exley's gubernatorial campaign, take revenge on Carlisle and Smith and find Glenda.

Reception

The reviews for White Jazz were quite positive. "Blacker than noir... Makes most other crime novels seem naive."--Publishers Weekly. "James Ellroy's latest book WHITE JAZZ makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss."--San Francisco Examiner. "Ellroy's tenth novel burns with the memory of Rodney King in its descriptions of unimaginably cruel law officers who are not merely tainted by corruption on a vast scale but pursue conventional police work as a sideline to more lucrative illegal activities that burst into the public consciousness in violent frenzies.... An undeniably artful frenzy of violence, guilt and unappeased self-loathing. Ellroy's crime fiction represents a high mark in the genre."--New York Newsday.

In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Wendy Lesser, reviewing the novel for The New York Times wrote: