American Tabloid
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's Presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination - in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C.... Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy... Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty... Where money, power, influence and even the Presidency of the United States are up for grabs... Where three renegade law enforcement officers - a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents - are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history... The same blistering language, relentless narrative pace and nothing-spared rendering of reality that have marked James Ellroy's other best-selling novels are here once again, and in electrifying abundance. And now he puts them to work in a novel more shocking and daring than anything he's written before: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.
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- Got any recommendations?
I don't really have any complaints about this list, but I would include:
The Castle - Franz Kafka
American Tabloid - James Ellroy
The Inheritors - William Golding
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
- If you want to try some modern-er noir, American Tabloid by James Ellroy is a wild ride.
- Check out American Tabloid by James Ellroy if you're a fan of Libra.
- I read American Tabloid first and then Libra after learning that Ellroy cited it as a spiritual inspiration. I also enjoyed American Tabloid more. Libra is a character study of Oswald and a piece of post-modern fiction (about as much as I can say without spoiling things). Tabloid is more straightforward in terms of literary techniques, the plot is more compelling, and in my opinion bigger in scope - it tries to look at the whole system that would bring such an assassination to fruition (meaning, America itself). More than any book I've read it captures a "dark" vision of America - one driven primarily by violence, racism, greed, paranoia, hypocrisy, and corruption. It's got everything - Hollywood, the mob, CIA, FBI, Hoover, Hughes, Hoffa, Vegas, the Kennedys, Cubans, the Klan, and more - and yet it doesn't feel overstuffed. Definitely one of my favorite books.
- Pale Fire by Nabokov and American Tabloid by Ellroy
- It's not that there's no conspiracy, it's that there are too many credible, and not even mutually exclusive, options (some with strong supporting evidence) to pick from.
My three favorite isolated pieces of evidence: (a) the pristine "magic bullet" found on the stretcher JFK was brought in on (it wasn't just magic how it supposedly hit two people 1/12 of a second apart, but it took no damage in the process, and was found lying on a stretcher), (b) the perfect handprint of Lee Harvey Oswald found on the rifle by Dallas PD -- which happened to have custody to Lee Harvey Oswald's corpse -- after the rifle was returned by the FBI lab which found no prints at all, and (c) the implausibly large number of witnesses with strong mob connections (many of whom died in suspicious circumstances over the next ten years). Each of those, on its own, is enough to launch a thousand conspiracy theories.
BTW: I really love American Tabloid by James Ellroy. It doesn't pretend to be "true" but it's a lot more compelling that JFK.
Anyway, in 2025 the LA Times can declare that Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes.
