Tome: The Cold Six Thousand

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
James Ellroy's second volume in his USA Underworld trilogy follows the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and culminates in the killing of his brother Robert and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King. Once again told through a 3-man arc (returning American Tabloid alumni Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell and newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr.), The Cold Six Thousand, is a massive, demanding read, hardly helped by Ellroy's pared-to-the-bone prose and a plot that isn't so much labyrinthine as it is a literary hydra, where the closure of one strand merely results in the sprouting of 2 more cogs in an incredibly complex wheel of murky dealings, shady alliances and tangled sexual politics.

Ellroy's massive, grimy canvas now takes in the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the former exploited by nefarious CIA operatives to run a drug manufacturing and exporting enterprise, with profits being funneled into training camps for mercenaries to for yet another planned Cuba invasion to topple Fidel Castro, while the latter prompts the ever-scheming J.Edgar Hoover to launch a cointelpro to discredit the movement.

Mixed into this turbulent stew is Wayne's misplaced hatred of Black people and it's attendant guilt when his wife is brutally murdered by a black felon he let escape, Ward Littell's gradual unraveling by guilt and remorse over his collussion with Hoover to discredit King and the Mob to fleece the reclusive Howard Hughes in Las Vegas and Pete Bondurant's gradually disintegrating marriage to Barb Cathcart.

Not the easiest of reads but a must for fans of Ellroy's revisionist American History and it's deeply flawed facilitators.


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