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Essay on L. A. Confidential

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L. A. Confidential

A Crime or Detective novel has many characteristics. It can combine mystery, suspense, romance, and maybe even a bit of comedy into an intriguing story that you just can't walk away from. James Ellroy, the self proclaimed Demon Dog of American Literature, has produced a masterpiece in the third book in his L. A. Quartet. L. A. Confidential is a great example of this genre of literature. It combines multiple love stories, multiple crimes, and a slew of characters into a work of art that is as highly dramatic as it is suspenseful. This is a book that will literally change you be affecting your way of speaking and may even cause you lose of sleep in order to get another couple pages in before calling it a night. …show more content…

Ed stood up, breathed chaos: cops, shattered glass, an ambulance through the window, loading bodies. Bud White shouting orders, a little girl in a blood-spattered dress eating a doughnut" (Ellroy, pg. 467). Ellroy wrote this book with thoughts of the characters providing the lines of the book. The entire book is written with dialogue and the stream of conscious of the main character at that point in the story. This genius idea makes the book flow so fast that you can barely keep up with the action. You almost have to teach yourself to read again to adjust to Ellroy's style of writing and at first it in confusing but you do gain a grasp for his literature. When questioned about why he chose to develop this style of writing he stated that he needed to cut the book down from over 600 pages to fewer than 500 without losing a drop of the story. By just showing what the characters were thinking not only did he cut the story by over a hundred pages but made it that much more exciting. L.A. Confidential is a story that starts out in 1950. There are three detectives that are the main characters of this novel. Ed Exley is a up and coming, play it by the book cop who is battling against his legendary father who was chief of police and his hero brother who was killed in the line of duty and is a L.A.P.D. legend. Wendell "Bud" White sat chained to a radiator while his abusive father killed his mother. Bud is now a bomb with a badge that wages war on wife beaters and

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