James Ellroy: "Hollywood communists were crooks spying for Russia"

• Don Winslow "The narcos are now more powerful than ever"

Who says he feels like "the dog of death with a pig's trunk, the crazy owl and the clever trick of the donkey's cock" is tired and has a cough.

He is also brave and lazy, perhaps overreacted, who likes anorexic responses.

James Ellroy (Los Angeles, 1948) is in charge.

"

, but I refuse to answer any questions about the war, I'm not interested in the present," he warns when he is groped for the pin he wears with the colors of the invaded country's flag.

It is the nature of the most scarred and talented writer in American crime fiction.

We are talking about someone who in his genre is compared to

who beat to death a rabid dog that attacked him in the street, who almost ended up in jail in a violent youth of alcohol and sex, the motherless for guilt of a murderer who was never found in an unsolved police case.

And who wears a wonderful flower shirt and whose pants fall down (on his last visit to Madrid in 2019 he was much fatter), mismatched with a large belt.

His laconism has an explanation: he only gives a visa for his literary world because he is

.

«I live as in the 40s and I haven't evolved mentally until the early 60s, the rest doesn't interest me, I don't understand;

I don't have a computer, a cell phone, and I don't watch TV.

He is not even interested in Los Angeles, the setting for his great novels, because "he hasn't been there for years, the city I describe is only in my head."

-As far as you are concerned, the pandemic has not affected you.

-That's how it is.

I haven't even been physically afraid, because my perpetual natural state is loneliness.

A solitude that is only interrupted when his editor calls his home in Colorado to ask him to promote one of his books.

As the most professional mercenary of letters, he packs his luggage and catches a plane.

And he appreciates it.

In his novel

, published in Spain by Random House Literature, the dog of death wallows again in blood and mud, telling the story of

, a former police officer who worked as a detective in Los Angeles in the 1950s and as a thug. of a tabloid publication dedicated to the gossip of Hollywood stars.

A guy who blackmails homosexuals who don't live in a closet, but in a castle, hides abortions and is an accomplice in celebrity porn movies.

pass through his agenda of outrages .

My perpetual natural state is loneliness

Someone who remembers Jack Vincennes, his corrupt cop and lover from the

media show , who in his film version was played by

.

At first, Ellroy denies it, but then he acknowledges the relationship: "Vincennes was created entirely from fiction, but it is true that when I described Otash, who was real, in many things he reminded me of him."

The author of

does not go further when asked about specific aspects of the book: «I am not going to answer because I never reveal what I write really happened or is invented».

Another contained bark.

It does come in like the rattle of a machine gun when asked about the communist persecution in Hollywood of his favorite years.

“The communists controlled the unions and were very powerful.

People say: 'Oh, poor little artists who lost their jobs because of their ideals', when in reality they were scumbags, bad people,

who wanted to subvert the established order in the US.

I don't feel sorry for them."

Ellroy, despite his crazy early years, is order-loving, heavy-handed, and capable of frightening any liberal in his country.

That is why he staunchly defends the work of the Los Angeles Police Department, regardless of his violent history and despite the fact that in his novels it is full of corrupt agents.

The dog does not bite the hand that literally feeds it.

That is why the opinions of other police authors, such as Don Winslow, who has denounced the racism of the police forces in the US, do not matter to him at all.

"Don't trust what is said,

," he says.

When I'm done with the tour, back to solitude, to Colorado, to discipline.

“I write by hand and when I start I prepare a detailed outline of characters and plots that I follow very strictly,” he says.

It has never missed a delivery date.

The rabid dog who loves snacking on journalists is the dream of any editor.

At the end of the interview he is very friendly and plays ping pong with the jokes of the respective flowery shirts.

Relaxed, she asks him if after everything she has lived she considers herself someone happy.

"Yes," he replies.

The dog wags its tail.

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