White Jazz

A Novel

By: James Ellroy

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns - it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer, a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.

Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat", and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, and from racketeers and drug kingpins, all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "42 and going on dead", it's dues time.

Klein tells his own story, his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing, taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.

Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

©2007 James Ellroy (P)2007 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"Riffling, rolling, reeling....Ellroy's best." ( The Denver Post)
"One of the great American writers of our time." ( Los Angeles Times Book Review)
" White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss." ( San Francisco Examiner)

Scott Brick hits a home run!

Great book. Scott Brick always came across to me as a somewhat boring narrator, but this time he nailed it!

Time period

Attention to detail. How things have changed from the 50's till today. Love stories from the old days

What a great book!

I've always loved this book and hearing it read by Scott Brick is a real treat. I don't get all the 1 star reviews. This is a really good book.

I wish Audible would get some more Ellroy books. An unabridged version of "LA Confidential" would be a great start. Followed by "The Big Nowhere".

Enjoyable...

There are better Ellroy books, but this was pretty good. The real downfall was Scott Brick. Normally I like him, but he's wrong for Ellroy. He can't do gritty pulp.

Someone's always watching

Scott Brick is a fantastic narrator and
Ellroy is still king of noire prose atmosphere

Raw, Challenging Final Act Needed Better Narrator

I’ve been a fan of James Ellroy for 25 years now but I only started listening to the audiobook versions of his work. It took me about 2 years to get around to all of them but I recently finished listening to his entire body of work, and White Jazz was the only one that featured a narrator that either just isn’t very good ior was at least wrong for this. Personally I’m leaning toward the former but this is the only thing I’ve heard him read so maybe he does a better job elsewhere, but he nearly ruins this. It’s too bad because White Jazz is a really great novel that features some of the best and boldest writing stylistically that Ellroy has ever done, and features a pretty insane plot that’s a worthy conclusion to the famed LA Quartet.

Love me fierce in danger.

"in the end I possess my birthplace and I am possessed by its language."
-- Ross MacDonald."

"Tell me anything
Tell me everything.
Revoke our time apart.
Love me fierce in danger."
-- James Ellroy, White Jazz

4.5 stars. Sure, you could read this as just the final book in Ellory's masterpiece LA Quartet, but Ellory is playing for bigger stakes. He isn't just writing crime. He is writing the human condition. He isn't just giving you straight dope. He is playing you with pairs. He gives you E. Exley v D. Smith. He gives you Noonan vs. Gallaudet. He gives you J.C. Kafesjian v.P. Herrick, Richie V. Tommy, Sad mom vs Crazy mom.

Think of all of these pairs as fugues that swirl around the narrator, dirty Lieutenant David Klein, reflecting, stream of consciousness, talking, screaming, building, dropping. The narration is like jazz playing two themes together into one. The themes finally coalesce and you see that black and white, criminal and the cop, these are all just linked brothers and sister trapped in a long and fatal incestuous battle for survival, for love, for understanding.

Coda:

In the end everybody dies, but you hope before then someone tells you the truth and tells you they love you. If you are lucky, perhaps, those two will be the same.

Did I read the same book...

I am shocked at the 3 negative reviews. I loved this book as I do all of James Ellroy's work.
Ellroy searches into his character's souls and the results are not pretty. He has a great understanding of what he is writing about.
The writing style is different. sort of 1 word sentences, but it is not hard to follow at all.
White Jazz is sort of a snap shot of urban life at a specific time in our history. The reality is real. The reality is disturbing.

Amazing end to an incredible quartet.

Firstly, let me say I LOVED this final chapter of the LA Quartet. It is sublime and without doubt a classic.
I think many of the negative reviews on this platform are silly. James Ellroy is a masterful writer and deserves to be credited as one of crime writings greatest auteurs. Perhaps the reviews I speak of were written by people who had not listened in chronological order or, perhaps, they were written by people who want the same recipe played out in every book. This one is different in that it returns us to the first person, like Black Dahlia, but changes things into a semi stream of conscious. I love that. I love that Ellroy chose to become more lyrical, perhaps even whimsical, and put the narrative structure of the classic whodunnit into a bullet pointed, hard nosed, song of fictional genius.
To begin with the story seems chaotic - lots of names and lots of things to follow, but if you have read/listened to the other books then it won’t take long to find your feet. Part of the choice I believe Ellroy made was to throw us into this one - as if we are a fly on the wall in the madness of the LAPD circa 1950’s. It doesn’t matter if you don’t grasp everything to begin with. You will. However, as the story unfolds it completes this saga with brutal, poetic, perfection. You wanna know what happens to everyone and how the bigger picture plays out…? This is the book to end the journey and I couldn’t imagine it any better.
It’s a shame I guess that there are different readers for all the books because that means some characters get changed quite fundamentally just by the voice the actor chooses to adopt. That said - none of the readers are perfect. The narrator of this book is useless at Irish accents.. but then the reader of Black Dahlia sucked at Scottish. Nevertheless they all manage to get a lot right and I very much recommend a back to back listening. That way you really feel like this quartet is one long and brilliant tale of corruption, greed, murder and the often fleeting hopes of various characters to get to the bottom of it all. The trouble is the bottom is so so far down and dark.
I think Dave Klein is an incredible character. Perhaps Ellroy’s best. He has a bit of everyone in him and he is every bit the hard nail in the cannon of badass.
Please ignore the dumb reviews saying this book sucks. It’s creative and it’s brave and, if nothing else, it’s the end to everyone’s story. But it’s so much more than that. Switch up. Knuckle down. Prepare to get toasty.

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