Blood on the Moon is signature 80s serial killer worship. It's considered early Ellroy, and it's amazing how much his writing matured over the next feBlood on the Moon is signature 80s serial killer worship. It's considered early Ellroy, and it's amazing how much his writing matured over the next few years (Black Dahlia was only a few years away!). This first novel in the Lloyd Hopkins series demonstrates Ellroy's unique voice, but it's nothing close to what's in store.
The first scene introduces the three antagonists, and Ellroy narrows it to the primary killer's identity at about a third of the way through. The only piece left to uncover is the killer's name. Lloyd identifies the threat, but ineptly fails to recognize the immediate danger:
The dream lover continued to send the flowers, anonymously, for many years. Over eighteen years. Always when the lonely woman needed them most ... Then he stood up and helped Kathleen to her feet. "I think your dream lover is a very strange fighter," he said, "and I think he wants to own you, not inspire you..."
Ellroy is a crime writer after all, and the opening scene is a graphic, brutal rape:
He pulled down his fly to deliver a warm liquid coup de grace, and discovered he was hard.
They left him there, bereft of tears or the will to feel anything beyond the hollowness of his devastation.
The violence settles down a bit, but it's never far away:
They couldn't even mark the outline of the stiff with chalk, they had to use tape.
This leaves the spotlight on the characters themselves more than the plot. Unfortunately even though the characters have personalities, but they’re still cardboard thin, and fall apart under only light scrutiny. Lloyd himself is as criminal, and nearly as damaged as the killer, but he ultimately landed in law enforcement. He's chasing a "white light", a concept that Ellroy never really develops. His 'sidekick,' Dutch, is a veteran cop who appreciates Lloyd's genius for solving crime. Dutch is the only truly likeable character mainly because he's more relatable than the rest of the frail and unbalanced cast. The women often fight back, but they're no more than fodder for the killer.
Lloyd's a womanizer, devoted to his children, but doomed to lose his wife as expected in any generic cop story. The women he sees on the side are free-wheeling, future collateral victims.
Worst of all is the psychobabble Ellroy uses to explain the homosexual motives of the killer, and Kathleen McCarthy's sentimental pseudo-feminism. It's as if he wants to champion the underdog, but doesn't have the information, nor any personally relatable experience to do it properly.
Blood on the Moon is more style than substance, likely more interesting for fans who are curious about the progress of his career, and those who are satisfied with boilerplate 80s serial killer stories....more
In The Moving Target Ross Macdonald shows a knack for planting an odd initial scenario hook with a far different truth behind it. In this case, the weIn The Moving Target Ross Macdonald shows a knack for planting an odd initial scenario hook with a far different truth behind it. In this case, the wealthy but unreliable opportunist Ralph Sampson appears to be the gullible kidnapping victim of a California cult. In truth there are two separate crimes with no clear connection, multiple love triangles and a racketeering crime ring riddled with piratical treachery.
Not only is the plot interesting and complex, but Macdonald's style has artistic, reflective moments with memorable and pithy noir aphorisms. On the rationalizing criminal mind:
"I'm a realist, Archer. So are you. Sampson's no loss to anybody."
His voice had changed, become suddenly shallow and flat. The whole man was shifting and fencing, trying out attitudes, looking for one that would sustain him.
The evil is in people, and money is the peg they hang it on.
I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.
The pianist's fingers moved in the keyboard mirror with a hurried fatality, as if the piano played itself and she had to keep up with it.
Lew Archer reflects on one of the societal impacts of war:
They went out of high school into the army or the air corps and made good in a big way. They were officers and gentlemen with high pay, an even higher opinion of themselves, and all the success they needed to keep it blown up. War was their element, and when the war was finished, they were finished. They had to go back to boys' jobs and take orders from middle-aged civilians. Handling pens and adding machines instead of flight sticks and machine guns. Some of them couldn't take it and went bad.
Title itself is a short brush-stroke about destiny:
Her reaction was surprising. "You make me sick, Archer. Don't you get bored with yourself playing the dumb detective?"
"Sure I get bored. I need something naked and bright. A moving target in the road."
The hard-boiled style (along with plenty of the early genre's sexism, reader beware!) stands among the high-grade writers like Hammet and Chandler:
He stabbed an egg and watched it bleed yellow on his plate.
The girl came out then, wearing a black-striped dress, narrow in the right places, full in the others.
"Where in hell did you come from?" I said to Taggert.
"Out of the everywhere into the here."
I was tired of waiting, of following people down dark roads and never seeing their faces.
I was halfway out of the chair when the gun went off. [He] was listless when I got to him. The gun slid out of his hand.
Another gun had spoken.
Of course he includes the dark humor that makes noir most attractive:
"You telling me my business?"
"Apparently."
You'll probably have to look (just as I did)!
"I couldn't stand podex osculation."
An "I'm asking for a friend" moment...
My memory struggled in the red gloom and found the comparison it wanted: a Neapolitan-type bordello I'd visited in Mexico City -- on a case.
The similes are awkward at times, but no worse than when Chandler's fail to land. It hurts the writing a bit, but they're mostly not too far-fetched:
A few pairs of headlights went north through the fog like the eyes of deep-sea fish.
A moment of silence stretched out like membrane on the point of tearing.
Loading...
