My Dark Places
By James Ellroy
Knopf, 353 pages, $25
The Missing
By Andrew O’Hagan
The New Press, 208 pages, $20
It has long been evident that James Ellroy has been living in a mental nightmare from which emerge fictions about too-intense cops who can’t let go of a murder case (the slow and convoluted “American Tabloid,” building up to the Kennedy assassination as a mob hit, was a bit of a detour). In his new memoir, Ellroy is back on his old L.A. noir turf, but this time the murder victim is his 43-year-old mother, Jean, a divorced nurse found beaten and strangled in a patch of ivy off a road in El Monte, Calif., in June 1958. When the killing occurred, Ellroy, then 10, had been out with his father, who soon gained custody of him. The father spent seven years telling his son that Jean’s murder had naturally followed her life of lies and infidelities. His father’s constant denigration of his mother prevented Ellroy from openly loving and mourning her; Ellroy descended into a decade of drugs, alcohol and purposeless living, punctuated only by the consolation he found in crime fiction. The legendary torture-murder of Elizabeth Short in 1947 in California obsessed him, and based on it he wrote what is arguably his best book, “The Black Dahlia.” But all his attempts to reclaim his mother have led to this one.
“My Dark Places” is divided into sections titled “The Redhead,” “The Kid in the Picture,” “Stoner” and “Geneva Hilliker.” The redhead was Ellroy’s mother, Geneva “Jean” Hilliker Ellroy, as he knew her when he was a child. The kid in the picture is himself. Stoner is Bill Stoner, the L.A. homicide cop with whom Ellroy began reinvestigating his mother’s unsolved murder in 1994, revisiting the evidence, running computer searches and chasing down any clue that came along. (The TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” even ran a re-enactment of the crime.) The final section is about Ellroy’s mother as he came to know her during the investigation. Stoner and Ellroy both became hooked on the case.
“Some kids found her,” reads the first paragraph of this compelling journey, told relentlessly in subject-verb-object sentences that eerily reveal how close Ellroy’s fiction comes to his life. Ellroy’s signature is the way he uses language, and here he uses it to keep his own emotions, obviously considerable, subjugated to the narrative. Everything is presented down flat, either this way or that; he became a novelist by intellectually denying emotional need. “I never dreamed about her,” Ellroy writes. “My new life (as a writer) was long on fervor and short on retrospection. I knew I abandoned my father and hastened his death and paid the debt off in increments. . . . I only knew (my mother) in shame and longing. I plundered her in a fever dream and denied my own message of yearning. I was afraid to resurrect her and love her body-and-soul. I wrote my novel and sold it. It was all about LA crime and me. I was afraid to stalk the redhead and give her secrets up. I hadn’t met the man who would bring her home to me.”
This, of course, was Stoner, who early on in his homicide work learned that “men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned, and (angry). Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies. Men killed so they could talk about it. Men killed because they were weak and lazy. . . . (Stoner) didn’t want the rule to be true. He didn’t want to see women as a whole race of victims.”
Neither does Ellroy. Now happily married, he is an example of someone who worked all his internal demons out constructively.
Though also literary non-fiction about permanent loss, Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Missing” couldn’t be more different from Ellroy’s book. Set beneath the perennially gray skies and brick working-class sameness of England and Glasgow, it is an investigation into the people known as missing persons. Unlike Ellroy, our lad of 28 never really explains why he feels so personally compelled toward his subject, except that disappearance hovered over his own childhood in a modernistic new town outside Glasgow and swallowed up a 3-year-old child there. O’Hagan’s search is more widespread than Ellroy’s; his soul is troubled by the precariousness of normality. “It is a matter of community,” he writes. “The missing are every community’s unknowable shadow; their plight can speak to us of modern indecency and horror.”
In 1994, “the Metropolitan Police Missing Persons Bureau was notified of 23,528 missing persons (and) these are just the reported ones, the missed,” O’Hagan writes in this narrative of thought rather than plot, this unhurried fugue through which the reader follows O’Hagan to the sites of disappearances, to police stations and to shelters where disconnected, runaway teenagers live.
O’Hagan is continually struck by the way the missing stay stuck in time, at the moment they disappeared; they never grow up, though their families go on without them. “Where the missing person is being missed, it is usually the case that someone visible, someone back home, will be going through a sort of hell, a misery of endless doubt and speculation. Mr. Bennett is one of these, one of the missers, whose life has been stalled and damaged by his son’s disappearance. I kept trying to talk to him about himself, about his life, but he quickly reverted back to the details and possibilities surrounding Billy’s case.” (A Chicagoan I know whose son had disappeared told me, 20 years later, that he could go maybe 15 minutes without thinking about it.)
Adults also disappear and never come back, forever lost in the gray, industrial landscape. Though the abduction and killing of Liverpool toddler James Bulger by two 10-year-olds in 1993 motivated O’Hagan to write “The Missing,” he ends the book with the stories of 12 young missing women murdered by a man named Frederick West, who buried their remains in and around the homes in which he had lived in Gloucester.
Ultimately, both Ellroy and O’Hagan suggest the psychological necessity of understanding the narratives we devise from the dead and the lost. And both men mourn their women as people.
