The Golem of Hollywood

Jesse Kellerman, Jonathan Kellerman
The Golem of Hollywood

Putnam, 2014

LAPD Detective Jacob Lev wakes up after a rough night in his apartment with a woman he sees for the first time. She calls herself Mai, goes to take a shower, and then mysteriously disappears. The same day, on Jacob’s doorstep appear two men in suits, Paul and Mel, from the Special Projects department and tell Jacob that he is temporarily transferred to their department, to help with the investigation of a murder. For some time before these events, Jacob, after seven years in homicide, asks his boss to transfer him to a desk job due to depression, and the boss moves Lev to Traffic to work with statistics.

«For most of his adult life, he’d been a high-functioning alcoholic, although sometimes functioning was the operative word, and sometimes it was high. Since his transfer to Traffic, he hadn’t been drinking as much—he hadn’t needed to—and it bothered him that he’d blacked out last night.
Now that he was back in Homicide, he supposed he was entitled.»

Paul and Mel bring Lev to a house in one of the remote areas of Los Angeles. There have been found severed head of a man, a package with vomit and a few words in Hebrew carved in the table’s wood. Woman detective of Indian origin Divya Das at the crime scene explains to Jacob the situation. The body has not been found at the site, there are no signs of a struggle, too, and no other clues. Head of Special Projects (which Jacob has never heard of) Mallick says that Jacob is in charge of the the murder investigation because of his Jewish origin.

After an unsuccessful previous novel Jesse Kellerman, this time in tandem with his more famous father, shoots the bull's eye. The Golem of Hollywood’s genre can be defined as a Jewish novel about a serial killer, but it is better not to define it in any way. It does not fit in any genre framework, although composed of the elements of police procedural, serial killer novel and Biblical apocrypha. A good novel about a serial killer is very hard to write, it is very few people who can do it. The very definition of a serial killer novel has become clichéd. Kellerman Jr. until this book avoided genre conventions, while Kellerman Sr. did quite the opposite – he wrote quite a lot of genre books, unashamedly put them in series, where the number of volumes surpasses two dozens, perhaps. And reading this novel, you guess all the time what parts elements of the book the son wrote, and what the father. I have read, only one Jonathan’s book, but all but one of Jesse’s, so I will not be a good judge, though to me this novel’s style was very Kellerman Jr.-ish. Here we have Jesse’s witty dialogues and his nimble prose. The protagonist Lev here is also the heir to protagonists of Jesse’s previous books, he’s again a strange loner, confused and sometimes funny. Jesse’s father apparently came up with a serial killer plot, police procedural parts and Jewish topic, and theme of fathers and sons was close to both Kellermans.

Main plotline, the police investigation itself, is very intense and very reliable as far as possible considering the supernatural elements. The novel is written in the tradition of Michael Connelly, who also wrote (and writes) deep police procedurals set in Los Angeles. Detective Jacob Lev can be a geek or a daddy's boy, a man with complexes or an alcoholic, but he knows his business. All answers here are not taken from the air, only hard work brings results. Leo uses his head and his legs.

The plot is complicated to the extent. It is not simple, but the simplicity only harms books as this one. And if the novel didn’t have the Jewish line, the novel would already be outstanding. Jewish storyline, apocryphal, is mystical and pretty confusing, not everyone will understand it fully. It helps to understand the events taking place in the present, helping to find answers, but does not give clear answers. As a non-religious person, I was lost in the twists and turns of the Jewish line, and not only lost, but did not understand it.

And this lack of understanding is the understanding itself - understanding of the novel as a whole. «The Golem of Hollywood» deserves comparison with the two other novels, written by Russian writers. These novels are Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and Faculty of unnecessary things by Yuri Dombrowski. In both of these books the main plot line takes place in the present, but there is also a secondary line - the Biblical one. In these books, I did not fully understand the biblical line, but that did not stop to highly praise the contemporary line. The same situation is also with this book: the main line is so good that you can judge the novel considering only this modern part. (However, it is worth noting that the endings in both Master and Faculty are more powerful than "Golem"’s, although I do not think that stylistically Kellerman is weaker than Bulgakov and Dombrowski.) Biblical line gives the depth to the main line, and the entire book makes it something than was never written before.

In this novel, Jesse Kellerman first stepped on the genre territory, but all signs of the genre have been turned on its head. Superb.

The Harry Bosch Novels: Volume 1

Michael Connelly
The Harry Bosch Novels: Volume 1

Little, Brown, 2001

This book consists of the first three novels about a Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch, including the Connelly’s debut The Black Echo. Each of the three novels is a stand-alone, but reading in a row, you can see how all three are fused into one common narrative about the life of Bosch.

Bosch, at first glance, is quite ordinary detective: he didn’t know his father, his mother was killed when he was a child, then he wandered around the foster homes, then the Vietnam War, the LAPD patrol, and up the career ladder, to the elite RHD. However, after one incident, IAD became interested in Bosch: Harry shot an unarmed serial killer. Disciplinary action had followed, and instead of RHD Bosch had been sent to a homicide table in Hollywood. Not the most original biography, if not for one "but": Bosch is a sort of private detective in LAPD, he is an outsider, a foreign body in the command line. His own lieutenant despises him, he has no friends in the division, and the IAD wants to nail Bosch forever.

Was Bosch among the first outsider detectives inside the police department? Hardly. However, the attractiveness of novels about Bosch is largely in the fact that it is non-standard mystery stories under the guise of police protsedurals. Connelly spent several years as a crime reporter at LA Times, hence the authenticity of the details. Description of Homicide in work is phenomenal. LAPD-geeks will squeal with delight (which is what I did while reading this 800+ pages).

But Harry is working ouside of a police structure. It is not something that he would not trust, but he has his own methods. Although Bosch is at odds with the Internal Affairs (especially in The Black Echo), he rare breaks the law. Bosch solves the most puzzling cases, often those where corruption is involved, but he does so not by knocking out the truth with his fists, but thanks to his extraordinary efficiency. Bosch knows that the management structure of the department always hinders the investigation, and in addition often chooses the easy way out. Bosch doesn’t care, it is convenient or not for the department.

Plots of all three novels - The Black Echo, The Black Ice and The Concrete Blonde - are puzzling stories, with double or even triple bottom, with a moderate share of persecution and shootings, and The Black Echo’s plot is at all close to perfection. The Black Echo tells the story of a bank robbery, The Black Ice - the distribution of a new kind of drug, and The Concrete Blonde brings us back to background story of The Black Echo, regarding the serial killer nicknamed the Dollmaker. And I can responsibly say that The Concrete Blonde is the best novel about a serial killer I have ever read.

As much as it may sound strange, but sometimes Connelly’s style reminded me the style of Richard Stark, creator of the Parker novels. Bosch and Parker are on opposite sides of the law, and I’m not sure, put them both into one book, would Bosch be able to catch Parker. But the mechanics of the thoughts of their characters Connelly and Stark describe similar.

«When he was done, many of the gaps were closed. Meadows served a total of six and a half years in the federal pen. He was paroled in early 1988, when he was sponsored by the Charlie Company program. He spent ten months in the program before moving to the apartment in Sepulveda. Parole reports showed he secured a job as a drill operator in the gold mine in the Santa Clarita Valley. He completed parole in February 1989 and he quit his job a day after his PO signed him off. No known employment since, according to the Social Security Administration. IRS said Meadows hadn't filed a return since 1988.

Bosch went into the kitchen and got a beer out and made a ham and cheese sandwich. He stood by the sink eating and drinking and trying to organize things about the case in his head. He believed that Meadows had been scheming from the time he walked out of TI, or at least Charlie Company. He'd had a plan. He worked legitimate jobs until he cleared parole, and then he quit and the plan was set into action. Bosch felt sure of it. And he felt that it was therefore likely that, at either the prison or the halfway house, Meadows had hooked up with the men who had burglarized the bank with him. And then killed him.»

Six months ago, I thought that Michael Connelly’s books are commercial fiction, mediocre airplane reading. But now, three novels later, it can be said that Connelly is an unbelievably great talent.

Clandestine

James Ellroy
Clandestine

Open Road Media ebook, 2011
(originally published in 1982)

After the death of his partner Wacky Walker, a young patrolman Fred Underhill learns from newspapers about the murder of a woman with whom he once spent a night. Underhill makes a connection between the murder of Maggie Cadwallader and murder of a woman from those times when Underhill’s partner was alive. Both murders are similar in method and means, and Underhill, ambitious and in dreams of the badge of a LAPD detective, violeting the law, begins to conduct his own investigation, gradually focusing on one suspect, a womanizer and gambler Eddie Engels. Having found Maggie’s brooch in Eddie’s apartment, Underhill is convinced that Eddie is the killer. Underhill puts the collected evidence (except the brooch) to his boss, and the boss assignes the patrolman to a working group, led by an experienced detective and violent psychopath Dundee. Independent group (clandestine) of four detectives is to gather evidence against Engels, preferably by proving that, in addition to Maggie, Engels had killed several other women. But the Underhill’s plan and the work of the group leads to wrongful arrest, and Underhill loses his badge. But he will come back to the death of Maggie, a few years later.

After the stunning debut Brown's Requiem Ellroy somewhat disappoints with his second book. Clandestine is the same Brown's Requiem, only transferred 30 years in the past. The main character changed private detective license to LAPD badge, became younger and the fascination with classical music is replaced by golf. Otherwise this is all the same ambitious, narcissistic, eccentric man who dreams of conquering the world (within his means) and get the heart of one and only. Both novels even are written in the first person.

Ellroy here delivers, of course, but only sporadically. Underhill marries a woman with a prosthetic leg. In the novel appears the boy in his nine years with the growth of an adult male. Homosexual provides an alibi (and this is the fifties) for a murder suspect. Even the final denouement is logical and natural, though Underhill is not Fitz Brown, he thinks slower.

But Ellroy missed the important thing: all that has happened to Underhill in the years following his departure from the LAPD, the author packed into two chapters:

«It started getting bad with Lorna gradually, so that there was no place to look for causes and no one to blame. It was just a series of smoldering resentments. Too much giving and too much taking; too much time spent away from each other; too much investing of fantasy qualities in each other. Too much hope and too much pride and too little willingness to change.

And too much thinking on my part. Early in '54 I told Lorna that. "Our brains are a curse, Lor. I want to use my muscles and not my brain." Lorna looked up from her breakfast coffee and scratched my arm distractedly. "Then go ahead. You used to tell me 'Don't think,' remember?" »

Fred Underhill has changed a lot over the years, but in the second part of the novel after his almost divorce from his wife for some reason he is still the same. Family life of Fred and Lorna is what would amount to a novel that would probably be more complex than what happened in Clandestine.

It is sad that Ellroy has squandered his talent on self-repetition.