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James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction

Nathan Ashman

James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981, Ellroy’s eccentric “Demon Dog” persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy’s fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy’s two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy’s fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse “peeping tom” into a recognizable, contemporary “social type,” a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory ”cinematic” world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of “ocularcentric crisis” in Ellroy’s texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroy’s works—particularly his later novels—are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.

Lexington Books

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6580-6 • Hardback • October 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-6581-3 • eBook • October 2018 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction

Hardback

eBook

Summary

James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981, Ellroy’s eccentric “Demon Dog” persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy’s fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy’s two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy’s fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse “peeping tom” into a recognizable, contemporary “social type,” a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory ”cinematic” world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of “ocularcentric crisis” in Ellroy’s texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroy’s works—particularly his later novels—are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6580-6 • Hardback • October 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-6581-3 • eBook • October 2018 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

Author

Nathan Ashman is lecturer in crime writing at the University of East Anglia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘Cam-Era’: James Ellroy, Voyeurism and Contemporary Culture
Chapter 1: ‘Cherchez la Femme’: Voyeurism, Narrative Desire and the Female Body in The Black Dahlia
Chapter 2: ‘They’ll Believe Anything We Can Get on the Screen’: Cinematizing the City in The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential
Chapter 3: ‘Feast Your Eyes’: White Jazz, Voyeurism and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism
Chapter 4: ‘Window Peeping History’: Voyeurising the Past in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand
Chapter 5: ‘You Can’t Peep and Prowl Paper the Rest of Your Life’: Blood’s a Rover, Public Privacy and the Voyeuristic Pleasures of the Archive
Conclusion: Connecting THEN and NOW: Perfidia, LAPD 53 and the Value of Ellroy’s ‘Voyeur Fiction’

Reviews

For fans of Ellroy’s fiction and crime story buffs in general, this is an excellent piece of work, dealing with scophophila, epistemophilia, crime story plots, psychological motivation of the characters (and maybe that of their inventors), literary criticism and the power of the hidden gaze,
seemingly always connected to read and understand the female body. The many detailed analyses of paragraphs and some main characters of Ellroy’s historical novels are masterfully explained and introduce several new aspects of his crime fiction.
— Popcultureshelf.com

To anyone who is a fan—or at least a regular reader—of the works of James Ellroy, this book will answer, or at least suggest some answers, to the complex psychiatric, metaphysical, geographical, and violent plots that make up the two challenging series and several standalone novels constituting his oeuvre. . . James Ellroy and Voyeur Fictionwill leave readers with greater insight into Ellroy’s rather challenging approach to the modern world of sight and perception, especially as it is both created and promulgated by Hollywood and greater Los Angeles.

— Clues: A Journal of Detection

James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction is an important work which draws you into the mind's eye of the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. By engaging with existing critical material and forging a new path in readings of Ellroy, Nathan Ashman has earned a place in the front rank of Ellroy scholars.

— Steven Powell, author of Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy (Bloomsbury: 2023)

Nathan Ashman's book is a welcome and valuable addition to the growing body of critical work on James Ellroy and the type of historical crime fiction he writes. Well-written, carefully researched, theoretically informed and textually astute, it provides a reading of Ellroy's most important fiction that focuses on the obsessive voyeurism at their core, and the desire for knowledge, both of individual crimes and their relation to the larger public sphere, that it signifies. This is an important contribution both to our knowledge of Ellroy's work and to crime fiction studies in general.
— Professor Peter Messent, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK

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