American crime writer James Ellroy has just published Blood's a Rover, the third novel in his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. (Random House Canada)

He felt it in his gut. He knew it before he was even old enough to explain it.

“As a kid,” James Ellroy says, “I always sensed that there was a guy with a briefcase containing a gun sitting outside the corridors of power. This is their story.”

'I am a reactionary. I’m very conservative. I’ve never been a hipster, I’ve never been a rock ’n’ roller. The rebelliousness that I saw all around me in the ’60s felt canonized. It felt like they were the establishment.'

— Crime novelist James Ellroy

“This” is the revered crime writer’s mammoth Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, and he’s just published its final novel, Blood’s a Rover. The trilogy, which also comprises American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), is a horrifying alternative history of the U.S. from 1958 to 1972. In Ellroy’s bleak, cynical vision, the guys with guns run rampant behind the scenes, infiltrating organizations, rigging elections, staging assassinations and coups — all at the behest of an evil cabal of politicians, mobsters and power brokers.

“It is a secret, self-contained, compartmentalized, shrouded, collusively minded America,” Ellroy says. He’s sitting across the table, sipping coffee. He’s in Toronto to promote Blood’s a Rover. He’s deadpan. His brown eyes never blink. He speaks like he writes, in blunt, declarative sentences. It’s a style so addictive that, after charging through the book’s 656 pages, you emerge writing the same way.

(Random House Canada)

Ellroy, the self-styled “demon dog” of American crime fiction, has a shaved head and round glasses. He looks monkish. He lives like a monk, minus the celibacy. He says he ignores the daily news and the culture swirling round him. He just sits in his spare L.A. apartment and writes. He’s obsessive, like the three antiheroes of his new novel: brutal FBI agent Dwight Holly, Oedipal ex-cop Wayne Tedrow Jr. and punk-kid private eye Don Crutchfield. All three spend endless hours poring over paperwork, trying to crack cases. All three also come under the thrall of the same unlikely femme fatale: a greying, chain-smoking, middle-aged, bisexual left-wing agitator with a knife scar on her arm. Joan the Red Goddess.

There’s a real Joan. Ellroy dedicates the book to her. There’s also a real-life counterpart to Karen Sifakis, Dwight’s married, college-prof lover. Ellroy met them both after his marriage to Calgary-born author Helen Knode ended. He says all three women inspired him to bust the bonds of the crime genre with this novel. Blood’s a Rover, which borrows its archaic-sounding title from an A.E. Housman poem, is pulp fiction on a Tolstoyan scale.

“It’s a love story,” Ellroy says. “It’s about ideology. It’s about conversion. It’s about the necessity of revolution. It’s about God. It’s about the holy conjunction of men and women.”

The novel opens in the summer of 1968, in the aftermath of the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations — the former engineered by the mob, the latter by the FBI. Dwight receives a new assignment from his racist boss, J. Edgar Hoover: set up a COINTELPRO operation to undermine the emerging Black Power movement. Wayne, meanwhile, uses his chemistry expertise to ingratiate himself with drug-addicted billionaire Howard Hughes and become his go-between with the Mob as Hughes seeks to buy up Las Vegas. In L.A., Don, a.k.a. Crutch, a roving peeping Tom-cum-rookie PI, finds himself swept into Dwight and Wayne’s ugly worlds. With breathtaking speed, he goes from helping the FBI sabotage Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid to slaying and scalping Cuban communists under the tutelage of an anti-Castro French mercenary.

(Random House Canada)

The pace never lets up as Ellroy plunges us into a tangled plot involving, among other things, Latin-American guerrillas, a gay black cop, a missing teenager, zombies, voodoo and the mysterious heist of an armoured car full of emeralds. Each page swarms with vermin-like characters — from vicious, rubber-pipe-wielding detectives to libidinous hate-literature kingpins. The historical figures are comic caricatures drawn in broad, black strokes. Dwight plays straight man to a semi-demented Hoover and a jovially venal Richard Nixon. Crutch chauffeurs dope-addled ex-boxer Sonny Liston and parries come-ons from flirtatious gay actor Sal Mineo.

None of these sordid ingredients will surprise readers of the trilogy’s first two novels. What you don’t expect to find are the faint glimmers of hope in Ellroy’s man-made Hell. There’s guilt, remorse, a newfound sense of moral responsibility. A rapprochement of right and left. And, in a world dominated by macho theatrics, strong women finally take centre stage.

“The book becomes, near the end, a matriarchy,” Ellroy says. Not that writing this novel brought out any latent liberal sympathies.

“I am a reactionary,” says the 61-year-old writer. “I’m very conservative. I’ve never been a hipster, I’ve never been a rock ’n’ roller. The rebelliousness that I saw all around me in the ’60s felt canonized. It felt like they were the establishment.”

Don Crutchfield, who sports a crew cut and bowtie, is also out of step with his long-haired contemporaries. Crutch is partly a youthful self-portrait. However, there’s a real Hollywood PI named Don Crutchfield, too — a friend of Ellroy’s whose gumshoe exploits inspired the character.

(Random House Canada)

“He was a wheel man. He did tail-jobs for divorce lawyers. He was certainly an adventurer in ways that I never was,” Ellroy says. “But I was the peeper in Hancock Park, I was the poor boy with the dead mother.”

Ellroy’s mother, Geneva Hilliker, was murdered in 1958, when he was 10. The unsolved case has haunted him all his life. It led to a youthful obsession with true-crime tales. It turned him into a crime writer. The adult Ellroy tried to crack the cold case himself, with the help of a retired homicide detective. He wrote about it in his 1996 memoir My Dark Places. He revisits his mother-fixation yet again in a new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, to be published in 2010.

Ellroy is clearly most at home in the past. He still writes his manuscripts in longhand. “I ignore the computer age,” he says, perhaps disingenuously. (He’s on Facebook.) “I don’t like imagery. I don’t like hyperkinetic art. I don’t like quick-cut motion pictures. Hence I don’t go to them.”

He did, however, like Curtis Hansen’s much-praised 1997 film of his novel L.A. Confidential. Now, word has it HBO and Tom Hanks want to bring American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand to the small screen. Ellroy is pessimistic. “HBO will never make them into a series. They’ll give me some option money. It’s fine. These books were never intended to be adapted into movies.”

It’s the books that matter to him. Ellroy thinks Blood’s a Rover is his masterpiece. He’s proud of its achievements. He seems as content as a mother-fixated, death-haunted obsessive can be. But it’s not just the book. There’s another reason. “I met a woman four months ago,” he says. “We had met two and half years previously. It’s exploded between us. I’ve never been happier.”

Blood’s a Rover is published by Knopf and is in stores now.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.