- European Union (EU)
- Nottingham
- Sicily
- Physics
- James, Curtis E.
- Scripting
- L
- Charts
- Geology
- Rugrats
- Jennings, Kate
- Residential Landlord & Tenant
- Taxonomy & Systematics
- Hiatt, Brenda
- Reproductive Medicine
- Jerome, Jerome K
- Navy Lark
- Electric Guitar
- Production Engineering
- Art & Painting
- Navigation
- Revised English
- D'Annunzio, Gabriele
- Bates, Kathy
- Touring Club of Italy
- Watches
- Home and Garden
- UK Electronics
- UK Books
- Health and Personal Care
- UK Sporting Goods
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- CDs and Music Downloads
- UK Software and Video Games
- UK Toys and Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Video Games
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Books On
- German Electronics
Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : E
-
-
-
-
There have been few books as keenly awaited as this final volume of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, Blood’s A Rover (the title is from A E Housman), set during the incendiary period of 1968-1972. As ever, we have an amazingly ambitious synthesis of crime and political chicanery, with the social mores of the day forensically examined. And all of this is delivered with the gusto we have to come to expect from one of the world’s most accomplished crime novelists (with, thankfully, the curiously alienating stylistic tics of the earlier The Cold Six Thousand a distant memory).Apart from the roles for such compromised real-life characters as Richard Nixon, Ellroy focuses (in a large dramatis personae) on three protagonists: Wayne Tedrow, Jr, one of Ellroy's almost operatically off-kilter characters: a killer (numbering parricide among his many crimes) who plays every side against each other with total dedication; Dwight Holly, a hard man and facilitator for J Edgar Hoover at his most sinister, who senses that the rising of Richard Nixon’s star might be good for him, and Don Crutchfield, known as ‘Crutch’, a low-rent private eye who finds himself mired in a conspiracy reaching from the upper echelons of power to the farthest reaches of America’s underclass. All of these damaged protagonists are stirred into a brew as heady as anything Ellroy has ever concocted – and the result is a state-of-the-nation (circa late 60s-early 70s) novel as scarifying as anything American literature has seen. Blood’s A Rover is most definitely not for all tastes, but those who esteem James Ellroy highly (and there are legions who do) will be transfixed – if not elated (it’s a caustic world view Ellroy serves up). --Barry Forshaw
-
-
-
-
It is the day of Jack Kennedy's assassination--Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr arrives in Dallas with instructions to arrest a pimp and make sure he does not survive the arrest. By the time James Ellroy's monumental thriller The Cold Six Thousand reaches its climax, Wayne has taken his own private journey into the heart of American corruption, into a cold hell of betrayal, prejudice and paranoia. In staccato sentences, brief paragraphs of narration and stacks of documentation whose essential truthfulness we dread, we learn the truth about the great assassinations of liberal hope, about the inner-city epidemic of heroin addiction, about the war in Vietnam and the American conflict with Cuba. Wayne and others like him--the ageing hit man Bondurant, the fallen, liberal FBI-man Littell--are the weapons through which the likes of Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover work their will. This is a convincingly depressing picture of a world in which the worst things you can imagine regularly come true (because there is always someone who will profit by them). It is a nightmare picture of America-as-Hell which sustains dramatic tension from dateline to dateline, from crisis to crisis. --Roz Kaveney
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
For many people under 35, their most vivid glimpses of Britain's illustrious history have been through the Blackadder chronicles which brightened television screens from 1983 to 1989. Their constantly reborn protagonist, Edmund Blackadder, flounced through a bloody Middle Ages, a campy Elizabethan court, even camper Regency revels, and the rat-infested trenches of the Great War, armed with only his repulsive servant Baldrick, and a fine line in complex insults ("you would bore the leggings off a village idiot"; "he's got a brain the size of a weasel's wedding tackle").Now you can brush up your Blackadder with a fine collection of the complete scripts, interspersed with useful titbits on medieval torture instruments, the menu in Mrs Miggins' coffee house, and the Prince Regent's laundry list. Bereft of their familiar faces and voices, television comedy scripts often fall flat--and Blackadder without the rubber-faced consonant-spitting of its hero Rowan Atkinson is surely unthinkable. But here the Blackadder oeuvre, penned by Richard Curtis and various collaborators, stands up wonderfully.
Curtis's bizarre, surreal take on English history takes up where 1066 and All That left off, wickedly skewering venerable historical personages, and hilariously literalising the classic clichés of textbook history (marvel again at the Puritan Whiteadders sitting on spikes so they won't enjoy their dinner). Classily produced, and with royalties going to the entertainment charity fund, Comic Relief, this is one TV tie-in well worth getting. --Alan Stewart
-
-
-
