Rating: 
Summary: WOW !!!
Review: The movie is great, but the book is the real thing. There is a whole other world of L.A. Confidential that you will never know of unless you read the book. One of the best books I have ever read and the plot is something you twist and turn in your mind and never fully understand it. If you haven't read it because you saw the movie, read it, you have not ruinned the spirit of the story and you will be blown away. Enough said...
Rating: 
Summary: Comparing book to movie (no real spoilers)
Review: I had seen the superb movie (several times) before reading this book, and wondered how the two would compare. Ellroy's novel is also superb, and in some ways the movie reads direcrtly from it (much dialogue lifted verbatim) but there are large differences.Fit into a couple hours and what feels like a year's worth of time, the movie is more concise. The book is far more sprawling, taking place over almost a decade --- and it connects to both the prequel (The Big Nowhere, excellent) and sequel (White Jazz, also excellent). The screenwriters actually did a fine job capturing the essence of the book while truncating the plot. The book is, of course, far more involved, with more seamy threads, the plot much more byzantine. I was having a tough time figuring out how the Evil Scheme tied together, but Ellroy does a surprisingly good job of tying it together in a short time at the end, so read closely and stick with it. The book's larger scope lets the three main characters get more face time and more depth. Not to slight Guy Pearce's fine performance, but Ed Exley is a whole new level of fascinating here. And Jack Vincenes isn't quite the super-slick hepcat that Kevin Spacey memorably embodied. Bud White is far less restrained than Russell Crowe made him look. The actors who played smaller roles in the movie (James Cromwell, Danny Devito and David Straithairn) were dead on. Ellroy's prose is a thing of beauty, with its raw expose of violence and corruption and 50's slang (though not quite as polished or stylized as in White Jazz). While the movie was chock-full of badness, it didn't come close to the book. For those unfamiliar with the author: let's put it mildly and say he doesn't have a good opinion of human nature. No nice guys here. If you like down and dirty crime fiction or film noir at all, this is the book for you. Personally, I'd recommend reading The Big Nowhere first, and then White Jazz, for a terrific trio of ungoodness.
Rating:
Summary: True noir and an amazing character study
Review: I love the movie version of this novel, simply because after watching it and hearing that only half of the book's plot made it in, I had to check out this Ellroy guy for myself. (And actually, only 20% of the book's story made the cut. This is massive.)
But the focus of this book isn't on the plot- that's simply an engine for the three main characters. One of the other, rather more naive reviews of the book here mentions the lack of heroes. For the god's sake, this is about the LAPD. Exley, Vincennes, and White are true antiheroes, men who are driven by their ambition, hatefulness, and love (which are personified by the book's three richest men). They are tragic figures who are sympathetic because of their flaws, not despite them- finally trying to reach beyond their inner natures, and to set things right. In the end they fail, and for their efforts one of them is dead, and the other two are crippled: one physically, and one emotionally. Read the follow-up, White Jazz, for proof of the latter. This is a novel of Los Angeles in the 50s as Shakesepare would've written it. Hamlet, Macbeth, Marcus Brutus- they've got nothing on these guys.
Rating: 
Summary: Sentence fragments. Jargon. No heroes. It coulda been good.
Review: This is a review of the Random House audio abridgement. Six people are murdered at the Night Owl Cafe. Three LAPD officers (Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes, and Bud White) who come from widely different backgrounds and have widely different agendas investigate the murder. The three officers among them are responsible for at least four murders and two manslaughters. Who deserves prison more? The Night Owl killers or the murdering policemen who are stalking them? Ellroy's try for gritty realism renders up louses for protagonists. When I got to the first murder committed by one of the officers, I quit listening. Only the fact that I completely ran out of other tapes drove me back to finish the story. It was a good story, but it could have been a great one. Heroes don't need to be heroic in the sense that Sir Gallahad was heroic, but they do need to have some redeeming social merit. I've known convicted murderers with more redeeming social merit than Exley, White, and Vincennes. I don't usually prefer movies to the books upon which they are based, but "L.A. Confidential" is the exception that proves the rule. The cinema versions of Exley, White, and Vincennes have their flaws, but they're not stone cold killers.
Rating:
Summary: Try something new!
Review: Okay. I have to admit I'm more of a Louisa May Alcott or LM Montgomery person, but I thought I try this since I liked the movie. Am I glad I saw the movie first, 'cause if I had seen it after I read the book, I would have hated it. This book will knock your socks off! The unconventional prose liberally sprinkled with abbreviations, short hand and slang is stunning. I felt like I was learning a new language and loving it. Ellroy's plot twists and turns and his descriptive language alone is worth reading it for. I really enjoyed reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Noir Tour De Force
Review: This is the quintessential crime noir book ever written. Ellroy uses superb plotting, character development, and his bullet style prose to create a literary masterpiece. If you have not seen the movie, wait and read the book first. If you have already seen the movie, read the book anyway. Disappointment is not a possibility.
Rating:
Summary: A Character study
Review: Be warned YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PUT THIS DOWN ONCE YOU START. This book was recommended to me by a professor of mine when I was in college. I had seen the movie and was familar with it already. Like the movie, your focus is on three cops solving the case. You really know very little about them, what drives them, except for Bud. That is too much detail for a film to go into. The book, however, presents you with a marvelous character study of three men solving the Nite Owl Murders on different levels and for reasons that are as different as they are from eachother. As only a creative mind can, Ellroy has crafted three of the most unique and complex characters in Vincennes, Exley and White. Their stories really only paralell eachother as they all try to solve the Nite Owl murders, only to find that they are all connected.They are three men driven. One by living up to the ghost of a dead brother, the other becomming a cop to someday find the father who killed his mother, and another an empty life of drugs spending his life to correct a wrong he made years earlier. Three flawed men, who find justice in one of the most stunning, breathtaking novels I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Sunkissed SoCal, the darkest place
Review: A hard, cruel set of narratives about an equally cruel way of life, L.A. Confidential takes a page from Hollywood and gives us '50's LAPD bigger, uglier, punchier than you hope it really was. James Ellroy's prose is telegraphic and slides with no hesitation in and out of the heads of its three main protagonists, each with their own agendas and sins. As the subplots weave ever closer together, it takes attention to disentangle Ellroy's verbal jumpcuts and hep slang in order to keep track of the criminals, the crimes, the intradepartmental warfare. There's several sets of grisly murders, artistically depraved porn, and Hollywood-star lookalike call girls. No punches are pulled, and the imagery, even evoked in staccato style, is vivid and disturbing. I give Ellroy much credit for avoiding a Hollywood-simple good guy ending, though; there aren't any good guys, just at best people dealing with demons and their aftereffects.
Rating:
Summary: Burlesque in every sense of the word
Review: I'd never heard of Ellroy until I saw the film of this book. It's tough viewing the book except in terms of the film - just try to imagine Jack Vincennes without seeing Kevin Spacey wearing a very sharp cream jacket dusting blood of his lapel... not possible. Ellroy doesn't mince, or waste words. It's difficult to adjust to his sparse style: abbreviated constructions abound, and the only thing it's liberally studded with is 50s crime slang - authentic enough sounding buzzwords which I couldn't be entirely sure Ellroy hadn't just made up. I mean, what on earth is a "hink"? It's a curious thing - Ellroy is so consciously hip, so "in" in his language and expressions you can't help but be seduced into the air of authenticity whereas, if you stake a step back, the whole damn book is so outrageously contrived that it could not conceivably be anything of the sort. Ellroy would have you believe that virtually every figure in the book, from a Mexican university student through the Hollywood scene, the gossip sheet reporters, a collection of pornographers, some bad dudes in a Purple Mercury, a vice ring, a plastic surgeon, a child serial killer, the District Attorney, every ranking officer in the police and prison service and most of the Italian contigent of California are all tangentially linked to a botched shooting in an all night diner. And its all to do with horse. You know, "H". And Prostitutes. And tying up Mickey Cohen's vice racket. And a nasty Police Captain. Ans so it goes on. The film excised about half of this material, and compressed it down from a ten year period, and it still seemed far fetched. For all that, though, once you are on message with Ellroy's slang, L.A. Confidential rips along, ideal holiday reading, which I suppose is all the Crime genre can really aspire to.
Rating:
Summary: Hollywood crime story seethes with emotion & violence
Review: For anyone who's seen the film with Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Guy Pearce, you know "L.A. Confidential" is a gritty crime story set in 1950s Hollywood. The original novel by James Ellroy, however, is even darker, more crime-ridden, more intricate, and full of raw emotion. The Los Angeles police department fights crime and is itself a primary instigator of corruption and bloodshed. ****The story reads like a fierce animal fed by the author's own demons and the real life tragedy of his mother's brutal murder when Ellroy was only a boy. Ellroy gives this horrifying past to one of the novel's three main characters, Bud White. White is so soul-ravaged by the memory of his mother that he becomes obsessed with protecting women and terrorizing their abusers. For all the good that he does, White is tainted by his own seething violence and arrogance. Ellroy draws him as a conflicted and controversial man. The same is true for the other principal characters, celebrity-slick Jack Vincennes and golden boy Ed Exley, a war-hero with ruthless ambition. ****White, Vincennes, and Exley each investigate the Nite Owl Cafe homicide case which leads to an even bigger monster in the murky depths of drugs, pornography, and prostitution. The characters, Ellroy, and the reader emerge at the end only by the miracle of human intractability. It's an exhaustive journey but fully dimensional and hard to shake.
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