Rating: 
Summary: Even Weak Ellroy Beats Most Other Writers
Review: One way I break fiction writers into categories is "Wait Till Paperback," "Wait till Used Paperback" or "Don't Bother." Ellroy has been one of the very few to meet that elite category "Buy Immediately In Hardcover." Although this is not his best work, he will remain in this category.As Ellroy evolves as a writer, he gets more stylistic. On the one hand, this distinguishes his skills from a number of other fiction writers; on the other hand, it takes a while to get used to. Think of watching Monty Python for the first time...it takes a little while to get used to accents (at least as a Californian)(wow, Monty Python and James Ellroy in a comparison...who'd figure). The constant use of short, simple sentences in the narrative is initially grating but creates a freneticism that a less stylized use of language might not. All the characters, even the "good guys," are corrupt; they just differ in degrees and types of corruption. This makes for a very dark and chaotic view of the world, where people strive for drops of happiness in an ocean of hopelessness. Ellroy remains as intense and compelling as ever. If I don't consider this his best story, it's still pretty damn good. I was torn between four and five stars for this review; in the end, I opted for five to offset some of the more negative reviews.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't anybody else like this book?
Review: This isn't a difficult book by any stretch of the imagination. It's written in one syllable words. Ellroy couldn't write badly if his life depended on it. In an era where most author's take chapter after chapter to get to the meat of the story, Ellroy starts with the meat and chews it up in front of you, like an angry dog. This book is admittedly not my favorite Ellroy book,(that would be White Jazz, also a staccato masterpiece), but it's still the best new book I've read this year.
Rating:
Summary: lost, not found
Review: Murder and mayhem, chaos and confusion. A literal birth dream chamber of lost ideals and illusions. The last bubble in the American Dream is burst. Naivety brutally cast on some rocky shore. Remaining beliefs in "our system" run down the drain. We are presented with a very plausible scenario surrounding the assassination and conspiracy coverups of JFK, MLK, and RFK, inclusive of our involvement in Viet Nam. All delivered courtesy - 100 MPH. The bookend to American Tabloid. Must reading for anyone over 40 who ever had doubts and suspicions concerning our most volatile political history. This book will challenge you, wash you out, and leave you to dry. Mr. Ellroy has delivered a major tour-de-force. It reads like a telegram from start to stop. All urgent.
Rating:
Summary: Like a punch in the face- but not in the good way
Review: I won't belabor the point that his "mimimalist" style is overdone. I'll just say it's hard to read, like getting punched in the face, but not in a good way. Frankly it's hard to understand - I read and re-read "paragraphs" just trying to understand what happened. I get too confused with what he's trying to say that I don't have the energy left to think about the style. However, it is a MUST READ. Pete and Ward, Howard Hughes and the Mob, JFK, RFK and MLK - the story underneath the writing is great. Ellroy is a genius and great story teller- he just wandered down the wrong path style-wise. Maybe in the next book he'll cut us some slack and write in a way that doesn't give migraines.
Rating: 
Summary:
Review: There aren't many writers who will take a risk like Ellroy did in The Cold Six Thousand. Unfortunately, this kind of risk wasn't worth taking. By deliberately setting out to write in this unnatural staccato, Ellroy cheapens the tight writing style he utilized in American Tabloid, which was probably one of the greatest works of crime fiction I've ever read.Writing in short, four or five word sentences, Ellroy attempts to grab the reader and shove his face into the dark, dismal world following the Kennedy assasination. A lot of critics have dubbed Ellroy's style a sort of "See Dick run" variant. Unfortunately, it isn't as expressive. Read that phrase again, and you literally see Dick run. Ironically, had Ellroy truly trimmed his writing to the very essence, this freaking book would've been fifty pages long. Instead, it's 700, and it's mind-numbingly boring by the end of the first chapter. I love James Ellroy, and I love him because he's a challenge. I started The Black Dahlia three times before I actually got through it, finally realizing that it blew every other piece of crime fiction I ever read back to the stone ages. But there isn't enough Advil on the planet to help me through the splitting headache that is The Cold Six Thousand.
Rating: 
Summary: Out Stones Oliver
Review: "American Tabloid" was edgy, dark and different. This is edgy and dark, but not so different any more. And it's long, really long. Extreme paranoia can get tiring and this does. I will still wait for the next piece from a very talented writer.
Rating:
Summary: In the words of Homer: "BORRRRRRRR-ING!"
Review: I'm an Ellroy fan, or I was. This book may have spoiled my appetite for jagged sentence fragments and groovy gangster lingo, which I had to force myself to like when I first encounterd the author's unique work in AMERICAN TABLOID. I loved that book! I mean, WOW! If you haven't read the first installment of this series, then please do--you're missing a treat. I thought SIX-THOUSAND would be at least as good as its predecessor, but... like most sequels, the second installment falls far short of the first. What is it with Ellroy? Is he trying to confuse the reader? Is he (artistically speaking) biting the hand that feeds him? Or is he just indulging in his own image: "The greatest crime-writer of the new century" by overflowing the pages with his trademark prose? I don't care. Before I reached page 70 of this gobbly-goop book, I stopped caring. What a waste of time--for us and Ellroy.
Rating:
Summary: Let's Do The Time Warp Again
Review: William S. Burroughs would love the prose styling here, some of the subject matter, too. Lots of dope and amputations, even some rat poison on the hype. Broken jaws and flying teeth everywhere. But the anachronisms begin to wear on you long before page 666. In a 1964 conversation J. Edgar says "I am extrapolating at warp speed". Doubt Hoover was a Trekkie, and that's a couple years before Cap'n Kirk hit the airwaves. Likewise, in Dallas, 1963, Ward J. Littell searches Arden's luggage, and finds a plastic-coated driver's license with a photo. A little before it's time, I think. Characters "freak" about something or "goof" on something else until you're ready to scream. Maybe this is 50s hepster lingo, but I don't think these terms hit the hit parade until well after the Summer of Love. (At least I haven't spotted a "groovy" anything just yet.) There's enough of this stuff that I'm convinced the author is doing it on purpose (ala *Moulin Rouge* or *Knight's Tale*) or else he really fried his brain back in his homeless wino/druggy days, and can't remember what life was like in his teenage years. This book requires an iron will, no willing suspension of disbelief here, but if you're willing to club disbelief over the head until it expells teeth, you might be able to fight your way through to end.
Rating:
Summary: High expectations, dismal performance
Review: This book is something of a sequel to James Ellroy's excellent novel /American Tabloid/, which I reread in anticipation of this next installment in the saga. /The Cold Six Thousand/ picks up at the moment /Tabloid/ left off and recycles many of the same characters, but it is difficult to imagine how the two books could be more different. /Tabloid/'s narrative gave readers the sense of having front-row seats to history. Not much suspension of disbelief was required to imagine that every event in it unfolded exactly as described. It wove together fact and fiction seamlessly to create a portrait of an era that seemed, strangely, truer and more complete than nonfiction historical accounts could ever manage. Ellroy seemed a fly on the wall during history's most mysterious milestones. Not so in /The Cold Six Thousand/. Its descriptions of real events seldom pass the smell test and seem to spring as much out of Ellroy's imagination as the fictional action. Readers do not feel as though they are being treated to an exposé of history's dangerous secrets; instead, the plot possesses an Oliver Stone feel to it. It does not help matters any that many of the events themselves are just plain uninteresting. The other area in which this book takes an obvious nosedive from /American Tabloid/'s heights is its writing style. Here as well the word "seamless" comes to mind to describe the first book, whereas, in /The Cold Six Thousand/, the language seems too deliberate, the bolts and gears beneath Ellroy's prose exposed, thus demystifying the literary magic of his hitherto successful noir style. This book seems to have distilled and concentrated /Tabloid/'s voice into a caricature of itself. At its worst, the language resembles a "Dick and Jane" story, with sentences on the order of, 'Littell stood up. Littell walked to the window. Littell drew his gun. Littell pulled the trigger.' Ellroy was a writer. Ellroy wrote books. Ellroy had devoted readers. Ellroy let them down.
Rating:
Summary: Mickey Spillane . . but without the class or grace.
Review: If you like your conspiracy theories served raw and undiluted by either rhyme, reason or saved by good writing the Cold Six Thousand is for you. If you think Oliver Stone and Art Bell have a direct line to some higher truth unknown to us naive ill-informedd peasants perhaps this book is for you. Unlike Stone, however, Ellroy does not tell his tale in a compelling or interesting manner. Much has been made of Ellroy's supposed cutting edge style. It didn't work for me. It seemed reminscent of the eager student in a high-school lit class who after admring the beauty of Hemingway's sparse, clean sentences decides to imitate them. But terse writing merely for the sake of creating a 'new style' simply does not work for me. This is particularly true in this book, where none of the characters are compelling, none seem worth caring about, and none seem at all believable or human. There is no hook to go along with the prose-style. But, if you like 672 pages of terse sentences whose lack of commas is counterbalanced only by an excess and repeated use of every concevable type of racial and ethnic epithet then this book is for you. I am not averse to the use of profanity or epithets in novels. Nor am I averse to vioence and sex. It just gets boring after a while when that is all there is to the novel. It is like the old prono flicks, written about at some length in this book, in which there is no context outside the grainy, poorly-filmed sex. Here, there is no context outside the violence and depravity of the novel's characters so it serves only to deaden the reader's senses. In other words, it has the same impact as novacaine. The only redeeming value of this prose-style is that fact that each painful sentence is read quickly. It did not take long to finhish the book. I awarded it 1 star because, like a bad headache, it feels so much better when it goes away.
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