Rating: 
Summary: I get it. I got it ...
Review: No commas. A world record. Just 47 commas in 672 pages. Not 700 pages. Some would have you believe that. Not so. 672 pages. The few commas could be colons. As in "Somebody yelled, 'limos!Somebody yelled, 'Him.' ''No. Not that "Him.'' Howard Hughes, who thought of himself as more powerful than that "Him.'' But seriously. I've been an Ellroy fan since "Black Dahlia, and the rest of the LA Noir series, which was actually written in prose, not stacatto. But after being originally turned off by his new style in "White Jazz,'' I've gotten used to it. And once you get by it, both this "novel'' and "American Tabloid'' become a brutal and (perhaps) fairly accurate portrayal of the late '50s and '60s. (At least Oliver Stone would think so. The best of Ellroy's heroes have always been flawed. But this bunch outdoes them. I'm not sure how he generates sympathy for a corrupt ex-FBI man and mob lawyer or a stone anti-Castro killer, but he manages. My feeling: Compared to J. Edgar, the real-life figure around whom the book revolves, they're up front about who and what they are. Hoover never was. Overall: worth reading if you can get through 672 pages with just 47 commas.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard hitting drag out genius
Review: I am a huge James Ellroy fan. I'm also on a literary fellowship at Stanford and people are always surprised when I insist that Ellroy is the best writer working today. I mean Wolff is great, Chabon is great, better than great. But these guys are not inventing anything new they're just doing what has already been established and doing it extremely well. The only guy that is likely to truly push the envelope of the English language is James Ellroy. Since White Jazz James Ellroy has been steadily redefining the way we write a sentence. In this, his newest book, Ellroy goes one step further still. Ditching crime fiction once and for all Ellroy aims to write an American classic, arguably his third, and succeeds magnificently. As bare as the language was in American tabloid, here Ellroy might finally have removed the adjective from our vocabulary. Imagine, 700 pages worth of two line paragraphs written off of a 350 page outline. The landscape of this book is sparse, scary, and reaching. I only hope that this book garners Ellroy the literary aclaim he so deserved for American Tabloid but never got.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the Faint of Heart
Review: JFK's assassins are revealed in this sequel to "American Tabloid." Plenty of sex, violence, salty language and racisim fill this tale where there are no good guys. Ellroy's trademark staccato prose reaches new crescendos--almost like a '50s beatnik rap. The Cold Six Thousand provides a glimpse of how things worked in the '60s, and Ellroy shows us why the US hasn't been the same since that turbulent era.
Rating:
Summary: Ellroy in Paris
Review: I was walking through Paris. I came across an English language book store near Le Jardin de Luxemburg. I ducked in for a browse. There it was...Ellroy...The Cold Six Thousand. I popped it open and read the first sentence, flipped through seven hundred pages and read the last sentence. "OK, I'll buy it." I said. "You like Ellroy?" asked le clerk. "Yup." "Read all his books?" "Yup." "Hmmm." I lugged the book over to Rue St. Dominique. There's a small bar with a no-flash front. Can't tell you where exactly. No name, no sign, no tourists. Locals know it as Fabrice's place. He's the small round guy with the sweaty round face. Sits at a table most of the day with his Algerian wife. Anyone shows up at the door he doesn't like, he says he's closed. Fabrice likes me. I spend a lot of cash there when I'm in town. He saw me coming. There was a Pastis on ice and a small jug of water on the table before I sat down. "A new book?" "Oui." He eyed the cover, picked it up and weighed it in his hands. He shrugged and set it down. "I think you will need much to drink." "Thank you Fabrice." Seven hours later. The sun long gone and me still there, reading and reading and reading some more. My mind spinning on the story...my eyes straining with the structure...like reading a novel written for the screen of a cell phone. Ellroy reinvents history. Ellroy reinvents his own characters. Ellroy reinvents the English language. He's off on some Bauhaus word trip. It ain't even the words on the page...it's all the words that ain't there. Strip down the sentence. Make it naked. Make it weird. Make it rip. Your eyes can't keep up with the rhythm. Ellroy is so far gone on his jazz riff, you give up reading...you just hang on for the ride. Ride the drugs. Ride the violence. Ride the plot. Ride the groove. Ellroy is way out there this time. And you can't put it down. I read three hundred pages in one sitting. Fabrice dropping more drinks on the table and me flipping pages still. Then round Midnight. The Eiffel Tower lit up and flashed with thousands of white lights. Like a giant sparkler on the Fourth of July. But the whole weirdness of The Cold Six Thousand turned my mind to mush. My eyes saw nothing but a blur of light above the Paris rooftops. I paid my tab and said good night to Fabrice and his Algerian wife. "You will be back tommorrow?" "Yes, Fabrice. I'll be back." "You will bring this book?" "Yup." "C'est bon?" asked Fabrice. "Tres, tres bon."
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Stunning
Review: Yes, Ellroy takes his already bleeding-edge prose over the top in this novel. It is very stylized, and the average sentence throughout the novel is probably less than 5 words yet conveys more plot and character insight than most writers manage in an entire chapter. This is dense fiction. You read the first few paragraphs and think, "My god, he's not going to keep this up for 700 pages, is he?" Well, he does, but if you're willing to take the ride with him then I assure you that you will not be dissapointed. The style serves the characters, changing subtley depending on the current point of view. Ellroy doesn't just use language to dryly describe, he wraps the plot in it, making the narrative flow inseperable from the story itself. Be aware that this is not exactly an easy read. It's not Chaucer, but it's not John Grisham either, despite the total lack of complex sentence structure. Like all great writing, not only do you have to partially surrender to the author's style, you also have to work at deriving the complete meaning of that style. Reading good fiction is not a passive activity. If you want something to lazily read on the beach, look elsewhere. 'The Cold Six Thousand' will grab you and smack you around, leaving you feeling like you've been braced by one of the characters in the book. Trust me, though, that's a good thing ;)
Rating:
Summary: I liked the old Ellroy better.
Review: I read American Tabloid. I was astonished. I lusted for the sequal. I waited. The sequal was published. I bought the sequal. I read the sequal. I was slightly disappointed. It's another great, intricately plotted crime novel from James Ellroy. The only thing keeping it from reaching classic Ellroy status is Ellroy's prose. It's ultra-repetitive and annoying. At times I felt like I was reading a really twisted children's book. An example: "He ran a kitchen-help union. He rigged low pay. He had coin. He had pull. He pushed right-wing tracts. He hobnobbed with fat cats. He knew J. Edgar Hoover." Ellroy keeps this up for the entire book. Too bad. I wish he'd stop experimenting with style so much and focus on creating killer stories and characters. It's what he does best. There were times when I actually was able to put the book down without trouble, unusual when I'm reading Ellroy. Still, its well worth putting up with Ellroy's quirks for another wild ride through the dark underbelly of american history.
Rating: 
Summary: Letdown...
Review: Not as good as anything he's written in the last ten years. You'd have to go Pre-Clandestine to find something this weak. American Tabloid is probably one of my favorite books ever. I didn't expect another Tabloid - comparing the two would be unfair. In the LA Quartet - I never compared one book to another. True, I had my favorites - but each was a unique story. The Cold Six Thousand was a letdown. I didn't want American Tabloid revisited - but Ellroy forces it down our throats. Kemper is gone. Ward and Pete B. are still with us. The threats to Pete B. didn't get much of a stir - at the end of White Jazz, we learn that Pete B. is, "Old and in failing health." So, I knew nothing was ever going to happen to him in this book. The problem with this book... and I can't believe I'm even saying this... it gets too slow, and even BORING. There's just nothing happening to speak of. We know the back-story to everything, but it's constantly revisited. Heck, some of the same things even happen again as in American Tabloid. There's just nothing going on. Characters aren't acting, just REacting. On to the prose: American Tabloid was perfect. A blitzkrieg of words and imagery. The Cold Six is almost hoakey. It's too sharp. It's too wink-wink. It gets confusing. Before, Ellroy cut down his prose. He sharpened it: take away the description, fill the extra space up with the good stuff. In The Cold Six, he just fills that extra space up with more prose. It's just more of the same; more "how-hip-am-I?" prose. It lags. It sags. I expect more. This is James Ellroy. There's no doubting his abilities. What happened?
Rating:
Summary: Good follow up
Review: The best book I have read in a long time, but definately not as good as American Tabloid. Wayne Sr and Junior float around the book never becoming anything more than what they were introduced as. In American Tabloid you were mesmorized by the evolution of the Pete and Kemper characters. Hopefully Ellroy is just setting us up for another insane story.
Rating:
Summary: More of the same - Ellroy is a bad, bad man.
Review: If you've read any of Ellroy's books, you've read this one. It's a re-hashing of his language, character types, and tone. However, it's not a problem, given Ellroy's fantastic language, well textured character types, and darker than dark tone. Ellroy's knack for creating sympathetic monsters is at its peak. He gets your blood pumping and your synapses firing. In Ellroy's 1960's, no one is pure, everyone has a file, and broken knuckles get you places. As much as I would have liked to see Ellroy forge new territory, you can't beat a tried and true format. Worth reading, though not for the squeamish.
Rating:
Summary: Tabloid 2
Review: James Ellroy's "The Cold Six Thousand" lacks the kinetic energy of its brilliant predecessor "American Tabloid." Beginning minutes after "Tabloid's" close, "The Cold Six Thousand" traces the underworld history of 1960s America through the morally-impaired eyes of three men: Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Vegas cop sent to Dallas on a mob errand; Ward Littell, an FBI agent whose loyalties shift from the mob to J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes; and Pete Bondurant, an ex-LA sheriff's department officer with an obsessive dream to liberate Cuba from the Communists. While "American Tabloid" covered a reletively brief period of time (1959 to 1963) and focused on the rise and fall of JFK, "The Cold Six Thousand" finishes off the radical sixties and leaps back and forth between historical events (RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the Baptist church bombing that killed four black girls, moving heroin in Saigon and the mob's takeover of Vegas) without leading up to anything. And the charcter arcs aren't as well developed as they were "Tabloid" (Ward Littell's brilliant, stunning, earth-shattering comeback from despair in "American Tabloid" makes him one of the most complex of Ellroy's creations.) Though this novel tends to meander, it is hard to dismiss it as an inferior companion piece to "American Tabloid." All the typical Ellroy flourishes are present: dense plotting, scant character and place descriptions, graphic (to the point of absurdity in some places) violence, mixing fictional and historical people, and the three-man construct he first employed in his brilliant 1987 novel "The Big Nowhere." Ellroy may attribute his genius to his ability to create ultra-dense plots filled with characters numbering in the hundreds. However, his real brilliance lies in the fact that he creates such monumentally unsympathetic heroes as his leads. If there is anything Ellroy will be remembered for it will be for straying from the typical "hero" found in mystery fiction today (the beautiful, brilliant "insert your law enforcement title here" vs. the diabolical serial killer "insert gruesome modus operandi here.") Ellroy's heroes are flawed, reckless and corrupt. Liking them takes time. And "The Cold Six Thousand" delivers this in spades. Also evident is Ellroy's unique tele-type writing style. An example: "Pete punched. Pete kicked. Pete walked." For a while this has been a welcome Ellroy trademark in a craft where so many authors are wordy and overbearing in their descriptions. However, reading 688 pages of this ratta-tat-tat style is tiring and, at times, a bit tedious. It's too bad because I loved his prose in books like "Clandestine" and "The Black Dahlia." Then again, neither novel comes remotely close to the ambitious breadth of his latest work. First time Ellroy readers would be better off beginning with his famous LA Quartet of "The Big Nowhere," "LA Confidential," "White Jazz," and "The Black Dahlia." Only the experienced Ellroy reader need apply to "The Cold Six Thousand."
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