Rating: 
Summary: Crime fiction? Goood. Historical fiction? Bad juju.
Review: Ellroy wrote LA Quartet. Ellroy wrote noir. Ellroy gained fans boocoo. Ellroy got plaudits. Ellroy wanted MORE. Ellroy got serious. Ellroy wrote Tabloid. Ellroy eschewed crime writing. Ellroy took White Jazz style. Ellroy did it MORE in Tabloid. GQ loved it. Time loved it. Ellroy got press. Ellroy got praise. Ellroy shook and shimmied. He did the Wah-Watusi. Ellroy wanted MORE. Ellroy wrote Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy said crime fiction is done. Crime fiction is passe. Noir is moribund. Dig it: Ellroy says he writes historical fiction now. New book has triad of mob goons. New book scopes drugs/murder/mob hits/sleaze/corruption. New book warps White Jazz style. New book overdoes style. Style gets confusing. Style too staccato. Style too dense. Style eschews character. Style eschews depth. Ellroy wants to write historical fiction. Ellroy eschews history for conspiracy. Ellroy eschews 60s ambience. Ellroy gives us Mob epic. The Mob ran the country. The Mob called the shots. Ellroy calls it: private nightmare of public policy. Ellroy eschews public policy. Ellroy deals only with private mob plots. The 60s gets bogged down. The 60s gets lost. The 60s gets washed out by mob plots/phone transcriptions/noir violence/Hughes/Sal Mineo/Hoover fixations. Call it: Cold Six vintage Ellroy. Thug triad/noir dames/mob plots/gore/fatalism. Cold Six not historical fiction. Characters shallow/period ambience shallow/plot byzantine. Call it: Read it for Ellroy. Read it for new spin on Noir. Still the best crime fiction. But as historical fiction? Bad juju.
Rating:
Summary: The sixties by strobelight
Review: I have to admit that at first glance, "The Cold Six Thousand" looked like a mistake. 700 pages of three-word sentences? It seemed like a coast-to-coast drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic: lots of scenery, plenty of interesting twists and turns, which would be great if you didn't have to slam on the brakes every few feet. However, as a devoted Ellroy fan, I kept going, and found that the journey was worth taking after all. By maintaining his stable of uniformly corrupt yet irresistibly engaging rogues, and introducing several new elements to the mix, Ellroy keeps the reader coming back for more, if only out of morbid fascination. The term "morbid" is actually a gentle euphemism for the depths of death and decay which are put on display in Ellroy's brutally forthright tale. The character most emblematic of this seemingly inevitable downward spiral is Wayne Tedrow Junior, a conflicted idealist who degenerates, by a combination of chance and evil external design, into someone fueled only by his hate and newfound appetite for violence and power. The overall feeling is one of hopelessness at the sight of a world in which might, however evil and clandestine, routinely tramples on right. This hopelessness is only compounded by the fact that this world was, and remains in part, our own. Such a conclusion can only make us hope that Ellroy's grim rendering of a period more often associated with peace and love than the war and hate he chooses to focus on does not bear too true a resemblance to the facts.
Rating: 
Summary: This realy is a masterpiece...
Review: I just closed this one. Wow, what a ride! Ellroy's prose has reached its pinacle. I heard him speak three years ago. He stated it was intend to cut his prose to the bare essentials. I was never sure if it would work, but it did and does. I love it! If you follow his arc from _The Black Dahlia_ to _The Cold Six Thousand_, you can see this transition. I realize his style isn't for everyone, but it is original, and he is force of nature.In any case, without spoiling the fun, I recommend this book. Read and enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: What A Shame.
Review: James Ellroy might be the best living American writer. What a shame you can't tell by this new novel. James shimmies. James shakes. James does the Mashed Potato. What James doesn't do is write a worthy follow up to American Tabloid, one of the greatest novels of the last 100 years. It's almost as if James was geezing through most of his writing on this one. Too much rehash of Tabloid. Too many recaps of plot points. Too much too much. Not enough new and exciting material. Not enough action. Not ENOUGH. The worst aspect of this novel, which is still better than most reads available, is not the narrative style. While he finally overdoes his jazzy word play, it's the lack of action that dooms the Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy kept his previous novels hop-hop-hopping. From Buzz Meeks to Bud White to Dave Klein to La Grande Pierre, Ellroy's previous novels were non-stop action, full of bad men doing bad things. Double dealing. Double cross. Double the fun. Intricate setups were followed by satisfying conclusions. People never stopped moving. They never stopped talking. They never stopped. It was bad guys and worse guys, with the reader feeling whacked out from having to root for the bad guys. Until now. In the Cold Six Thousand it seems as Ellroy is just marking time. RFK, along with his brother Jack the K, was a major player in American Tabloid. Now Jack is dead and Bobby is nowhere to be seen. His assassination is motivated not by anything happening here, but by what happened in the last book. That leaves a giant hole right in the middle of the Cold Six Thousand. It shouldn't take 700 pages for us to be told that Big Pete sells heroin, Ward Littel is selling Vegas, and Wayne Tedrow is...well...doing nothing. Watching. Wayne likes to watch, and that's pretty much it. Ellroy is a master, but he got lazy here. He hasn't bothered to do much but write a 700 page setup for what better be a slam-bang next book. I also read American Tabloid again in preparation for this book, and that only pointed up how thin Cold Six Thousand is. I want my Demon Dog back. I want him feral. I want him hopped up and plotting with three hands. I want my socks knocked off. I want to go now and read the L.A. Quartet again. Because my thirst for Ellroy was in no way quenched by The Cold Six Thousand. Post Script, Two Years Later: Ok, it's a three star book. I've read a lot [worse] since this one came out. It's not as bad as I said. It's ain't great, but it ain't Richard North Patterson either.
Rating:
Summary: Raises the Bar for American Fiction
Review: First a suggestion, then a rant: Don't read this book out of order. Read *American Tabloid* first. Absolutely read it. But read *Tabloid* first. Now the rant: People say this book's hard to read. You know what? People didn't like *Ulysses* either. They said it was "hard to read." *Ulysses* wasn't hard to read and this book is way easier to read than *Ulysses*. It's hard to encompass. It's hard to reduce to the comfortable categories of the Modern Langauge Association's Rule of Law, or what the book reviewer in the New York Times sanctions as "responsible" to "history." It's hard to compare because there's nothing to compare it too. This book is easy to read. This book is joyous to read. It swings. It shifts. It swells and crests and dips like angry surf. This book is fun to read. Some people also think the book was underedited. The book is not underedited. That's what some said (and some still say)about *Tristan and Isolde* and Charlie Parker: Too many notes. Nonsense. Which notes would they have cut? Who would they have chosen to cut them? Some people compare this book to Ellroy's other books and give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. This book transcends thumbs-up/thumbs-down criticism. That sort of thing works, maybe, for the lightweights that pass for literati of our time. Does anybody REALLY think that school kids are going to be reading Richard Ford 50 years hence? John (zzzzzzz...) Updike? While it is certain that men and women ("educators"), whose own tenure of mediocrity depends on celebration of the comfortable, will ever be with us, it is equally certain that some voices will not be compared, categorized, or successfully evaluated, in short, because they are too furious, too fine. This book doesn't play fast and loose with history. The New York Times plays fast and loose with history. Fiction is a way of telling the truth that history, as a discipline, can't aspire to because of its scientific pretensions. Making fiction is a moral act. Reading fiction is a moral act. Daring to face the darkness qualifies one to talk about the light. An interesting point made, not by the New York Times but in it, is that Ellroy doesn't really fit the category of "noir" because, ultimately, he's too tender with the humanity of his characters, too willing to find the soft-spots in the midst the brutality that is the wallpaper of Ellroy's visionary world. Leaving aside the problem, abovementioned, with trying to fit this writer into categories, it's a good observation. Ellroy, *de profundis*, shows an affirming flame. Look for it in lives crushed by horror, in the street, in the hope against hope trhough which all of Ellroy's characters do what they do, however driven they are, however completely they fail. Readers think they have to "get" Ellroy. Reviewers especially. They want to justify their existence by pretending they can evaluate a vision this large. But Ellroy won't be got. The fallacy that necessarily informs a critic's explanation or evaluation of Ellroy is that she comprehends the work. That her vision is large enough to accomodate his and pass on it. I haven't encountered that critic yet. Get a first edition while you still can. This book's going to be around for a long long time.
Rating:
Summary: Caught in the dog's mouth
Review: Everything you've heard is true. They call him the pitbull. His books conjure up those old warhorse dogs from Jack London. The old dogs that legends sprout up around. They sink their teeth into the dogs they fight and don't let go. "The Cold Six Thousand" is Ellroy to the power of fifty. Ellroy triple cubed. Ellroy redux. I mean, it's still recognisably Ellroy. It's still the Ellroy you know and love (as much as you can ever love a fiercely obstinate bulldog that you secretly suspect wants to gnaw on your head): the men are still men (real men, Henry Rollins men, men hewn from neither wood nor concrete, men hewn from neither sand nor clay, men hewn from the darkest of dark belly blood); the women are still suspect (their stories are their own, contrapuntal to the heavy masculine flow of history, history with a capital aitch isn't their story etc); the plots are still maddeningly obscure, gossip reported second hand and filtered through too-bright sunlight, reports slipped out of files and edited, transcribed phone tapped incoherent speech between shady historical middlemen caught in a downpour. "The Cold Six Thousand" starts where "American Tabloid" left off. Without "American Tabloid" you are lost. You cannot think about taking on "The Cold Six Thousand" without reading or re-reading "American Tabloid". It may be you know "The Cold Six Thousand" is a sequel to "American Tabloid" and suspect the relationship is similar to that of the four books that make up the darkly majestic LA Quartet. Big mistake. Where you can pick up "The Big Nowhere" without having read "The Black Dahlia" (you shouldn't, but you can), you cannot read "The Cold Six Thousand" without "American Tabloid". For chapter one of "...Cold...", read chapter 100 of "...Tabloid." We are back with Pete Bondurant. We are back with Ward Littell. JFK is dead. The sharp focus of "...Tabloid" - the events that lead up to the assassination of Kennedy - is gone. It is almost like somebody took the hard nut that was "...Tabloid" (picture this punch drunk Irish American with a black eye and a broken nose) and gave him boo-coo beats to the head. "The Cold Six Thousand" reels wildly, psychotically, from Dallas to Vegas, from the boondocks to LA, to Vietnam, to Cuba. The mob is here. The klan is here. Civil rights campaigners are here. The FBI is here. The CIA is here. Bobby Kennedy is here. J Edgar Hoover. The beard is here. Martin Luther King is here, performing in his jammies. It's history, yes. History. Kind of. But not the history you read about in books or watch on Discovery. It's suspect history. Dirty history. Its the history of grime. It's history that builds up under your fingernails (like earth from the last body you buried, or blood from the last Marv you offed). This is not a book you can dip into for thirty minutes every night before you go to sleep. "The Cold Six Thousand" demands attention (because it slips and slides and eludes you). You must devote yourself to La Causa. You have to sign up. Be part of the Kadre. It's like a dark love or a form of perversion. It's something adulterous. Something bad for you. You know you shouldn't, but you do. You don't have a choice. The whole shameful thing is wrong but you cannot help yourself. You read and read and read and read because you don't have a choice and because James Ellroy is probably alone in wanting you to share with him the very depths (because, perhaps, James Ellroy is alone in understanding that you can only appreciate the light and the life and the joy if you know what exists in the spaces and gaps left behind when light and life and joy exit stage left.)
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I eagerly awaited The Cold Six Thousand. I have read most of the authors novels. I re-read American Tabloid just before buying it. It starts out okay but half-way through I felt that the invented slang and the clipped phrases of the narrative were insulting my intelligence. I got to page 347 where the following lines appear: "Slaves shook their chains. Slaves did the Shackle Shimmy Shake." I was not pleased with this nonsense but I read on until I got to page 370: "The files existed. The files eluded. The files dirtified." This last line was too much; I threw the book against the wall and stopped reading.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to read
Review: Make no mistake. You cannot watch TV and write to grandma and read this book at the same time. But if you sit down and pay attention, and actually intend to READ the material, it is brilliant work. Noun/verb/adjective. First grade stuff. Once again Ellroy has taken awful people and made them compelling. I started out horrified, and then suddenly found myself drawn into their stories. I found myself worrying about them. One of the most satisfying aspects of the book is its length. This is no afternoon picnic, or two-day read. You commit to its size, you commit to the characters. You spend a lot of time with them. It makes everything that happens in the story immediate for the reader, and makes you part of the gigantic steamroll through history. Let's just hope Ellroy doesn't take 10 years for the final book in the series.
Rating:
Summary: Hip Hopped Up
Review: Let's start at the beginning; this is like reading EE Cummings on speed; it's smart, hip and all together way too cool for it's own good. I defy any reader to tell me what's going on at the conclusion of any paragraph. It takes three to four reads and a note pad to figure it out and Ellroy comes across as smirking and jiving at the reader like a kid with a riddle. I love the author and his previous work and grabbed this the day of release. But I tossed it after 50 pages and went on to something else. Far too dense and obtuse for most any reader. Sorry.
Rating:
Summary: 700 pages of adrenaline fueled savagery
Review: How do you follow a novel like American Tabloid, the definitive Kennedy assassination conspiracy novel? You write a novel like The Cold Six Thousand, which is the definitive RFK, MLK, Vietnam, Howard Hughes, Mafia, Las Vegas and J. Edgar Hoover conspiracy novel. The Cold Six Thousand starts off where Tabloid ended, on the 22nd of November 1963, the day of Kennedy's assassination. We are reintroduced to characters we have met in earlier novels (Pete Bondurant from White Jazz and American Tabloid) and Ward Littell (from American Tabloid) and to new characters such as the Tedrows, father Wayne Sr. and son Wayne Jr. Wayne Jr., a Las Vegas police officer, is sent to Dallas to kill a pimp, his fee for doing so, six thousand untraceable dollars. The roller coaster ride begins here, weaving his fictional characters in with real life characters (Jack Ruby, J. Edgar Hoover and Bayard Rustin to name a few) Ellroy takes us on a savage tour of the dark and ugly side of the 1960s from a heroin processing operation in Vietnam to the civil rights marches of the American south with plenty of stops in Las Vegas which Ward Littell is attempting to purchase for Howard Hughes while still allowing the mob to stay in control and collect their skim. Some of Ellroy's takes on the activities of the right wingers at the time might seem a little outre and exaggerated, but after reading Rick Perlstein's _Before the Storm_ and David Halberstam's _The Best and the Brightest_ I find that Ellroy is right on target skewering the nuts of the extreme right wing who infested our country during the 1960s. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that it bogs down in places. Ellroy needs an editor with balls big enough to say "James, cut this part out, it drags the story". Still, even if the story drags in places Ellroy picks things up quickly and soon you're reading along and feeling as breathless if you just went on a five mile run and smoked a carton of Camels.
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