The Underworld U.S.A Trilogy. Volume I. American Tabloid. The Cold Six Thousand: James Ellroy

Vol. 1 includes American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand.

'America was never innocent.'

Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece.

American Tabloid gives us John F. Kennedy's rise and fall from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end.

The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders Klansmen and mafiosi, killers, hoods and provocateurs. WIth Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And of course a lot of corrupt policemen.

The American dream as Nightmare.

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz) as well as the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. He has embarked on a second L.A. Quartet, set in World War II: the first novel, Perfidia, was published in 2015; the second, This Storm, will be published in early summer 2019. He lives in Colorado.