How ‘Bout Some More Words

I fired twice--two misses--ricochets off the pavement.

Two more shots braced against the hood--Bullock’s face exploded.

Bone spray in my eyes.

--from “White Jazz”

Sonny Mehta had some advice for James Ellroy when they met on a Saturday morning at Mehta’s New York apartment to talk about Ellroy’s first novel for his new publisher.

Mehta, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, had read the manuscript of “White Jazz,” and he thought readers would be turned off by the novel’s super-condensed style, a machine-gun pace Ellroy had first tried in his previous novel, “Hollywood Confidential.”

“It was too telegraphic (for Mehta),” Ellroy recalls. “He said, ‘It’s just too inaccessible. Will you put some words back?’ ”

Ellroy, who writes his books in longhand from meticulous outlines, agreed after Mehta showed him passages where additional “ands” or “buts” would fatten up the prose.

But it turned out to be more work than sprinkling conjunctions over the manuscript like confetti. Ellroy spent 20 days revising the manuscript, beefing up the novel at the rate of 35 to 40 pages a day. “I rewrote sentences out the wazoo,” he explains.

The result was “a substantial stylistic reworking” that added six pages to the manuscript, according to Ellroy. Biased though he may be, Ellroy believes the revisions produced a “seamless” book.

The author also claims contemporary relevance for a book set in the 1950s because it is “very much about the abuse of power in the LAPD.”

Now Ellroy is at work on “American Tabloid.” He calls the novel “a secret history of America” from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. Characters will include John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa and Marilyn Monroe.