A Wild Colonial in England

The old American aphorism that says the road will make a bum out of anyone does not apply to James Ellroy. Fresh and fit, the bestselling author of 15 books, including “L.A. Confidential,” surfaced recently in this town two hours from London. Five European countries and a month of hotel rooms behind him, Ellroy was on a two-week blitz of Britain, hustling his new novel, “The Cold Six Thousand,” a 700-page doorstop to be published in the United States on Tuesday.

“Do the gigs, do the gigs and then do the gigs,” he says, sitting in the green room of Cheltenham Town Hall, waiting to give an evening reading. For a decade of his young manhood, Ellroy was an addict of amphetamines and wines that come with screw-top caps. Speaking with him, one finds it difficult to imagine what he must have been like then, because you will rarely meet a cold-sober man with a personality more full-tilt boogie than that of the 53-year-old author. Conversation with him is like taking a carnival ride: colorful, bright, too fast, fun and almost dangerous.

Drug- and alcohol-free for 25 years, the native Angeleno seems, even sitting down, to be doing 10 things at once. As he talks about traveling, a cell phone rings musically across the room, and Ellroy, in mid-sentence, looks over and says, “That’s the opening of Mozart’s 40th Symphony. You know that? 40th. Mozart.” And then he plunges back to complete his interrupted thought. “Do the gigs. If I can sleep, I’m dandy. If I can’t, I get a little . . . “ he pauses, a good actor emphasizing a line, “frazzled. Ten interviews a day, signings, readings every night. I’m in France, and I’m looking around and it’s . . . France. Great. Fine. Tell people not to smoke and get back some really French looks. Go to the hotel and sleep. Do the gigs.”

Like a rock tour, it’s suggested. “I hate rock ‘n’ roll. All that institutionalized rebelliousness. Kids should stop wearing black and listen to their parents. And this tour doesn’t have T-shirts. Just books, man. And me. Period. Burn it down! Get it done!”

Prepare, America. The show comes to 25 cities, including two weeks in Los Angeles in mid-June.

A performer in love with his audience and his act, he glances across the room at three teenage girls, volunteers at the Cheltenham Spring Festival, to be sure they’re getting it. Cheltenham is, according to Fodor’s, “the snootiest town in England,” and the girls, while not completely nose-in-the-air, are studiously nonchalant while reveling in a close encounter with the self-styled “demon dog of American literature” (he tends to growl and bark on occasion).

“Britons are fascinated, appalled and repelled by America. They have a powerfully ambiguous relationship with us.” But the teenagers, like every other English person he comes in contact with, don’t seem ambiguous; they’re perfectly charmed by the 6-foot, 3-inch, 200-pound fountain of energy.

For Barbara Hillhouse, a 29-year-old who came to the festival from Glasgow just to see him, Ellroy’s work “brings a whole world to me. I don’t know if it’s truly America, but it’s a complete world.”

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Asked about the crisis of the foot-and-mouth epidemic resulting in the mass slaughter of British livestock, Ellroy reveals some contradictions. The avatar of mayhem and extremely bad attitude says, “I hate it that so many nice animals have to die. I give money to all kinds of animal causes. I’m a vegetarian. I’ll never eat an animal.” He also, at times, appeals to “my seldom sought Lutheran God. I dig Martin Luther, man. He burned the world, as he saw it, to the ground. The greatest Catholic of his age, the first Protestant.”

The chronicler of noir sleaze now lives in a tony suburb of Kansas City with his second wife, former L.A. Weekly journalist Helen Knode. (He met her in his favorite hometown spot, Pacific Dining Car at West 6th and Witmer streets. Why Kansas City? “Quiet. I have a turbulent imagination but live a quiet and peaceful life. I listen to classical music. I work. It’s the only way I could write the new novel. The story of American violence in the 1960s. “

“The Cold Six Thousand” begins a few minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, precisely where Ellroy’s last bestseller, “American Tabloid,” ended. It is a tale of bent cops, Mafia blood opera and government cover-up that ends in 1968 with the murder of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles.

“This is the first time you’ll see the real world, the underworld of that era. I take you to Cuba, Vietnam, Las Vegas. You meet the quintessential American fiend, J. Edgar Hoover. Martin Luther King, Jack Ruby, Howard Hughes. My latest masterpiece, man.”

Demon dog, maybe, but he really seems to be the Muhammad Ali of American letters, all brag and boast swinging from a hinge of sweetness. Reviews in Britain have been overwhelmingly favorable for “The Cold Six Thousand,” with the only negative reaction questioning the style. Readers will either be enchanted by the three-word-sentence/one-sentence-paragraph technique that propels the speed-bag narrative or, simply, after reading a hundred pages, be on the ropes, punch drunk.

Striding down a hall on his way to a sound check, Ellroy recalls financing his first tour himself, turning “The Black Dahlia” into a 1987 bestseller. “I figured out how I could use my mother’s death, reduce it to sound bites and sell books. I addressed the exploitation of her in ‘My Dark Places.’ ” A stunning redhead who was much too fond of Early Times bourbon and picking up men in low bars, Ellroy’s mother was found beaten and strangled to death, dumped in some bushes in El Monte on a June night in 1958. Her 10-year-old son was taken to live with his beloved father, a man spectacularly incapable of raising a child. His deathbed advice to his son: “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”

When his father died, the 17-year-old was alone in the world. For the next 10 years, he used every drug he could find, chased by wine and vodka. He lived in parks and abandoned apartments. He stole food, jimmied coin boxes in Laundromats and broke into houses in Hancock Park to steal women’s underwear. The county jail was home 25 or 30 times. “The people over here used to think I was some kind of bad man. No. I was low life, pathetic, a buffoon.”

At 28, he was a barely burning cinder. Pneumonia, abscesses on his lungs and auditory hallucinations were the ground zero where he decided to make his stand. “I realized I wanted things. Women. Then one woman. I wanted a decent life. I wanted to write books.” Los Angeles, Ellroy has written, is his “mythtown.” Myth in the older understanding of the word, as a serious attempt to describe a particular place and a set of calamities that shows the community the underlying moral faults and motivations that define them.

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Fictionally, he has moved away from L.A. with his last two novels, but he has kept his hand in as a writer for GQ magazine, doing pieces on Mexican boxing and, this fall, profiling Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley. “I’ll be interested to see what he makes of the Rampart scandal.”

His sound check is a recitation of a long, obscene and very funny poem boasting about his writing and his sexual prowess. A British camera crew for “60 Minutes” is delighted. The soundman, in the sharp accent of East London, says fondly, “Ah, he’s gobsmacking.”

There are 150 or so people for the reading, a young crowd, in an ornate room of red-veined pillars and creamy molding. Ellroy has them from the moment he takes the stage. “Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pets, panty sniffers, pugs and pimps. I am James Ellroy, the foul owl of the death growl, the white knight of the far right,” and continues with a rhymed couplet concerning his penis. The room is rocking.

(Asked earlier about his politics, Ellroy replied, “My opinions are all over the place. If there is a political model, it’s newsman Bill O’Reilly,” the shout-maestro of the Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”)

Afterward, a line snakes through the tall corridors of Town Hall to get books signed by the author. He stands, disarming everyone who approaches with his chatter, making everyone part of the show. To a tall, pale boy with dreadlocks: “Hey, the Rasta man!” Softly, to a shy, bearlike, auburn-haired young fellow: “Come on up here, Red. Give me that, and I’ll put my name on it.” To a man in his 40s who wants a book signed for his son: “Why? The boy some kind of junkie?”

The last book is sold and signed, and he says, “Is that it?” He growls. “I want more. More. More.”