The third and final book of James Ellroy's Underworld Trilogy, and undeniably the weirdest.
Donald Crutchfield is a decidedly unimpressive young man. A not-terribly-bright peeper in Los Angeles with a penchant for older women, Crutchfield mostly performs low-level PI jobs for more experienced and prestigious lawyers and cops — tailing people, arranging blackmail schemes, etc. But a seemingly simple job (find a woman who seduced and robbed a prominent Los Angeles racist) will bring him into contact with some incredibly dangerous men.
One of those men is Wayne Tedrow, a protagonist from the previous novel, The Cold Six Thousand. Fresh off his Face–Heel Turn and his role arranging the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Tedrow has taken the job previously belonging to Ward Littell (who Ate His Gun at the end of the previous book) — go-to guy for The Mafia. Wayne is being run ragged as a result of his various commitments, but he has one big job: smoothing the path for the mob to build their casinos in a pliable Caribbean nation.
The other dangerous man who is about to turn Crutchfield's life upside down? FBI agent Dwight Holly, one of the antagonists of The Cold Six Thousand. Wayne feels a wave of guilt over his actions in the previous novel. Holly? Not so much — J. Edgar Hoover is using Holly's skills to launch a subversive operation named "BAAAAAD BROTHER," designed to infiltrate and discredit black nationalist movements in the LA area.
But while Holly is happy to carry out Hoover's racist right-wing directives, he's also carrying on a love affair with Karen Sifakis, a decidedly left-wing activist with a history of low-level, non-violent subversive acts of her own. Holly and Sifakis work out a deal that will bring Holly into contact with a decidedly less scrupulous left-wing activist: Manipulative Bastard Joan Rosen Klein.
Into this tangled web stumbles Crutchfield, who gets caught up in the work being done by Holly and Tedrow. He will find himself in (and contributing to) the chaos outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, the airspace over Communist Cuba and the huts of voodoo practitioners in Haiti. As Crutchfield finds himself in so far over his head that he doesn't even know which direction is up, the question becomes whether it's even possible for a nobody like him to survive his horrible world.
This novel contains examples of:
- Aggressive Negotiations: Scotty and Dwight get together for a sit-down toward the end of the novel to try and iron out their differences. They hit a snag when Scotty insists on killing Crutchfield and Dwight refuses to give in and allow it. A few minutes later they're engaged in a shootout in the middle of a crowded LA restaurant, and Dwight is dead.
- The Atoner: Wayne is looking to atone for his actions in The Cold Six Thousand. Eventually, Dwight Holly takes on this mantle as well.
- Anyone Can Die: A staple of Ellroy's novels, but this one takes the cake. By the end of the novel, Ellroy has killed off: Wayne, Dwight, Scotty Bennett and Marsh Bowen, not to mention a score of characters who aren't point of view protagonists.
- Badass Decay: In-universe. Hoover, previously regarded as a fearsomely omniscient and ruthless operator, is in the throes of dementia, and many people are willing to openly mock him for his decline. Dwight is careful to emphasize that Hoover is still very dangerous, but even he takes shots at Hoover in his calls with the President.
- Bad Guy Bar: We finally see the Grapevine Tavern in St. Louis, which was an important but unseen location in the previous two books as a gathering spot for right-wing racists and mafia figures. Dwight and Wayne lead a raid on the bar and slaughter everyone inside because they were chattering about the MLK and RFK assassinations.
- Curbstomp Battle: Scotty and Dwight's shootout results in Dwight dead from many, many gunshots and Scotty totally unharmed.
- Determinator: Scotty is obsessed with an armored car robbery from 1962, and he spends the better part of a decade trying to solve it. Unbeknownst to him, Marsh Bowen has been pursuing the same case for the same period of time.
- Double Agent: As part of "Operation BAAAD Brother," Holly recruits a black LAPD officer, Marsh Bowen, to infiltrate local black radical organizations and subvert them from the inside.
- Dwight Holly becomes one (a literal "agent," in his case) after things fall apart with BAAAD BROTHER and he works with Joan Rosen Klein to subvert the FBI and assassinate Hoover.
- Jack Leahy has been working for left-wing political causes and trying to subvert the FBI for decades.
- Historical Domain Character: In addition to the famous historical figures who showed up in the previous two books (Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, the assorted mob bosses), Don Crutchfield is actually a real person and Hollywood private investigator. He has a book you can buy on Amazon, in fact.
- Hollywood Voodoo: Crutchfield has some rather up and close personal experiences with voodoo zombification. Crutchfield, Tedrow and Reginald Hazzard become obsessed with voodoo herbs and creating elaborate concoctions.
- Info Dump: Joan becomes a POV character after Scotty and Dwight are killed. Her first chapter lays out at great length all the details of the novel's backstory and significant mysteries.
- Jerkass to One: Wayne Tedrow, otherwise a reasonably decent guy for an Ellroy protagonist, absolutely hates Don Crutchfield's guts, beats him up and threatens to kill him several times over the course of the novel. This comes back to bite Wayne in the behind. Hard.
- Literary Allusion Title: From a line in "A Shropshire Lad" by A.E. Houseman: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover / Breath's a ware that will not keep."
- Manipulative Bastard: Joan is very good at manipulating people to get what she wants. Marsh Bowen has some skills as well, as part of his Master Actor traits (see below).
- Master Actor: Several characters describe Marsh Bowen in this way, though it's not entirely a compliment — Holly (and Marsh himself, in his diary) describe Marsh as a fundamentally empty man without any principles or core beliefs, which makes it easy for him to pretend to be anybody he needs to be.
- My God, What Have I Done?: After BAAAD Brother ends with a shootout in a residential area that kills children, Dwight Holly is racked with guilt and becomes The Atoner.
- The Needs of the Many: One of the differences between Joan and Karen is that Karen insists on non-violence, while Joan is willing to sacrifice lives if it means achieving a larger good.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Essentially a character trait for Wayne, one that other characters even call out. After the tragedy with Wendell Durfee in The Cold Six Thousand, Wayne goes to the home of another low-life to warn him that the local police are going to frame him for a murder Wayne committed. But the guy he's warning is totally zonked out on drugs, and he ends up trying to kill Wayne instead of thanking him. Wayne ends up killing the guy and an innocent bystander preacher who was at the home trying to convince the guy to live a better life.
- The Peeping Tom: Crutchfield is introduced this way and he basically never shakes the compunction. His friends and colleagues even call him "peeper."
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Joan Rosen Klein has been on a decades-long rampage targeting J. Edgar Hoover.
- Scatter Brained Senior: Hoover is suffering significant mental decline by the time the novel starts, and that decline just gets worse as the book goes on. This is reflected in the nature of his conversations with various characters that are captured in the form of wiretap transcripts. In the first two novels, Hoover's dialogue is clipped, to-the-point, professional and intelligent — he receives information, gives orders, and acknowledges requests, and that's about it. In this book, Hoover routinely rambles about random nonsense, often leaving the person on the other end of the conversation to respond with some version of "Um...sure."
