This Storm

In the early 1940s, as America goes to war, LAPD and Army intelligence officer Dudley Smith senses an opportunity. The cunning and ruthless Irish cop conspires to smuggle drugs as well as Japanese and Mexican laborers into the U.S. in military vehicles. His scheming is aided by a Tong boss restaurateur, a high-ranking Mexican Sinarquista, and by Hideo Ashida, a closeted and conflicted Japanese-American LAPD chemist. To thwart Dudley, his more straight-laced but equally ambitious rival, LAPD captain Bill Parker, recruits forensic biologist/Navy officer Joan Conville to work alongside and keep tabs on Ashida. Though distrustful of one another at first, a series of discoveries brings them closer together and puts them – as well as Dudley and LAPD officer Elmer Jackson – in pursuit of a Communist-Fascist conspiracy and a cache of stolen gold.

            The second book in James Ellroy’s Second LA Quartet, This Storm is all but inaccessible without having read the first book (2014’s Perfidia) and requires a decent understanding of WW II-era history to boot. A sprawling, character-laden six-hundred-plus page exploration of Ellroy’s favorite subject (mid-century American corruption), This Storm will appeal to a narrow band of patient, strong-stomached readers, and even then, it will test their commitment.

            As with Ellroy’s previous oeuvre, This Storm breathlessly catalogues the violence and sleaze lurking behind the veneer of respectability. Not only do characters like Dudley eradicate the lines between cops and criminals, but politicians and entertainers (chiefly, the real-life Fletcher Bowron and Orson Welles) are painted as indulgent and corruptible. “Fifth column’s fifth column” pops up as a refrain, and it works to capture the greed and thuggery that unite partisans of widely differing political stripes.

            All of this is delivered in Ellroy’s rapid-fire staccato style, which is as much a curse as a blessing. On the one hand, it suits the subject matter well and keeps a long book from being unbearably longer. On the other hand, it stands in the way of characters developing their own voices (excerpts from the journal of police pal Kay Lake notwithstanding). This is a shame because Ellroy has finally diversified his protagonists. The familiar corrupt white cop battling a greater evil is still present here in the form of Elmer (a redneck running a prostitution ring who foreswears white supremacy and murder), but Joan (who plays Bill and Dudley against one another as she looks for a means to avenge her father) and Hideo (whose growing attraction to Dudley clashes with his growing sense of guilt from enabling him) allow for new stories to be told. And yet, they are only fleshed out as much as the plot demands them to be, which is often not nearly enough.

            This Storm takes its name from a fabricated quote by W.H. Auden. “This storm. This savaging disaster” is repeated by various characters within the book, and it’s tempting to see it as a description of the text (relentless and unyielding as it is) itself. However, another frequent phrase is actually a better fit. “It’s all one story,” Joan notes as her cases begin to converge. Here, too, Nazism, Communism, theft, and murder are all viciously intertwined, to the detriment of anything else worth focusing on.