L.A. Quartet

The L.A. Quartet is a sequence of four crime fiction novels by James Ellroy. The novels, set in the late 1940s through the late 1950s in Los Angeles, are:

• (1987) The Black Dahlia
• (1988) The Big Nowhere
• (1990) L.A. Confidential
• (1992) White Jazz

Some critics [1][2] say that the Quartet marks Ellroy's crime fiction movement from the tradition of classic modernist "hardboiled" noir fiction of his earlier novels—such as Brown's Requiem, Clandestine, and the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy—to postmodern historiographic metafiction. For example, The Black Dahlia is a fictional representation of an actual event, the murder of Elizabeth Short. Several characters from the L.A. Quartet, most notably Dudley Smith, were introduced in Ellroy's 1983 novel Clandestine, which takes place between 1951 and 1955 and makes reference to the Black Dahlia killings and Smith's investigation into them.

Characters

• Dudley Liam Smith (1905 - ?)

Smith was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1905, and later immigrated to the United States, where he joined the LAPD in 1928. Smith was the clandestine protector of two rival criminal families, the Herricks and the Kafesjians, in the 1930s, in 1942 he murdered José Diaz in the famous Sleepy Lagoon murder case. He is first mentioned in The Big Nowhere, which is set in 1950, where he is recruited by Deputy D.A. Ellis Loew to investigate Communist influence in Hollywood. He and his partner Mal Considine pursue this assignment with vigor. It was in this book that the extent of his personal corruption was revealed; as well as Jose Diaz, Dudley and his men were involved in other criminal activities, and in February 1950 Dudley personally tracked down and killed protagonist Buzz Meeks as is stated in the prologue to L.A. Confidential. By 1950 Dudley had reached the rank of Lieutenant, and he would remain there throughout the 1950s, until his promotion to Captain in 1958. By this time, his personal rivalry with fellow LAPD Captain Edmund Exley resulted in a power struggle between both men, which Edmund Exley won when Smith was attacked by a man named Wylie Bullock. This attack left him with brain damage that rendered him essentially insane, and only semi-lucid. It is unknown when Dudley died; however, he is apparently still alive in 1976, as is revealed in the epilogue to White Jazz. Smith was thoroughly unscrupulous, ruthless, and evil. He had a large list of crimes that he had committed, including theft, pornography distribution, murder, and most disturbingly, infanticide - Dudley personally strangled the 2-day old baby of the Herrick family in 1937. He was a hard line anti-communist, declaring that he hated the "Red filth worse than Satan." Dudley's racism was also well known, particularly in regards to Jews, and he was a notable proponent of "containment;" as he explained it, keeping the "nigger filth" in black areas.

See also

• Noir fiction