The Cold Six Thousand - Structure and Style

Structure and Style

The Cold Six Thousand has a structure substantially similar to that of American Tabloid. As in American Tabloid, the chapters are divided into named Parts (see Contents, below), and each chapter is numbered and identified by location and date. The action of the book is completely sequential, as the dates indicate. Each chapter has a limited third person narrative voice from the point of view of one of the three main characters. Interspersed between many chapters are "document inserts" reproducing newspaper clippings, letters, and transcripts of telephone calls. Flashbacks occur, but only in the present tense memory of the protagonists.

The highly stylized prose used in the main chapters builds upon the style used in American Tabloid (and, to a certain extent, White Jazz). Of the novel's style, Ellroy noted:

The style I developed for The Cold Six Thousand is a direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards. It was appropriate for that book, and that book only, because it's the 1960s. It's largely the story of reactionaries in America during that time, largely a novel of racism and thus the racial invective, and the overall bluntness and ugliness of the language.