Underworld USA Trilogy - Overview

Overview

The trilogy blends fiction and history to tell a story of political and legal corruption in the US between 1958 and 1973. American Tabloid covers the years 1958 to 1963, beginning exactly five years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with the assassination as the book's dénouement. The Cold Six Thousand begins concurrently with American Tabloid's end. It covers a slightly longer period, culminating in the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Blood's a Rover spans the years 1968 to 1973, encompassing the Vietnam War, the death of J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Power movement, the Mob's attempt to build casinos in the Dominican Republic, and the reign of President Richard M. Nixon. Each novel is written from the viewpoint of three separate characters.

Ellroy has described the central themes of the trilogy:

The essential contention of the Underworld USA trilogy ... is that America was never innocent. Here's the lineage: America was founded on a bedrock of racism, slaughter of the indigenous people, slavery, religious lunacy ... and nations are never innocent. Let alone nations as powerful as our beloved fatherland. What you have in The Cold Six Thousand — which covers the years '63 to '68 — is that last gasp of pre-public-accountability America where the anti-communist mandate justified virtually any action. And it wasn't Kennedy's death that engendered mass skepticism. It was the protracted horror of the Vietnamese war.