The Cold Six Thousand
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.
In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroyplants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground.
It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.
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James Ellroy
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz — have won numerous awards and were international bestsellers. Likewise, the novels of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy — American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. The Quartet and Trilogy are now available in Everyman’s Library editions.
2023 is Demon Dog Ellroy’s Triple Crown year. On April 21 he will be honored with the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime excellence in writing about the American West. Late this summer, the twenty-hour podcast of “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” will drop on Audible. It will be unexpurgated, uncensored, and unabridged. Ellroy himself reads all narrative passages; noted actors read the dialogue. Boffo sound effects and jazzy period music accompany the spoken text. “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” is a revolutionary advance for the podcast form.
Underworld USA Trilogy
Underworld USA Trilogy consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
