Underworld USA

Underworld USA is James Ellroy's trilogy examining American political crime from 1958 through 1972 — American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover — following a rotating cast of FBI agents, mob enforcers, CIA contractors, and political operatives through the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Nixon era. Ellroy writes American history as a nightmare of institutional criminality at the highest levels of power.

The trilogy is one of the most ambitious works of American historical fiction of the twentieth century — Ellroy implicates the FBI, CIA, organized crime, and the Kennedy family itself in a web of conspiracy and violence that he presents not as paranoid fantasy but as the logical extension of documented historical fact into the fictional space where the full truth cannot be known. The prose style is the most compressed and demanding Ellroy has ever written.

The central characters — Pete Bondurant, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd — are morally destroyed men who do terrible things for reasons they understand and cannot stop. There is no heroism in Ellroy's America, only varying degrees of complicity.

Begin with American Tabloid (1995). Ellroy at his most ambitious. Read in order.