As Mickey Spillane created a character named Mike Hammer, Ellroy has now invented a style named Hammer. The survival of Pete Bondurant is so implausible that Ellroy portrays the reunion with his wife at the end in an implausible puff of Malamudian magic realism. Barb took two steps. Not only that, but with arch and purposeful anachronism Ellroy has Pete chewing Nicorette gum in the late '60s. Chuck has two guns.
Chuck aims and fires.
Two hammers click. But as the echo of an uncanny intuition, that style has an extraordinary resonance. For with his simple declarative sentences, Ellroy has taken a primal American literary expression and transformed it into a vision of cultural and social destiny. Indeed, there really are a Dick and a Jane here. It is perhaps why this is not so much a book that is read as a book that is watched while it rushes by.