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Destination: Morgue
 
 

Destination: Morgue (Hardcover)

by James Ellroy (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £17.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Century (7 Oct 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0712661379
  • ISBN-13: 978-0712661379
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.4 x 4.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 86,392 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #14 in  Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Authors, A-Z > E > Ellroy, James

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

The fragments of memoir, and three stories, which make up Ellroy's Destination Morgue share the same high-octane nervous jabber, the same noir world of amphetamines, neon and women brutally killed. Ellroy has never entirely got over the murder of his mother--he says so a lot, but that is no reason not to believe him--or a youth of bigotry and petty crime which made him rather more likely to end up a lifer than a best seller. If, at times, he is a bit too keen to tell us how street smart he is, he has nonetheless earned much of the right to do so; pieces here about a pornography obsession or dead killers he quasi-identified with have a scary honesty to them. It is shocking that a man is prepared to say such things about anyone, let alone about himself.

The novellas--collectively 'Rick Loves Donna'--anatomize the thoroughly and entertainingly unhealthy obsession across the decades of a corrupt cop for a starlet with a taste for involvement in vigilante violence. They are not quite vintage Ellroy--a little too close for that to Mickey Spillane on the one hand and the Simpson's 'Itchy and Scratchy' on the other--but they will do until his next dark mad masterpiece comes along.--Roz Kaveney



Review

No manuscript was available for the latest collection of Ellroy's uncollected works. Everything's here you would expect from the man whose last book, The Cold Six Thousand, was described as a 'remarkable accomplishment'; sex, violence, true crime, scandal and a new novella called Hollywood Fuck Pad. However, Destination Morgue features a whole lot more than Ellroy's usual fare - pictures from low- rent paparazzi, including 'stretch marks revealed', 'gaping flies outside whorehouses' and 'toilet-stall assignations'. Expect darkness, depth, intensity and lots of comment from an author generally and critically acknowledged as one of America's greatest living crime writers, a claim backed by impressive sales figures for American Tabloid - 40,000 in hardback (a fivefold increase) and 75,000 in paperback. If you're not familiar with Ellroy, that's an omission you should remedy.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Worth a glom, 12 Sep 2008
By Gavin Bell "gav_40" (Glasgow) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Destination: Morgue (Paperback)
This reviewer is an Ellroy fan. This reviewer dug The Big Nowhere. This reviewer dug LA Confidential. This reviewer dug American Tabloid tres righteous.

I heard there was a new Ellroy tome out. I checked Google. Shagged a number for the library. 28 Bank Street. I hit the library. I braced the librarian. Aisle six. Non-fic. I found the book. I withdrew the book. I read the book.

I glommed the GQ articles. Three novellas. Ellroy's style is mucho terse. Ellroy's style is tres irritating. Ellroy's style is mysteriously readable.

The book is okay. The book is not classic Ellroy. Ellroy is not as cool as he thinks.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Jibber-jabber, 25 Jul 2006
By Mr. Warren M. Fisher (East Grinstead, West Sussex United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Destination: Morgue (Paperback)
Not classic Ellroy by any means. His hipster-jive patois is more impenetrable than ever - it's beginning to reek of self-indulgence - and the pieces here are of widely varying quality. The non-fiction articles written for GQ are intermittently interesting, but the autobiographical pieces are somewhat repellent (Ellroy as a young man was a doofus, lovelife bottom-feeder, not the epic rebel he imagines) - his un-PC rantings come off as affectation. The novellas offer thin entertainment, but don't come close to the majestic grandeur of Ellroy's novels.

Ellroy is a born novelist, but as again reiterated here, he is not a short-story writer or journalist. Stick to the day job Ellroy, why waste time when you should be working on that new novel.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Avant-noir, 17 Sep 2006
This review is from: Destination: Morgue (Paperback)
This is Ellroy's second collection of shorts, a mixture of essays from GQ magazine with three inter-linked (and previously unpublished) novellas.
If one thing unites them all, it's the alliterative, allusive authorial style of Hush-Hush magazine and Ellroy's character Danny Getchell. For some people, this makes Ellroy devilishly difficult to devour, but for me this is much of the attraction - he's almost avant-garde in the extremism of his laconic stylism.
So there's "Balls to the Wall", a boxing write-up where sentences struggle to pass the 4-word barrier; or "The Trouble I Cause", a short story about Dragnet actor Jack Webb, penned in the Getchell style.
Elsewhere there are two autobiographical tales, much like "My Dark Places" cut down for readers with short attention spans.
One piece, "Stephanie" deals with the 1965 murder of Stephanie Gorman, and with the attempts of Ellroy's three buddies in the Cold Case squad to revisit it during 2002. This provides the real-life backdrop for the three novellas, where the first thing to note is the similarity of the three main characters' names to Ellroy's real-life pals. The novellas are the heart of the book, and take detective "Rhino" Rick Jenson through three episodes ranging over roughly three decades, close encounters with classic Ellroy characters: Hollywood, killers, perverts, racists. At times, the relentless racist rancour of the anti-hero is hard to take, but they're great stories and they see Ellroy taking on welcome new themes - terrorism in "Jungletown Jihad" - while plunging passionately into post-modernism way beyond previous flirtations.
Probably one for fans only - newcomers would be better starting elsewhere.
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