Why I want to meet James Ellroy
Because he says shit like this:
I’m convinced that the Mob, in cahoots with Cuban exiles and renegade CIA elements, whacked Jack Kennedy. That said, I’m a novelist—and my job is the creation of verisimilitude, not the exposition of literal truth. There is no evidence that the Mob whacked King—and in The Cold Six Thousand, he gets whacked by a cabal of racist provocateurs, ex-FBI men, and right-wing fat cats. I suspect that something like this happened in reality. Again, however, my design is to show the horrible power of like-minded men bent on repression at any cost—which is true to the flow of history in general and of the 1960s especially. Thus I lie / fabricate / condense / extrapolate / guess / hyperbolize and weave to give you that flow and make it convincing. As for Bobby—I’m not sure. Maybe Sirhan Sirhan was a lone wacko; maybe he was assisted in his murderous obsession. It comes down to this: The Cold Six Thousand plausibly exposits the time and the place and the mindset of the bad men who made things happen then.
