Recast it! BLOOD ON THE MOON, that is...

You remember wrong.

He pretty much zeros in on the one feminist bookstore that "just happens" to be run by the woman who is the lifelong obsession of the killer. Keep in mind, he is investigating a case that has nothing whatsoever to do with bookstores. That was just ONE example of what became a constant stream of shockingly bad choices. His characters in these books are sophomorically written as well, speaking and acting in very unrealistic ways (he keeps having male characters "scream" when he obviously means "yells" or "shouts"). Absent is Ellroys later gift for idiosyncratic speech patterns and wonderful slang. You get drips and drabs of it, but it doesn't flow the way anyone who has read latter Ellroy comes to expect.

Go read White Jazz, Crime Wave and The Cold Six Thousand. Next to them, Blood on the Moon looks like it is some high school short story. And don't give me that "it's not Faulkner" crap, which is just a bs way of saying I'm some nose in the air type who thinks all fiction has to be literature. Nope, I'm just someone who has read most of Ellroys later stuff when he had honed his writing skills to a razor sharp edge. Where the plot is driven by the actions of the characters - not the other way around.

Just because something is of a genre like "noir" or what-have-you, doesn't mean it can't be either very good or excellent. Writers like Ellroy, King and Elmore Leonard aren't the top dogs of their genres because they simply have the most interesting plots. Other writers before and after have told similiar tales without the booksales or critical acclaim to show for it. No, their works get to sit at the top of those lists because they are excellent writers who care about every word and know how to create characters who act & speak like real, flawed people.

I now realize there's reason why these early books are never mentioned in interviews or articles about Ellroy - they are that different in quality to later ones that made his reputation. But they do offer a lesson that not all writers hit the ground running, with every short story or novel from word-go a masterpiece. It's rather human to see that Ellroy struggled to find his way, his voice in his writing much like he himself struggled in his youth to find a way out of the petty criminal life he led.

Something clever someone else wrote for a movie or TV show