Rating: 
Summary: Hard-boiled brilliance
Review: (Actually 4.5 stars) As a reader I was relatively new to James Ellroy and his work. Having purchased this book at an airport shop I wasn't expecting a great deal from it. Boy was I mistaken! What amazed and enthralled me more than anything about White jazz was the way in which the characters draw you inexorably into their own corrupt, upside-down world. Weaving together a cast of magnetic (if morally suspect) people and a Byzantine plot Ellroy manages to immerse us totally and effortlessly in Dave "the enforcer" Klein's seedy L.A habitat. This being my first brush with Ellroy I (like a few others evidently) found his staccato, machine gun style of prose hard to follow at first. But after a while I found that the writing style suited and complimented the content greatly, and if anything it added to the overall effectiveness and weight of the story.White jazz works both as a good old fashioned crime noir, and as a fascinating look into the darker recesses of the human soul. Brilliant stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: The Los Angeles Police Department Cesspool
Review: Everybody in the L.A. Police Department (circa 1958) from top to bottom, from the Chief of Police to the cop on his beat, is crooked. A feature columnist at the scandal sheet, "Hush Hush Magazine," has been telling that to his reading public for years, but no one has taken particular notice until the U.S. Attorney's Office started investigating the L.A.P.D. According to _White Jazz_, the L.A.P.D., crime boss Mickey Cohen (now a federal witness), Howard Hughes, and others are involved in bootlegging, illegal slot machines, narcotics peddling, burglary, sale of stolen merchandise, murder, blackmail and shaking down homosexuals. There is even a little "wife swapping" and incest thrown in for color. There is no hero in this book or anyone I even remotely liked or cared for. Meanwhile, the body count keeps mounting from chapter to chapter. To make wading through this vast cesspool even more unpleasant, intersperced throughout _White Jazz_ are the corrupt attorney/police Lieutenant Dave Klein's incoherent, private thoughts, as if the plot were not incomprehensible enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Ellroy does better elsewhere
Review: Disappointing considering it's an Ellroy. If it were written by someone else, it would be a great book, but I hold him to a higher standard since I know he's capable of it. Like all of his books the plot is an intricate web of corruption and nefariousness whipped up to the nth degree of complication. The "hero" is the usual motley mix of petty corruption and feeble instincts for good. The prose is standard Leonardese, chopped up, manic sentience fragments that should fail utterly but come together in a weird poetry of immediacy and power. Still, despite all that, this book disappoints utterly and completely.
Rating:
Summary: Experiment in Writing
Review: This is my second Ellroy's book, the first being "Black Dahlia". Stylistically this is a much more difficult story to follow due to his internal monologue in short sentences. You really have to pay a lot of attention and read every sentence carefully. Black Dahlia, I found, is a faster reading and more gripping. In White Jazz, there are alot of plots that are so gripping that you just can't put them down, but for the reason mentioned above, I have a hard time tying up together. The internal monologue style -- very similar to James Joyce latter part of Ulysses -- is unique, and require a great deal of adaptation to fully understand. I feel I have to re-read the neitre book to understand fully the enitre plots.
Rating: 
Summary: Definitive Ellroy
Review: This is the most amazing book I have ever read, taking me inside the mind of corrupt,insomniac rogue cop and lawyer Dave Klein, the most memorable of Ellroy's alienated hard men. The plot is tight, zig-zagging all over LA and through a map of the darl underside of fifties America. Although Klein has quite rightly been described as a repulsive human being, like all of JA's characters he is true to himself and has the shopsoiled integrity of a true noir character. The jewel of the LA tetrology, as well as the one that ties up the loose ends from the other three books, this is one that you just have to grit your teeth and read. (Not being distracted by Klein's punch-drunk internal monologue or the gore level, which is high even for Ellroy). A classic of the mystery genre, and of American literature as well.
Rating:
Summary: "White Jazz" plays the right notes for Ellroy's noir L.A.
Review: "White Jazz" is about a good cop. Well, at least as good a cop you can expect in a James Ellroy novel. Basically, Dave Klein is a good cop who makes one impassioned mistake and gives the mob fodder to blackmail him. Rather than sulk and collapse, Klein figures that if he's going to be on the take, he might as well be good at it. The story, ostensibly, is about Klein's tightrope act between the cops, the mob, and all shades of grey in-between. "White Jazz", though, is ultimately about an unhappy truth that when giants fight, it's the little people that get crushed. As the sequel to "LA Confidential", it's about the continuing power struggle between Ed Exley and Dudley Smith. As a southern California tale at the end of the Eisenhower era, it's about Republicans vs. Democrats. As a 50's piece, it's about pinkos, civil rights, and the Great American Pasttime. As the story of Dave Klein and his many associates, it's an up close and personal morality play about being chess pieces - all expendible with varying degrees of worth. "White Jazz" has a stream of thought first person narration that can be jarring at times, but then the story itself is like free jazz - different threads playing along roughly together and toward some common end. Whereas "LA Confidential" had a tight narrative so that it could key on a small number of plot threads as they developed over a span of time, "White Jazz" takes place in a matter of months, presenting a survey of what was going on in the city with a depth that the first novel couldn't. In the end, "White Jazz" plays all the right notes as a follow-up for the unfinished business left over from "LA Confidential" and the unfinished stories of life in the City of Angels.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This is the creation of a new type of writing style. No other book (even of Elroy's) has it. He backed away from it after this book. Check it out. You are THERE.
Rating:
Summary: Notes From The Food Chain
Review: Feature: Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley, the once morally ambiguous hotshot in LA Confidential, now revealed to be a dangerously polished hyena is mad at the Feds, who are now launching a full fledged investigation into his insalubrious efficient gutter that is the LAPD. At one of his many press conferences, he says of the probe: "It will fail because he (the Fed head of the probe, Welles Noonan) has grievously underestimated the moral rectitude of the Los Angeles Police Department." No such luck, moral rectitude is never an issue here. The only thing an inquirer may underestimate is the survival skills of the inquired. The slime-balls are all here. James Ellroy's White Jazz is the authentic feeling, brilliantly foul continuation of the life and times of the various parasites that populate the 50s LAPD and the corrupt politicians, drug-pushers, tabloid hounds, pornographers, pimps and prostitutes they feed on. It is a first person account by lieutenant Dave "the enforcer" Klein. A casual murderer of numerous witnesses and others that happen to be in the way of where ever he's going. He doesn't feel bad about it, probably doesn't have time to. But he does admit certain queasiness after a kill. Ellroy's novel is too hardboiled to be one of redemption, but he does offer castigation to all his sinners. There is for instance Klein's unsubtle incestuous obsession with his sister. In fact, incest seems to be Ellroy's preferred method of punishment. A longing that can never be satisfied, and if satisfied will be the source of infinite desolation. At the center of this hell is a diseased family Klein observes as an investigator. They are a crime family, long involved with the LAPD. Their numerous afflictions are of the darkest kind, and are the source of the novel's deceptively euphonious title. The family is also a reflection of Klein, of his irreversible destination. Often in crime tales (both films and books), characters seem to have becomes criminals for the exclusive privilege of spouting phrases like "waste em" or "clip em". They seem to be enjoying sounding like criminals, which of course menas that they are not real criminals. They are the work of a cuss-happy author delighted by all the evil he can shock us with. Ellroy is something else in this regard. He recognizes that corruption, for whatever reason, is more inherently attractive then goodness in fiction. His characters speak the language that most readers will believe is the language of criminals, then imbues their world with such loathing that the language seems merely functional. Not comedic. His characters are all slaves to their lives, some happy, some dead. But almost all, incapable of change. If you consider White Jazz, the only one that seems to be at peace is the that joyously eloquent scoundrel Dudley Smith. He is distinguished as villain in a world of villains only by the apparent cheerfulness with which he goes about his nastiness. If you're interested in the dark corners of Ellroy, you may want to check out Irvine Welsh's appetizingly titled FILTH. That novel achieved a magnificent scatological poetry of self-mutilation from which Ellroy deliberately eschews. Ellroy's style is ofcourse an integral part of all his work. You'll find it mimicked and explained in almost all the reviews, a source of both complaint and admiration. I personally felt that it was a two edged sword. On the one hand his bizarre stream of police form consciousness, with those one, two or three word sentences is often disorienting and opaque. It is always a relief when a character speaks, complete sentences for a change. It resembles a departmental form, ambiguously filled out by the narrator and understood by the few who have had similar experience. Soon enough, you get used to the rat-a-tat rhythm, recognize the names, but White Jazz remains, to the very end, exhausting to read. On the other hand, the style adds to the realism of the whole thing. If you have to exude such effort to get into this world, then it becomes that much more vivid. Your enjoyment of the novel will depend almost exclusively on your acceptance of Ellroy's prose. Once that hurdle (or blessing) is bypassed (or embraced), your are left with an uncensored stream of shocking facts. JUST THE FACTS as that TV show in LA Confidential used to advertise. And they're incredible.
Rating:
Summary: guilty pleasure
Review: james ellroys wildest,funniest,meanest book has been underestimated far too long, say it loud say it proud this is brilliant white hot writing. sure, the prose style takes some getting used to but so what? no one else's writing can give you this kind of sick thrill. ellroy, is as good as he thinks he is, i can't think of anyone since muhammad ali who was so good and so egotistical, no matter what your perception of ellroy is he's a writer of staggering talent. all other crime fiction pales compared to his!!!
Rating:
Summary: Nice finish to the quartet
Review: And the review below by 'Stone Junction' is dead on! :) This one wraps up the LA series pretty well, and carries on Ellroy's tradition of subtle almost-justice for the antagonists and very heavily intertwined plots. All in all I preferred Black Dalhia and Big Nowhere but I still highly recommend LA Confidential and White Jazz. I'm sad to see it end!
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