Ellroy spent his childhood in foster homes, drinks, takes drugs, rob anything goes, refourgue credit cards. It does not switch in the crime, but is not far. Not like the hero of his book, A KILLER ON THE ROAD. The parallels between Ellroy and his character Martin Plunkett are striking. Plunkett is a killer, arrested by police for four murders, and who shuts himself up in a morbid silence. He prefers to write. He is in prison deliver all necessary documentation, and began to write his criminal path, serial killer, author of more than thirty murders ...
Written in 1986, before the quartet from Los Angeles, A KILLER ON THE ROAD is a first-person narrative. A remarkable and terrifying study of what goes through the mind of a serial killer. All themes Ellroy are present: corrupt childhood, racism, homophobia, cult of beauty, perfection of the body, delight of death, violence. In the sixties, Plunkett begins with petty theft, insists on mastering the art of rob, to create a parallel universe inspired by a comic youth "Super Saigneur", he organizes, plans, calculates, is projected. He calls it his "inner cinema." Charting his physical and mental universe. Super tapper dictates his actions. And then everything changes in the blood, one evening. Hallucinatory scene ice Plunkett as the reader. Now he found his way: to kill. Still, more and more, to fly, fly, become stronger, more beautiful, more free.
Ellroy dissects the sick mind of his character with a precision that makes one shudder. The novel is interspersed with newspaper cuttings of the discovery of corpses. Plunkett read the newspapers, and the names of Ted Bundy, the Zodiac, Charles Manson pass before his eyes. Pitiful individuals in his eyes, poor "heroes" who were caught, who proclaim their innocence is either genius behind bars. The Plunkett / Manson found in the book is an unforgettable way. Plunkett, he has no use for media, celebrity. He works for himself. Then Ellroy introduces a new character, Anderson, a cop who stops Plunkett for questioning, and that seems to guess who is behind this globetrotter. Cop instinct or Twin killer instinct?
I obviously say nothing of the second part of the plot. The madness escalates, the reader becomes one with Plunkett. Straw! The man we almost becomes freindly. Besogner be left in peace, all the same! The epilogue is a paroxysm of rage. The end, the reader knows. Since the story is a long flashback. Well, almost. For it remains to understand the motivations, know why. And how is understanding Plunkett, who mastered so well his element.
A KILLER ON THE ROAD is a challenging book, recoilless cold, which has the writing talent of James Ellroy, who knows so well how to find the words, the images, to make us understand the dark side of man. A book that also suffers from a few lengths of a few facilities inherent to its author. But a book that will be difficult to forget.
