Brace! Here comes a death scene from American Tabloid:

Fulo took the wheel. Pete got in back. Salcido tried to scream through his gag. They hauled down Flagler. Fulo yelled an address: 1089 Northwest 53rd. Pete turned on the radio full blast. Bobby Darin sang ‘Dream Lover’, earsplitting loud. Pete shot Salcido in the back of the head – exploding teeth ripped the tape off his mouth.

Exit Salcido.

This scene is typical of Ellroy, both for its brutality and its economy. American Tabloid is a book where horrible things happen quickly and often. Relax for a second and you’ll find that you’ve missed two hoodlums getting shot and dumped in a Florida swamp. And even when people aren’t getting killed – “His food was cold. He’d sweated his shirt starched to wilted” for instance – the writing remains clipped and hard-edged. Ellroy has no need for words like “from” or “through”, or for his sentences to meander around the dampness of a shirt. He takes us directly from start to end result: starched, then wilted.

Windows are never opened in American Tabloid, they are “cracked”– opening one would take too many syllables and allow Ellroy’s characters too much leisure time. If they’re going to open a window, they have to do it fast. Time is always against them. Even waiting is done quickly: “They waited in his outer office. Ward sat hold-your-breath still. Kemper knew: he’ll be 20 minutes late exactly.”

This is a book where punctuation falls hard. You have to rest on those full stops and especially that colon. Punctuation provides the only chance you get to catch your breath, because Ellroy’s words are nearly always propulsive, moving the action forwards, eating into time.

Once you click into this galloping rhythm, reading Ellroy becomes addictive. The prose feels crisp and vivid, and throws up frequent gems: “He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to history.” And (on the same page): “Sometimes he couldn’t sleep. That big fucking woosh was like a hydrogen bomb in his head.”

There’s also substance behind the style: this is a plot that needs to be driven fast. American Tabloid takes on five years from 22 November 1958 to the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and there are an awful lot of intrigues, heists, murders, shakedowns, stakeouts, bribes, buggings, betrayals, extraditions, acts of sedition and grand malfeasance to get through. Not to mention the small matters of a rigged presidential election, the failed invasion of Cuba, J Edgar Hoover’s endless plotting, Bobby Kennedy’s prolonged crusades against the mafia, and John F Kennedy’s busy infidelities.

And time is crucial in American Tabloid: every chapter heading is date-stamped, people are always looking at their watches, counting seconds and racing against the clock. Typical is an attack on a goofball dealer in the kitchen of a Drive-in: “The geek pulled a knife. Pete kicked him in the balls and deep fried his knife hand. Six seconds only – pill heists didn’t rate mayhem.”

When John F Kennedy is taped having sex in a bugged room, we learn he is a “2.4 minute man”. We see a character called Littell allot “seven minutes for cosmetic thievery” in an apartment break-in. Sometimes we are even told the time in caps: “TWENTY-NINE MINUTES ELAPSED.” Sometimes, time goes too fast: “He was too late – by seconds,” starts chapter 64. As a result, a mafia boss is bundled off to Guatemala, another frantic chase begins, more time whizzes by.

This is a book where everything is always moving forwards, and its rat-a-tat prose is an impressive marrying of form and function. Except there’s a catch. Because time isn’t simply moving forward in American Tabloid. We know where we are heading – and that’s towards a point fixed in the past. Each of those carefully marked minutes must also be subtracted from the time left until we get to Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November, 1963. Ellroy’s characters might not know it, but history is reversing towards them just as fast as they are careering forwards through their lives. There’s got to be a big crunch – and as readers, we can only strap in and await impact.