American Tabloid is populated almost entirely with baddies of one sort or another, and ethical judgments are left up to the reader

Let’s take a look at the character arcs of some of the leading players in American Tabloid:

Ward J Littell: Initially idealistic and prepared to risk life and limb to fight organised crime and help the Kennedy family, Ward becomes disillusioned, alcoholic and physically humiliated to emerge twisted, cynical and eagerly working for the mafia.

Kemper Boyd: At the beginning, Kemper is handsome, suave and in control. He skilfully plays off the CIA against the FBI, then both of them against the Kennedys – and vice versa. He embarks on a meaningful relationship with a smart woman to whom he feels deeply attracted. Then he loses everything: murder after murder has made his hands bloodier than Lady Macbeth’s and he’s fried his brain with speedballs. He dies alone.

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Pete Bondurant: Pete enters American Tabloid working security for Howard Hughes and shaking down terrified victims in honey traps. He murders and tortures dozens of men, rearranges the faces of a few others, and scares the living hell out of just about everyone he meets. He bribes, blackmails and swindles. He gets deeply involved in the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, helps import heroin into the US, betrays his business partner – and remains the closest this book has to a likable hero.

J Edgar Hoover: The infamous real-life director of the FBI starts off in this novel scheming and corrupt, enthusiastically prepared to blackmail, murder and lie. He extracts deep and quite weird pleasure from the failures and humiliations of his enemies and allies alike. He ends up exactly the same.

John F Kennedy: When we first meet “the haircut”, he’s a “pussy-hound”, who devotes most of his energy to chasing and exploiting women with a reckless disregard for potential consequences. He carries on in this manner throughout the narrative, as well as engaging in nefarious deals with the mafia, cynical voter manipulations and appalling cruelty to a close family member. Then he becomes the US president.

You get the picture. This is bleak stuff. American Tabloid may be fantastic entertainment and a pacy thriller that has you ripping through its pages, but that’s not the same thing as an easy read. It’s brutal. It’s cold. It’s also highly discomfiting. There’s a strand of racial invective, for instance, which may well suit the characters, the period and the action – but which also seems custom-built to set liberals like me squirming.

Not only does the book take readers to these dark, unpleasant places, it also challenges our moral assumptions. As Ellroy himself has stated, it’s designed to make you “root for the guys” – criminals and swindlers to a man – who set out to kill the Kennedys. The addictive and queasily enjoyable narrative voice remains dispassionate. Ellroy does not make explicit moral statements; he leaves it to his readers to swim their way through this sewer, with little hope of emerging unsoiled.

Except, strangely enough, American Tabloid also seems like a book with scruples. If you buy Ellroy’s thesis (which he, in turn, borrowed from Don DeLillo) that Kennedy was killed because of his involvement with anti-Castro Cubans, the president’s murder starts to seem like something he himself sowed and reaped. “I don’t think John F Kennedy should have been assassinated. I don’t condone the assassination of political leaders,” Ellroy told the World Book Club. “But Kennedy’s assassination directly derived from his own attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It’s a very interesting moral conundrum.”

Ellroy has been even more explicit about this moral sensibility. “I’m a moral guy,” he has claimed. “The books are moral, and I think I’m a moralist … morality in literature is largely the expositing of moral acts and their consequences, the karmic price of the perpetrators of the immoral acts, for having committed them. In that sense, I think the books are very moral.”

That Ellroy makes us feel so uncomfortable about his characters’ actions also makes us sense their moral transgressions and feel an urge for justice. Their destinies begin to seem like a kind judgment – harsh, Old Testament judgment, with teeth and eyes flying everywhere. But no one claimed there would be easy answers.