For Fans of James Ellroy

The LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz) is best read as a single sprawling novel about the slow moral collapse of a city and the men who tried to run it. Characters appear and disappear across books, the LAPD's institutional rot compounds, and by the time White Jazz's Dave Klein is narrating in pure staccato fragments, you realize Ellroy has been building to this dissolution the whole time. Read them in order. Read them close together. The experience is unlike anything else in crime fiction.

The argument for American Tabloid as one of the best American novels of the 20th century is serious and not easily dismissed. Ellroy takes the Kennedy era, the Bay of Pigs, the mob-CIA nexus, and tells it through three men who are complicit in everything and loyal to nothing. The prose is stripped to almost nothing. The moral weight is enormous. It is the book that proved Ellroy had outgrown genre entirely.

The comparison sounds unlikely until you actually play it. Disco Elysium gives you a protagonist who is as broken and self-destructive as any of Ellroy's cops, embedded in a city whose political corruption runs all the way down to the foundations. The investigative obsession, the sense that the truth will cost you more than you want to pay, the system that grinds individuals into its machinery: all of it reads as a spiritual cousin to the LA Quartet, even if the setting is a surrealist Baltic port rather than 1950s Hollywood.

Before reading Ellroy's fiction, read My Dark Places, his memoir about reopening the investigation into his mother's 1958 murder. It explains where the obsession comes from. It explains why every Ellroy novel is about a man trying to impose order on chaos that will not be ordered, why the dead women in his fiction are always more than victims, why corruption is always personal. The memoir is one of the great American crime books and it illuminates every novel around it.