So James Ellroy intones at the end of a soliloquy opening American Tabloid, the first volume in the Underworld USA trilogy. The bad men he hugs close include the Mafia, J. Edgar Hoover, assorted politicos, and tycoons like Howard Hughes. The novels illuminate a conspiratorial hidden history of the United States from just before the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the Watergate break-ins in 1972, told across two thousand pages in Ellroy’s signature style: strings of tight, telegraphic phrases interspersed with police-report exposition and Grand-Guignol violence. The style — experimented with in his earlier work, but perfected in Underworld USA and his first memoir, My Dark Places — is innovative enough to be worth the price of admission for anyone who values literary invention.

Anticommunism — as an ethos and a way of life, more than as an idea — drives the action of the books. Ellroy’s performance as a public figure over the years has sometimes verged on talk-radio-style right-wing ranting, and his fiction is at times calculating in its violation of liberal sensitivities through racial stereotyping.