James Ellroy: ‘It’s satanic to me, the dependency people have on computers’ ⁠30%

By David Smith⁠0%

6/3/2026, 9:00:50 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Emotion, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23% saturation with 404 hits. Analysis detected 2,330 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,760 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠30% (14,982 of 21,164 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 70.80% of the article peer group.

James Ellroy does not own a computer, his publicist explains, so will a phone interview be OK? 
When the self-proclaimed “mad dog of American crime fiction” picks up his landline at the appointed hour, it transpires that he has never owned a mobile phone either. 
Nor sent an email. 
Nor figured out how to turn on his ex-wife Helen Knode’s TV set. 
“Everything is very complex and it’s satanic to me, the dependency that people have on computers,” Ellroy, 78, says cheerfully in a bass baritone drawl from his pad in Denver, Colorado. 
“I don’t engage in internet chat and I understand there’s all this crazy shit on the internet and people with the most outlandish beliefs on God’s green Earth.” 
If his agent or publisher want to get in touch, Helen – who lives in a separate apartment – prints out the email, hands it to Ellroy, and the author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia dictates a response. 
“I got a big, big drawer over here with printed-out emails,” he reports. 
When it came to his 18th novel, Red Sheet, published on 9 June, Ellroy has a system where his handwritten pages are transmitted to a retired FBI couple in southern France who magically send typed pages back. 
In the absence of Google, he has a researcher who “reads books, summarises and sends me the pages”. 
Red Sheet looks pretty research-intensive. 
Picking up where Ellroy’s previous book, The Enchanters, left off, the action is set in October 1962 in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. 
The then attorney general, Robert F Kennedy, fears a domestic backlash from communists and orders the overzealous Los Angeles police department to launch a “red probe”. 
Once again, Ellroy’s Los Angeles is a noir-ish hive of scum and villainy. 
He weaves a sprawling tapestry that includes Richard Nixon’s failed gubernatorial campaign, the campaign of future Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a horrific series of “Red Ripper” murders and a corrupt trade union acting as the enforcement arm for the Communist party. 
The approach is what Ellroy calls “reckless verisimilitude”, combining objective historical events with subjective fantasies to nail deeper truths of a time and place. 
His website describes Red Sheet as “an anti-communist novel” that stands “foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane” and forces readers into a state of “jumped-up disavowal”. 
Ever the contrarian, consensus-buster and slayer of liberal sacred cows, Ellroy set out to dethrone the Hollywood 10, a group of directors, producers and screenwriters – including Dalton Trumbo – who were subpoenaed before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 and refused to testify about possible communist ties. 
Their refusal to cooperate led studios to create the first systematic Hollywood blacklist. 
The malignity of the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunts is now part of the foundational story Hollywood tells about itself in films such as Good Night, and Good Luck, and Trumbo. 
Ellroy is having none of it. 
“I came to set people straight about the Red Scare. 
My curiosity and my political activism is all retroactive to my adolescence or earlier or to the period of time before I was formed.” 
In Ellroy’s view, the Hollywood figures who refused to name names knew the consequences of their silence. 
“That was the biggest criminal conspiracy at the time and they should have named names,” he says. 
His satirical take on this “mock martyrdom” culminates in an absurdist scene early in the book where communists and rightwingers hold hands and sing We Shall Overcome. 
Conversely Nixon, an arch-villain according to conventional wisdom, is treated with tenderness bordering on affection. 
Ellroy was 20 when he watched him win the White House in 1968. 
“I recall thinking, this guy is just like me. 
And by that, I mean I’m coming out of my skin, I always need to shave, my clothes don’t fit me, and you know, what else? 
I will burn your ass down behind my implacable will.” 
The author adds: “He was one guy in 1962; he hadn’t gone bad yet. 
He went bad in a very bad way and got what he deserved and at least he had the decency and the probity to step down and not drag the country through any more mud than he already had.” 
Red Sheet’s protagonist is Freddy Otash, Ellroy’s recurring antihero. 
The real Otash was a notoriously corrupt private investigator and extortionist whom Ellroy met and paid $10,000 to consult on his most honoured book, American Tabloid. 
He says: “I flew to Miami to meet him and he was older and an absolutely vile human being and a crook and a liar and one of the world’s premier bullshit artists, to be sure, and past his prime.” 
Knowing Otash would inevitably betray their deal, Ellroy wrote him out of that book in favour of a fictional substitute. 
But when Otash died from a heart attack the following year, he became Ellroy’s ultimate literary plaything. 
“I’ve made him a good deal more tortured, more religious, more attractive to women with a greater burbling humanity bubbling up inside of him seeking to get out and you witness that in Red Sheet when he becomes, of all things, a handmaid to the civil rights movement and the passage of the Rumford Fair Housing Act.” 
In Red Sheet, Otash falls in love with a real life historical figure: the folk singer Judy Henske. 
She was Ellroy’s “fantasy girlfriend of 1962 and 1963”, despite the fact that she was 12 years his senior. 
“My dad used to measure my height every few months because it looked like I was going to be a tall kid. 
Judy Henske was six foot one and I remember the day in the fall of 63 that I surpassed her height by an inch and I had this astounding revelation that now she’ll be my girlfriend. 
Aside from the fact that I was a dipshit 14-year-old kid and she was 26, there were some other issues there.” 
He never did meet Henske, who died in 2022, but he tracked down her widower to pay him to include a photo of her in the new book. 
“I looked him up and we talk on the phone periodically. 
She was older than him too. 
He’s 81 now whereas Judy would be 90.” 
Ellroy’s education also included living on the streets, sleeping in parks or vacant flats that he had broken into, and a brief, chaotic stint in the Los Angeles county jail system for various misdemeanours – drunk-driving, disorderly conduct and petty theft. 
While in jail, he battled pneumonia and a lung abscess and read beat-up paperbacks from a volunteer’s library cart. 
But he dismisses any notion that his time behind bars provided him with authentic insight into the criminal underworld. 
Instead, he found the six-man cells overcrowded and filled with <strong>“</strong>preposterous, ridiculous, lying, tall-tale bullshit sessions about committing daring crimes and having sex with the most seductive women in the world, including all the major movie stars of the day and everybody would just sit around and lie”. 
Ellroy has been known to spin up his own reputation. 
Asked by the New York Times in 2006 whether he thinks of himself as a novelist or as a crime writer, he replied: “I am a master of fiction. 
I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. 
I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.” 
Are these sincere beliefs or an act, scaffolding in the construction of a literary persona? 
Ellory replies: “A more realistic and more decorous way of putting it is that Samuel Dashiell Hammett, whose first novel Red Harvest was published in 1929 – 97 years ago – and I form the alpha and the omega of the American hardboiled novel. 
I think I come out of him. 
He died when I was 12 years old; of course I never knew him.” 
He reflects: “I’m very much Hammettian as opposed to a Chandlerian. 
I think [Raymond] Chandler is completely full of shit, his plots don’t hold together and they’re shot through with similes that don’t work, even though they’re set in LA and I’m from LA and fixated there. 
I think LA is just serendipitous with me. 
Geography is destiny. 
I was born in LA, the film noir epicentre in 1948, the height of the film noir era.” 
Ellroy acknowledges: “The clock is ticking. 
In a year and 10 months, I’ll be 80 years of age and this ain’t forever and I want to write a bunch more books and I’m writing a new one now. 
I don’t want to stop. 
I don’t want to say the long goodbye to Helen anytime soon and, as the poet and clergyman Gerard Manley Hopkins said, ‘It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.’ 
I’m perfectly healthy but I’m still looking at the other side.” 
His Christian faith gives him solace. 
Does it also inform his view of human nature? 
Given his literary preoccupation with the worst of us, does he believe we are all born sinners? 
“There’s a great many variants of sin, a great many degrees of sin and – it’s an archery term – it means falling short of a mark and all human beings do that. 
“Thank God that people like hot-prowl rapists and hot-prowl burglars are in the minute minority. 
I feel good about people. 
I get an obscure kick out of a great many people and our diverse range of people.” 
This prompts a couple of final anecdotes. 
“I don’t drive a car any more. 
I’m very clumsy; I always have been. 
A doctor asked me fortysome years ago, ‘You always been this clumsy?’ 
I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve always been clumsy’. 
He said, ‘Wait till you’re an old man. 
You’ll be really clumsy.’ 
And he’s right. 
“So I have an Ethiopian cab driver who drives me around if I need to go out and run errands, go to church, go to the store. 
We’re very friendly and we talk about American craziness and African craziness and he said the funniest thing ever about Trump. 
He said that Donald Trump is the Joseph Mobutu of America,” a reference to the former dictator of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 
“We had a good laugh over that one.” 
Red Sheet is out on 9 June 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 0.0%David Smith: 4.1%the Guardian: 3.7%Confirmation Bias0.0%This article: 3.1%David Smith: 0.5%the Guardian: 0.6%Anchoring Bias3.1%This article: 6.3%David Smith: 2.7%the Guardian: 3.1%Availability Heuristic6.3%This article: 0.3%David Smith: 1.2%the Guardian: 1.2%Representativeness Heuristic0.3%This article: 2.9%David Smith: 0.8%the Guardian: 1.0%Hindsight Bias2.9%This article: 4.9%David Smith: 2.5%the Guardian: 1.6%Overconfidence Bias4.9%This article: 5.2%David Smith: 10.2%the Guardian: 6.1%Framing Effect5.2%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.3%the Guardian: 0.6%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.3%the Guardian: 0.6%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.2%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 1.3%David Smith: 1.6%the Guardian: 2.5%Optimism Bias1.3%This article: 2.8%David Smith: 1.9%the Guardian: 2.1%Pessimism Bias2.8%This article: 23.0%David Smith: 14.2%the Guardian: 10.4%Negativity Bias23.0%This article: 1.9%David Smith: 1.9%the Guardian: 1.6%Self-Serving Bias1.9%This article: 1.5%David Smith: 2.2%the Guardian: 1.4%Fundamental Attribution Error1.5%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.2%the Guardian: 0.3%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 2.9%David Smith: 2.6%the Guardian: 1.3%In-Group Bias2.9%This article: 1.5%David Smith: 0.9%the Guardian: 0.7%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias1.5%This article: 2.0%David Smith: 2.3%the Guardian: 3.2%Halo Effect2.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.5%the Guardian: 0.3%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.0%the Guardian: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 2.9%David Smith: 1.2%the Guardian: 1.1%Recency Bias2.9%This article: 1.5%David Smith: 0.4%the Guardian: 0.4%Primacy Effect1.5%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.0%the Guardian: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 4.9%David Smith: 4.2%the Guardian: 2.0%Ad Hominem4.9%This article: 1.5%David Smith: 0.8%the Guardian: 0.6%Straw Man1.5%This article: 8.8%David Smith: 2.4%the Guardian: 3.8%Appeal to Authority8.8%This article: 3.9%David Smith: 2.1%the Guardian: 1.7%False Dilemma3.9%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.8%the Guardian: 1.1%Slippery Slope0.0%This article: 1.4%David Smith: 0.2%the Guardian: 0.1%Circular Reasoning1.4%This article: 5.5%David Smith: 6.7%the Guardian: 6.3%Hasty Generalization5.5%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.2%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.9%David Smith: 0.6%the Guardian: 0.7%Bandwagon0.9%This article: 8.8%David Smith: 4.7%the Guardian: 5.6%Appeal to Emotion8.8%This article: 1.9%David Smith: 1.0%the Guardian: 0.9%Begging the Question1.9%This article: 2.7%David Smith: 2.4%the Guardian: 2.9%Post Hoc (False Cause)2.7%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.1%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 1.0%David Smith: 0.3%the Guardian: 0.4%Burden of Proof1.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.2%the Guardian: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.4%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 7.3%David Smith: 1.6%the Guardian: 3.1%Anecdotal7.3%This article: 2.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.1%No True Scotsman2.0%This article: 1.4%David Smith: 1.7%the Guardian: 1.6%Ambiguity (Equivocation)1.4%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.0%the Guardian: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.1%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.1%the Guardian: 0.1%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.3%the Guardian: 0.3%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 0.9%the Guardian: 1.6%Unattributed Quote0.0%This article: 2.3%David Smith: 1.2%the Guardian: 1.1%Quote-first Misdirection2.3%This article: 6.8%David Smith: 13.8%the Guardian: 10.4%Biased Writer Voice6.8%This article: 2.4%David Smith: 0.8%the Guardian: 1.8%Indoctrination2.4%This article: 0.0%David Smith: 2.5%the Guardian: 3.1%Politically Left Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 2.9%David Smith: 1.2%the Guardian: 0.3%Politically Right Leaning Bias2.9%This article: 2.2%David Smith: 0.3%the Guardian: 1.0%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…2.2%

1760 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker50%attributed speech874writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
James Ellroy • 12 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 28 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 4 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 13 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 31 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 28 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 40 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 13 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 37 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 5 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 25 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 26 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 13 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 47 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 24 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 31 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 51 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 13 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 29 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 100.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 10 words • 100.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 24 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 17 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 27 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 15 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 13 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 9 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 26 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 10 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 14 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 39 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 9 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 26 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 40 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 20 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 57 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 19 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 22 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 36 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 21 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 28 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 11 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 6 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 8 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 41 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 19 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 19 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 48 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 10 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 29 words • 100.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 10 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 21 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 15 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 44 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 7 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 14 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 11 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 36 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 8 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 3 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 32 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 5 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 37 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 11 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 9 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 33 words • 100.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 15 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 5 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 17 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 7 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 7 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 7 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 12 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 7 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 8 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 4 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 3 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 27 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 21 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 26 words • 0.0% coverageJames Ellroy • 8 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 7 words • 100.0% coverage
Selected voice

James Ellroy

76%flagged-word coverage
886 attributed words100% of attributed speech77% writer coverage
0%7.5%15.0%Biased Writer Voice-13.6 ptsWriter: 13.6%James Ellroy: 0.0%0.0%Politically Right Leaning -5.8 ptsWriter: 5.8%James Ellroy: 0.0%0.0%Indoctrination+4.9 ptsWriter: 0.0%James Ellroy: 4.9%4.9%Attempt to Sell a Product -4.3 ptsWriter: 4.3%James Ellroy: 0.0%0.0%Quote-first Misdirection-2.0 ptsWriter: 3.3%James Ellroy: 1.4%1.4%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.