Speaking to James Ellroy Sunday 27 re his grotesquely hilarious new novel about crime in high places in the 20th century of Los Angeles and, in this instance, in Washington D.C. also.  The narrative follows a bevy of detectives, snoops, FBI ops, black radicals, white radicals and not a few innocent bystanders from a violent armored car heist in 1964 to the eve of the Watergate fiascos in 1972.  At the center of this narrative, part of Ellroy's many novels about crimes in high places, is the deranged lunacy of the dying J. Edgar Hoover combined with the epochal cynicism of the just elected President Richard Nixon.  The telephone consultations between Hoover and the book's peculiar, compelling hero, FBI agent Dwight C. Holly, are topped only in dark comedy and a kind of grim opera by the telephone conversations between President Nixon and agent Dwight C. Holly.  The historical fact that makes all this zany plot credible in the FBI's deeply paranoid program COINTELPRO that was aimed to discredit and destroy all dissenters who annoyed the troubled Hoover. Including and starting with Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.  What makes it a pleasure to follow the vulgarity, crudeness, violence and nasty pay-off is the author's infectious style, part crime genre and part laughter.  At least I think this is laughter.  It makes me laugh and like LA and DC all over again for the fact that anything is possible, anything at all: