Perhaps one of the most intriguingly conflicted and politically complex characters in Blood’s a Rover is Marshall Bowen, a gay, black FBI infiltrator of two militant Black Power Movements. Marshall also benefits from the first person perspective shift; aside from creating an affecting portrait of repressed sexuality and institutionalized prejudice, Marshall’s journaled discourse animates the political conscience of the novel:

“‘Both groups peddle bootleg editions of Mao’s Little Red Book and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I’ve read both books. They both contain wisdom. Given my life in Los Angeles, my parents’ horrible tales of life in the South, my own LAPD experience and my two auspicious beatings by the LAPD, I empathize as much as my compartmentalized psyche and soul will let me. But revolution?’”

Ellroy’s work, even in its most grisly depictions of disarticulation, has always been primarily moral. There’s redemption at the end of his work; the bad guys, invariably, get whatever is coming to them. But that doesn’t make his work simplistic. Ellroy is sure to ask us: Who are the bad guys?

Blood’s a Rover features the character of Wayne Tedrow Jr., a Mormon hit-man whose FBI-sponsored coordination of the murder of Martin Luther King eventually leads him into a love affair with an African-American woman, Mary Beth. The best part: Ellroy mines Tedrow’s hellacious flaws for insight into the inherent incongruity of being human. You don’t have to like Tedrow to understand him, just as you don’t have to condone his actions to see how they could occur. Ellroy’s willingness to explore the unsavory extremes of human behavior is a gift in a climate of homogenized, politically-correct thinking. In these pages, we are reminded that the insane, the criminal, and the psychotically duplicitous all spring from the same gene pool as we do. As years of human history have demonstrated, there seems to be no way to have a world without this aspect of humanity.

So how do we deal with our collective darkness?

“When you’re an outrageous public figure who writes big novels with racial invective and crazy Yiddish, people will get the wrong idea and start thinking nihilism,” Ellroy grins playfully, as he removes his gold-rimmed oval specs and dissects the dinner menu. “The basis of drama for me is entirely a man meets a woman. The man and woman are forced to quash or interdict. Some superstructure may be endemic as a means to substantiate their growing love. Generally, it’s a lonely haunted guy with self-serving motives. It’s my worst and most noble vision of myself.”

Ellroy, although heavily rooted in noir, is simultaneously a romantic and a pragmatist. Invariably drawn to darkness, he can’t resist interspersing that darkness with melancholy and hope. The rising and falling structural rhythms of his work are in some ways reminiscent of those of a symphonic composer. He is an ardent fan of Beethoven’s. When asked why he prefers Beethoven to, say, Mozart, Ellroy says, “Mozart was lily-livered compared to Beethoven. Beethoven introduced drama and psychology to music and he’s entirely about transcendence and God. These are things I think about continuously.”

Blood’s a Rover is ultimately a political romance, but of the darkest and most satisfying kind. Ellroy is perhaps the last member of an increasingly quaint tribe: The unabashed, self-identified American. In this age of globalization, when national identity is just another relic of the charmed rubes, there is something mysterious about a man who chooses to live and work in the past. It’s not that Ellroy ignores America’s flaws; to the contrary, he sees every last disfiguration, and loves it all the more.

“I have a very finely developed conscience and an extraordinary level of personal ambition, which America embodies. We go here, we go there; we go wrong, we go right, but we’re big. It’s a big place. America is a big, open, seeping place that no one should ever condescend to.”

Sit down with Ellroy. You won’t be disappointed.

*All excerpts from Blood’s a Rover, published by Alfred A. Knopf, September 2009.