James Ellroy\u2019s Critical Criminology: Crimes of the Powerful in the Underworld USA Trilogy

Rafe Mcgregor

doi:10.1007/s10612-019-09459-3

Abstract

This article argues for the criminological value of James Ellroy’s fiction, using his Underworld USA Trilogy (the “Trilogy”) as a case study. I present the Trilogy as a critical criminological enterprise, understood in the sense of offering a convincing explanation of the cause(s) of social harm—specifically, those committed by various agencies of the American government from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Ellroy’s Trilogy provides this explanation in two distinct ways, using literary devices first to establish a counterfactual vision of America during the 1960s and then to represent the lived experience of perpetrators of state-sponsored social harm. In conveying such criminological knowledge, the Trilogy constitutes an instance of critical criminology and demonstrates the exercise of the criminological imagination.

Highlights

Narrative Criminology and Criminological FictionCriminology has been slow to embrace narrative as a tool for understanding, explaining, and reducing crime and social harm
The counterfactual value rests with his alternative history of America, which is framed in such a way that its content is represented as probable rather than alternative—an account of the period that is more authentic than the popular history, if not entirely accurate
This exploration is the source of the phenomenological value of the Trilogy—the knowledge of what it is like to be a perpetrator of social harms that Ellroy conveys so effectively

Summary

Narrative Criminology and Criminological Fiction

Criminology has been slow to embrace narrative as a tool for understanding, explaining, and reducing crime and social harm. Sandberg (2010), Sandberg and Ugelvik (2016), and Presser and Sandberg (2019) all refer to narrative criminology as a framework, and this is the most useful way to conceive of this particular type of criminological inquiry, i.e., as a shared commitment about what research questions are important, what data are relevant, how that data should be interpreted, and what counts as a satisfying answer to those research questions This shared commitment includes the story as one of the main explanatory variables in criminology, the relevance of stories to the causes of crime and social harm, and the significance of stories to desistance from crime and social harm. I move on to the phenomenological value of the Trilogy, i.e., how it provides knowledge of the lived experience of perpetrating social harm

What is Critical Criminology?

Critical Criminological Imagination