7.2 /10 1 Votes
Language English OCLC 866615100 | 3.6/5 Goodreads Originally published 9 September 2014 Country United States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Cover artist Jacket design by Chip Kidd Series The Second L.A. Quartet Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, William Heinemann Ltd/Cornerstone (Waterstones's edition) Publication date September 9, 2014, September 11, 2014 (Waterstones's edition) Media type Print (hardback and paperback), audio CD, audio download, and Kindle Genres Noir fiction, Historical Fiction Similar James Ellroy books, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Perfidia is a historical and crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Published in 2014, it is the first novel in the second L.A. Quartet, referring to his four prior novels from the first L.A. Quartet.
Contents
The main characters are Hideo Ashida, a Japanese Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chemist, Kay Lake, a young woman looking for adventure, the real life William H. Parker, a gifted LAPD captain with a drinking problem, and Dudley Smith, an LAPD sergeant born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Los Angeles. The novel is told in real time, covering 23 days with the dates and the time the chapters and events are occurring, as well as through Kay Lake's diary. An entry from Kay Lake's diary begins Perfidia, followed by a bootleg transmitter radio broadcast on Friday, December 5, 1941, being broadcast by real-life Gerald L. K. Smith. The first chapter introduces the reader to Hideo Ashida, on Saturday, December 6, 1941, at 9:08 am. Since many fictional and real-life characters appear in Perfidia, many from his prior novels, Ellroy added a dramatis personæ, which notes the previous appearances of characters in Perfidia, as well as short summaries for some of the characters.
Perfidia was released September 9, 2014. A Waterstones exclusive limited edition of Perfidia was released September 11, 2014, and includes an essay by Ellroy himself titled "Ellroy's History – Then and Now."
Reviews and reception
Perfidia was on The New York Times Best Sellers list for hardcover fiction at number 16 on September 28, 2014. It also was an Editors' Choice at The New York Times on September 12, 2014. Perfidia was also one of the eighty books nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize by the Folio Prize Academy.
Historical inaccuracies
The UK hardback edition contains three historical errors. Firstly, the LAPD had a tape recorder that is small enough to fit in a woman's handbag and apparently record a conversation (no such machine existed at the time); secondly, a reference is made to a radio receiver used by Japanese agents that has a faulty transistor (the transistor had not yet been invented); and the third relates to a line of dialogue by the character Dudley Smith where he remarks, "(the) Jews are the Jews and they are a grand scapegoat for all the world's ills, but I hardly think that their shoddy business practices mandate genocide". The second error could easily be removed by replacing 'transistor' with 'valve', but the first one renders part of the plot impossible. For the third, genocide was a term first coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, several years after the narrative's events take place.