The Big Nowhere was published by Mysterious Press in 1988, the second volume of the L.A. Quartet, and it tackles one of the darkest periods in American domestic history: the anti-Communist witch hunts that convulsed Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Three protagonists — a sheriff’s deputy, a district attorney’s investigator, and an LAPD detective — converge on a series of mutilation murders that become entangled with the political machinery of the Red Scare.
Ellroy’s three protagonists represent different varieties of corruption. Danny Upshaw is a closeted homosexual detective whose secret makes him vulnerable to blackmail. Mal Considine is an ambitious prosecutor willing to destroy innocent lives to advance his career. Buzz Meeks is a corrupt ex-cop working as a fixer for Howard Hughes. None of them is admirable; all of them are comprehensible. Ellroy refuses the comfort of a sympathetic protagonist — his readers must navigate a moral landscape in which every character is compromised.
The novel’s structure is more complex than The Black Dahlia — three alternating narratives, dozens of secondary characters, and a plot that spans labor politics, organized crime, the film industry, and the LAPD’s internal wars. Ellroy manages this complexity with a storytelling discipline that never allows the reader to get lost, even as the moral landscape becomes increasingly treacherous.
The “big nowhere” of the title refers both to the void at the center of American political life — the paranoia, the willingness to destroy careers and lives on the basis of accusation alone — and to the psychological emptiness of men who have sold their souls for advancement.
Collecting The Big Nowhere
First edition (Mysterious Press, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in fine jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $250–$600
- Reading copy without jacket: $10–$30