The Cold Six Thousand (2001) Signed First Edition Reference

The Cold Six Thousand is the second volume of the Underworld USA Trilogy, published by Knopf in 2001. The novel picks up immediately after the JFK assassination and follows three protagonists — Wayne Tedrow Jr., Pete Bondurant, and Ward Littell — through the mid-1960s as they navigate Vietnam, the heroin trade, the civil rights movement, and the conspiracies that lead to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

The Book

The novel’s prose style is the most compressed and telegraphic Ellroy has ever produced — even more extreme than White Jazz. Sentences are stripped to fragments; paragraphs are staccato bursts; the narrative races forward with relentless, almost unbearable velocity. The style polarized critics and readers: admirers saw it as a radical formal innovation that matched the violence and fragmentation of 1960s America; detractors found it exhausting and unreadable.

The title refers to the six thousand dollars paid by Jack Ruby’s associate to facilitate the Oswald assassination — a detail that captures Ellroy’s vision of history as a series of transactions between corrupt men.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Knopf, New York Publication date: 2001 Format: Hardcover in dust jacket

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
• Inscribed copies: $100–$350
• Unsigned first edition: $15–$35

The most divisive volume of the Underworld USA Trilogy, valued by Ellroy completists and admirers of his extreme style.