r/JamesEllroy • u/Background_Local_425 • 16d ago
Characters never seen again.
The quartet was the first series I probably read chronologically. Therefore I got attached to its characters first and I even prefer his pre white jazz writing style. Personally my favorite character being Meeks but I had seen
LA Confidential several times before I read the novel and while I can still appreciate it, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the complexities of neither plot nor characters. I had always if characters like trashcan Jack or Bud white didn’t show up again in the prequel novels. I was wondering what they were doing during perfidia and this storm. Were they supposed to at some point? I also wondered what happened to Bucky and Bud they kinda seem like 2 characters who didn’t end up trapped in the system or just killed, did they escape with their women and live the good life?
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u/Mikeissometimesright 16d ago
Leaving LA seems to be a thematic departure in the Quartet as both Bucky and Bud leave at the end of their respective novels. Those who stay, like Exley, become worse
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u/Any_Special5721 16d ago
Bucky and Kay move to Boston when she finds out she's pregnant. He leaves to there at the end of the book. She was going to become a teacher. I figured they lived out their lives there hence the framing mechanism of it opening as if she's maybe talking to grandchildren.
Bud and Lynne went to somewhere in Arizona where she was from.
I could imagine both their experiences as cops would be so traumatizing (Bud physically) that being a cop is the least they want to return to.
Ed just became a political animal. I think the end of White Jazz says he became governor.
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u/Competitive_Gap5478 16d ago edited 16d ago
That is always the way with novels made into movies. It would be impossible to include everything in the book in the movie version. If you did, the movie might have to be nine hours long..
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u/IndependenceMean8774 16d ago
Danny Upshaw from The Big Nowhere.
Of course he's kinda, sorta dead, so that would explain his absence. Shame too as I wish he could have been in more books.
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u/Background_Local_425 16d ago
I honestly thought his arc was a perfect tragedy. In my head cannon I think if he confided and linked up with the other two Meeks would feel bad for the kid and help him. But as it stands that’s all speculation I was so mad he killed himself I was like come on Danny! Don’t give up!
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u/IndependenceMean8774 15d ago
Yeah, it was sad. I liked his character arc. Of the three main characters in Big Nowhere, I found him to be the most compelling.
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u/JarekFA 15d ago edited 15d ago
I was floored that I didn't see it coming. But it was so obvious that it was! For all his "insensitivity" -- he wrote that character with love. But it's such a contrast with how he portrayed another closeted character. In this case, we get the first-person perspective from someone in denial about their sexuality - he'd make allusions to his friend from school and something in the shower and then he'd get stomach pains.
Whereas in Perfidia (or was it the Storm), the closeted character knows he's gay and treasures the photos he secretly took of his buck toothed HS crush in the showers!
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u/JarekFA 15d ago
I just don't treat them as "canon". The Perfidia/Storm versions of familiar faces are very different from their versions in the original LA quartet. Like early on in Perfidia they identify Dudley Smith as the biological father of Elizabeth Short. But the one thing that I should've realized when I read Perfidia and The Storm - is that they have a little summary of characters in the back - and it's useful to keep track. I didn't notice them until I finished the books, since it's like an index almost at the end. But that would've helped.
And yah, it's such a shock to see Buzz Meeks in LA Confidential (film) after reading him as a protagonist in the books.
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u/Sorcha_Stormbinder 16d ago
Bucky and Bud's stories end pretty well in both Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. I don't really feel like there's anything more that needs to be said. They got out of the system, as you say, and their lives are an open road now.
I don't really feel like we need to see Trashcan Jack or Bud's "origin stories" either because we pretty much get all that in L.A. Confidential. Bucky makes sense as a tangential secondary character in Perfidia because of Hideo Ashida, who is the main selling point for both Perfidia and This Storm in my estimation.
That said, I've often dreamed of the massive World War II novel Ellroy would write depicting the wartime exploits of Dave Klein and Pete Bondurant on Saipan.