THE ENCHANTERS by James Ellroy

THE ENCHANTERS

James Ellroy (jamesellroy.net)

Hutchinson Heinemann (penguin.co.uk)

£22

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Los Angeles, Saturday 4th August 1962. Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her Hollywood home, victim of a drug overdose. Freddy Otash, ex-policeman-private-eye-king-of-the-scandal-rags has been surveilling her since early April at the behest of Jimmy Hoffa, who is trying to find dirt on two men who are alleged to be Monroe’s lovers – brothers John and Robert Kennedy, the President and Attorney General of the United States respectively. When her body is found, Freddy finds himself once again in the employ of LAPD chief William Parker and that self-same Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. His job this time around is to build a story around the moviestar’s death, something that will squash the rumours that have linked her to the country’s president and remove any doubt about the cause of death. But there’s more going on here than is immediately apparent, and Freddy finds himself on the trail of a sexual deviant who has been breaking into the homes of single women throughout Hollywood.

Back in 2014 James Ellroy released Perfidia and, with it, the promise of a new L.A Quartet, focussing on Dudley Smith’s wartime and post-wartime antics. After publishing two books, he surprised us all again in 2021 by publishing Widespread Panic, a book centred around Freddy Otash, a minor character who we had previously met in his Underworld USA trilogy. Ellroy’s latest novel, The Enchanters, is a follow-on to that 2021 novel, and once again sees Freddy Otash take centre stage as he navigates Hollywood in the run-up to, and the immediate aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Of course, Freddy is involved up to his neck and, as usual, his involvement puts him at odds with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood and America.

When the novel opens, we find Freddy dropping a man off a cliff in an attempt to find kidnapped starlet Gwen Perloff. Something isn’t quite right with the whole affair but before Freddy can dig too far, he learns of the death of Marilyn Monroe. Flashback several months and we find Freddy providing security to Eddie Fisher for his run at L.A.’s The Losers Club before receiving a call from Jimmy Hoffa asking him to watch Monroe and Peter Lawford. Freddy O complies with relish, bugging their houses and setting up stakeouts to track their every move. Following Monroe’s death, Freddy continues to watch Lawford – the Kennedys’ brother-in-law, and the man married to Freddy’s one-time lover – and digs deeper into the Perloff kidnapping. Something isn’t quite right, and. he’s determined to get to the bottom of it, while trying to stay on the right side of the most powerful men in America. 

The Enchanters is pure James Ellroy. From the opening pages, we’re dropped into his staccato storytelling rhythm and sucked completely into his world. It’s difficult to know the fine line between fiction and reality with many of his stories, and this is no exception. Seamlessly blending the figments of his own imagination with a veritable who’s who of 1960s Hollywood, he evokes a world of decadence and wealth, a world that many of us will only ever know through the silver screen, but also gives us a brief peek behind the curtain, to the seedy underbelly that we all assume must have existed when Hollywood was at its height. Here’s Marilyn Monroe, eating pizza several nights a week because she’s screwing the pizza delivery guy; a foul-mouthed Elizabeth Taylor who is costing Fox millions as her epic film, Cleopatra, sinks deeper into debt and further behind schedule; Roddy McDowall, stealing props and costumes from the epic production so he can make satirical Cleopatra pornography. These are the names from a golden era of filmmaking and, in Ellroy’s hands, they’re reduced to the same stinking humanity as everyone else. 

In fewer than twenty novels, James Ellroy has built up an alternative modern history of America. In the vast majority of these novels, the locale is Los Angeles, and usually in and around Hollywood. He revels in the dark underbelly of the city, and seemingly enjoys bringing our heroes down a peg or two. How much of his characterisations are accurate? It’s difficult to tell, but one has to assume that there’s some truth to his characterisations, even if they are caricatured to a high degree. For Widespread Panic Elrroy pulled an obscure supporting character from The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover into the spotlight and made him shine. With The Enchanters, he builds on this success and puts more meat on the bones of Freddy O, one-time private eye to the stars. Freddy is a thoroughly unlikeable chap, a man who will take advantage of anything he can to put his targets or his enemies at a disadvantage, regardless of the wider damage it might do. But he’s a compelling character and in Ellroy’s hands, he becomes a character that we want to know more about, someone we keep coming back to, despite what we know of him, because once we’ve met him it’s difficult to let him go.

The surrounding cast are fairly evenly split between real people and products of Ellroy’s own imagination (I’ll admit I had to look one or two of them up to find out for sure!). Ellroy pulls no punches and spares no feelings in his characterisation, and shows us sides to these people that we may never have seen before, or even imagined possible. Anyone who has read his Underworld USA series will know what to expect from President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert. No-one escapes his view of Hollywood and America corrupted. As in many of his novels, the city of L.A. plays a big part in The Enchantersand it, too, suffers from his acerbic characterisation, the focus on the side of the city we may never have seen before rather than the glitzy, shiny place we imagine when we hear the name. Incredible, then, that this is just window-dressing around the heart of The Enchanters: what really happened to Marilyn Monroe? How involved was the president? And who was the person creeping the homes of single Hollywood women and leaving seemingly random photographs and bodily fluids behind? This is Ellroy at his best: constructing a crime story from the unwashed fabric of history and making us believe that it really happened. 

The Enchanters takes the foundations laid in Widespread Panic – as well as Freddy Otash’s earlier appearances in Ellroy’s work – and elevates it to the next level. This is the James Ellroy that we have come to know and love in recent years, and his is a version of America that seems eerily prescient. The Enchanters draws us in from the very first word, and keeps us on tenterhooks until the turn of the final page. His style isn’t for everyone, but it doesn’t take long to settle into the rhythm of his telegrammatic sentence structure, his quick-fire dialogue. While many readers – myself included – will be (im)patiently waiting for the next instalment of the new L. A. Quartet, there will be plenty of us hoping for more Freddy O in the near future, too. Ellroy’s biggest problem is that he just can’t write fast enough to keep us all satisfied!