‘This is the master of darkness at his incomparable best – simply impossible to put down’ Daily Mail

Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.

The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is Love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create – and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.

It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O.’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. The Rolling Stones proclaim it best: We’re just a shout away.

The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama. It is an unparalleled thrill ride. It is resoundingly the great American crime novel.

‘This entire book is one gleefully violent foul-mouthed research note. It’s vivid, gripping, surreal’ Spectator

‘This is the master of darkness at his incomparable best – simply impossible to put down’ Daily Mail

Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.

The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is Love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create – and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.

It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O.’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. The Rolling Stones proclaim it best: We’re just a shout away.

The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama. It is an unparalleled thrill ride. It is resoundingly the great American crime novel.

‘This entire book is one gleefully violent foul-mouthed research note. It’s vivid, gripping, surreal’ Spectator

Welcome to the world of the malevolent monarch of the Hollywood underground – a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows.

From The Modern Master of Noir comes a novel about the malevolent monarch of the 1950s Hollywood underground – a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows.

Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in ’50s L.A. He operates with two simple rules – he’ll do anything but commit murder and he’ll never work with the commies.

Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood – and it got to him bad. So Chief William H. Parker canned him. Now he’s a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp – and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet – and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink and the scurrilous skank on the feckless foibles of misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites and potzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all!

In Widespread Panic, we traverse the depths of ’50s L.A. and dig on the inner workings of Confidential. You’ll go to Burt Lancaster’s lushly appointed torture den; you’ll groove overhyped legend James Dean as Freddy’s chief stooge; you’ll be there for Freddy’s ring-a-ding rendezvous with Liz Taylor; you’ll be front and centre as Freddy anoints himself the ‘Tattle Tyrant Who Held Hollywood Hostage’.