The Enchanters
California in the hot summer of 1962. A character from Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, Freddie Otash, is resuscitated. He is a former cop, consummate opportunist, and now will do just about anything to earn a (dis)honest buck, including having a major finger in an extortion racket. The LAPD panics when a relatively minor movie star is kidnapped, and for some unaccountable reason they task Freddie with solving the crime. His investigations take him all the way to the top of American society, including the teetering spires of Camelot and the Kennedys, together with Marilyn Monroe, who overdoses. This is a Los Angeles that operates at a highly pitched neurotic pace, riddled with crime, corruption and aggressive selfishness.
It is written in Ellroy’s familiar hardboiled style that clearly and intentionally reminds one of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It is decidedly un-PC, explicit and piercingly cynical. Once you get into the saddle of the conversational narrative, the reader is whisked along, the cavalcade of characters swirling past like a carousel of iniquity (fortunately there is a four-page Dramatis Personae, but I discovered it only at the back of the book after I had completed the novel!). A great, stimulating, superficial, breakneck read – you’ll hate it or love it.
