Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet life. Freddy Otash breaks legs for Frank Sinatra. He gets Dean Martin’s pregnant Latina maid deported. He sticks the hand of someone blackmailing Liberace into a deep-fat fryer. He sleeps with the 21-year-old Elizabeth Taylor while she’s only on her second marriage. And all that’s in the first 20 pages, while Otash is still an LA cop. Once he goes freelance as a private eye, things turn rather more lurid.
Widespread Panic is a rare stand-alone novel among Ellroy’s assorted trilogies and quartets. But, as you can maybe tell already, that doesn’t necessarily make it a radical departure. Otash himself — a real-life character in 1950s Hollywood — showed up in the Underworld USA trilogy and was the protagonist of the 2012 online novella Shakedown, of which the new book is an (extravagantly) extended version. Moreover, pretty much all of Ellroy’s methods and concerns are so fully present and correct that the result — not for the first time in his fiction — often feels close to self-pastiche.
As a private eye, Otash works for Confidential, the all-powerful scandal magazine referred to in the title of Ellroy’s best-known book, L. A. Confidential. By bugging selected bedrooms in every upmarket hotel in the city, and by bribing the staff to ensure that movie stars choose the rooms in question, Otash keeps Confidential fully informed of who’s having sex with whom — especially if the sex is gay, interracial or features an unusually large penis (penile size being another abiding Ellroy interest). Either that, or he extorts money to kill the story.
Not that this prevents Otash from passing on those stories to us.
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