James Walton

Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed

Readers may find themselves seriously Googling as Ellroy’s private eye dishes the dirt on Hollywood celebrities for LA’s scandal magazine

James Ellroy. [Getty Images] 
issue 03 July 2021

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.

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