"The Enchanters" (featuring Marilyn Monroe): James Ellroy's new noir novel

James Ellroy's new novel The Enchanters goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth. Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. 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 nightmarish L.A.— and as he confronts his own raging madness. 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. Source: amazon.com

Fred Otash was a disgraced former cop turned private eye and freelance menace who worked with the notorious Hollywood tabloid Confidential; he claimed to have hot-wired every bathhouse in L.A., to have spied on Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, and to have eavesdropped on Marilyn Monroe as she died. Ellroy knew the man (Otash) a little and loathed him a lot. “You don’t go out and wreck lives en masse the way he did with Confidential and retain your humanity,” Ellroy once told an interviewer. In The Enchanters we expect and find redheads and racists, shock and schlock, pearl-gray suits and straw fedoras, weak men and strong women—noir stock types. 

Marilyn is the bait girl nonpareil; no one can touch her. About seven hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies have been published in English alone. There have been biographies by her friends, her foes, her siblings, her household staff, two of her husbands, and two of her stalkers. Norman Mailer didn’t hesitate to publish a glossy art-book appreciation of the actress. In “The Enchanters” she is depicted as a pill-popping, ditzy dilettante, deluded and drunk and self-centered and into some very shady stuff. Here, however, he’s messing with an icon (not to mention two popular political figures, the Kennedy brothers, who met tragic deaths), so the transgressions feel more severe. We get disquisitions on how uninteresting the characters find one another. Freddy on Marilyn: “She worked people. She used people. She possessed three modes of address. She was bossy, she was demure, she was effusive. I didn’t like her. I didn’t get her. Her acting chops and alleged va-va-voom hit me flat.” Monroe, who could have been the book’s making, is instead its undoing—which is, consoling thought, an odd sort of triumph on her part. Source: www.newyorker.com