Widespread Panic

by James Ellroy

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Ninteen-fifties Hollywood! This is PURE Ellroy territory. Mystery, crime, HollyWEIRD Babylon all wrap themselves into a literary knockout fever dream that only Ellroy could dream up. If you’re looking for us, we’ll be located at a booth in Musso & Frank Grill with a scotch in one hand and Widespread Panic in the other. And when you're done here, there’s more Hollywood gone awry in The Disappearing Actby Catherine Steadman.

From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine.

Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.

Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.

“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”

In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.

Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593319345
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	458,329
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover, and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.

Read an Excerpt

Harry said, “Be useful, kid. There’s a cop killer at Georgia Street. Chief Horrall thinks you should take care of it. This is an opportunity you don’t want to pass up.”  
 
I said, “Take care of what? The cop he shot isn’t dead.”  
 
Harry rolled his eyes. He passed me a key fob. He said, “4-A-32. It’s in the watch commander’s space. Look under the backseat.”  
 
I got it. Harry locked on my look. He went Nooowww, he gets it. He winked and waltzed away from me.  
 
I steadied myself and stood still. I loaded up on that lynch-mob gestalt. I lurched through the squadroom and zombie-walked downstairs. I hit the garage.  
 
I found the watch commander’s space. There’s 4-A-32. The key fits the ignition. The garage was dark. Ceiling pipes leaked. Water drops turned wiggy colors and morphed into wild shapes.  
 
I gunned the gas and pulled out onto Spring Street. I drove sloooooow. The heist geek was jacked in the jail ward. It was a lockup-transfer ruse. It was forty-three years ago. It’s still etched in Sinemascope and surround sound. I can still see the passersby on the street.  
 
There it is. There’s Georgia Street Receiving.  
 
The jail ward sat on the north side. The squarejohn ward sat to the south. A narrow pathway bisected the buildings. It hit me then:  
 
They know you’ll do it. They know you’re that kind of guy.  
 
I reached under the backseat. I pulled out transfer papers for Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I grabbed a .32 snubnose revolver.  
 
I put the gun in my front pocket and grabbed the papers. I slid out of the sled. I popped down the pathway and went through the jail-ward door. 
 
The deskman was PD. He pointed to a punk cuffed to a drainpipe. The punk wore a loafer jacket and slit-bottomed khakis. He sported a left-arm splint. He was acne-addled and chancre-sored. He vibed hophead. He looked smack-back insolent. 
 
The deskman did the knife-across-throat thing. I handed him the papers and uncuffed and recuffed the punk. The deskman said, “Bon voyage, sweetheart.” 
 
I shoved the punk outside and pointed him up the pathway. He walked ahead of me. I couldn’t feel my feet. I couldn’t feel my legs. My heart hammered on overdrive. I lost my limbs somewhere. 
 
There’s no telltale windows. There’s no pedestrians on Georgia Street. There’s no witnesses. 
I pulled the gun from my pocket and fired over my own head. The gun kicked and lashed life back in my limbs. My pulse topped 200 rpms. 
 
The punk wheeled around. He moved his lips. A word came out as a squeak. I pulled my service revolver and shot him in the mouth. His teeth exploded. He dropped. I placed the throwdown piece in his right hand. 
 
He tried to say “Please.” This dream’s a routine reenactment. The details veer and vary. The “Please” always sticks. I’m alive. He’s not. That’s the baleful bottom line. 
 
 
The cop lived. He sustained a through-and-through wound. He was back on duty inside a week. 
 
Vicious vengeance. Wrathfully wrong in retrospect. A crack in the crypt of my soul. Harry Fremont passed the word. Freddy O. is kosher. Chief C. B. Horrall sent me a jug of Old Crow. The grand jury sacked him two months later. He got caught up in a call-girl racket. An interim chief was brought in. 
 
Ralph Mitchell Horvath. 1918–1949. Car thief/stickup man/weenie wagger. Hooked on yellow jackets and muscatel. 
 
Ralphie left a widow and two kids. I got the gust-wind guilts and shot them penance payoffs. Money orders. Once a month. Fake signatures. All anonymous. Dig—Ralphie’s dead, and I’m not.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/26/2021

This devious and delicious side trip into the life and exploits of real-life Hollywood fixer Fred Otash from MWA Grand Master Ellroy (The Storm) has a cool conceit: Otash dies of a massive coronary in 1992, but has spent the last three decades stuck in purgatory, and his only way out is a full confession of his lifetime of misdeeds; and confess Otash does. In the 1950s, Otash transforms himself from bent cop to even more crooked private eye, delivering the dirt on Hollywood celebs, outing communist party members, and exposing then-verboten interracial relationships. When puritanical Chief William Parker of the LAPD builds a righteous legal case against Otash, he strikes a deal to let the ex-cop slide in exchange for help in taking down the salacious tabloid Confidential. And so Otash embarks on a dangerous path of playing both sides against the middle. Numerous celebrities appear in suitably compromising positions, including Rock Hudson, Jack Kennedy, and a sizzling cast of Hollywood femmes fatale. The infamous rape spree of Caryl Chessman (aka the Red Light Bandit) adds another layer of sordidness. Ellroy’s total command of the jazzy, alliterative argot of the era never fails to astonish. This is a must for L.A. noir fans. (June)

Publishers Weekly

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"Graphic, stunning and in many instances hilarious. . . . No punches are pulled, and no literary expense is spared."
—BookReporter

“Widespread Panic is quintessential Ellroy, but with enough alliteration, Hollyweird flavor, booze, distressed damsels, communist conspiracies, and extortion to make this the most Ellroy novel he's ever written. . . . Wildly entertaining and memorable. . . . Otash's voice is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. . . . A spiritual companion to L.A. Confidential.”
—NPR

“There is here, as in Ellroy’s other novels, so fully researched and plausible an evocation of the world about which he writes, so deft an intermingling of the real and fictional characters that the novelist asks the reader to believe that these events could have happened, and that some of them (Jack Kennedy’s exhaustive and exhausting philandering, for example) probably did. This commingling of fact and fiction is, of course, the basis upon which the myths of Hollywood, and hence, at this point, those of our broader American culture, rest.”
—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
 
“Widespread Panic unfolds in shimmering Ellroyvision. In recounting his sinful past, Freewheeling Freddy mainlines the repetitive rhumba of his scandal sheet until it’s become the mother’s milk of his speech and psyche, and he bops to alliteration’s alluring algorithm.” 
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
 
“[Ellroy is] the dean of Los Angeles crime novelists. . . . You come [to Ellroy] to roll around in the blood and the mud, to ping along to the plot twists and betrayals.”
—Los Angeles Times

“If you love Ellroy, you’ll love this wild ride.” 
—The Washington Post (10 Books to read in June)

“Devious and delicious. . . . Ellroy’s total command of the jazzy, alliterative argot of the era never fails to astonish. This is a must for L.A. noir fans.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Wildly flamboyant. . . . A spectacular explosion of language. For those with a taste for foul-mouthed fireworks and freeform jazz solos, both dazzling and exhausting, Ellroy is your man.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze. . . . Entertainingly hop-headed. . . . The author [is] operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal. . . . A delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown. Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

05/07/2021

Crime meister Ellroy ("Underworld U.S.A." and "L.A. Quartet" series) returns to the familiar universe of Los Angeles in the 1950s with this title, which details the reminiscences of Freddy Otash, a former cop and P.I. He's now an investigator and strong-arm thug for the tell-all magazine Confidential, for which he shadows, bugs, and entraps Hollywood notables—sometimes for stories, but just as often to shake them down. Freddy is open to anything, including murder, and he's got the dirt on everyone: secretly gay and lesbian stars, hangers-on, a neo-Nazi director, randy politicians. The novel ends with Freddy's attendance at the 1960 execution of the real-life Red Light Bandit (aka the rapist-murderer Caryl Chessman). This book's plot—Freddy's hunt for a couple of mystery women—is hard to pick out against the background of sleaze and nonstop violence. Freddy narrates the book in prime Confidential style: all alliteration and punchy sentences. Each time-hopping section starts with a blurb from Freddy—these he delivers from Pervert Purgatory, two decades after his death. A weakness in this book is Ellroy's use of a single narrator, instead of the multiple narrators he uses in previous books; readers never get an escape from Freddy and after a while, it's too much. VERDICT There's energy in this book, as in all of Ellroy's fiction, but here it wears the reader down as much as it excites.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

2021-03-31
A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze.

This entertainingly hop-headed narrative seems to occupy a tangled place in the author’s often cross-connected oeuvre. It isn’t the anticipated third volume in his historically epic Second L.A. Quartet, the prequel series to the L.A. Quartet, which provided his popular breakthrough—particularly after L.A. Confidential (1990) inspired such a well-received movie. Instead, it expands on the material the author explored in his novella Shakedown (2012), the confessions from purgatory of a crooked cop–turned–extortionist private investigator. Those coming to this fresh will find the author operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal. The book takes the form of the post-mortem confession of Hollywood scenester Freddy Otash, narrating from what he calls “pervert purgatory” as “the hellhound who held Hollywood captive.” It was an era when scandal sheets moralized against homosexuals and communist sympathizers and where Freddy lives by a simple credo: “I’ll do anything short of murder. I’ll work for anyone but the Reds.” A good case can be made that he has violated both. His escapades find him involved with discovering the murderer of a woman who had recently been both JFK’s seductress and a proposed participant in a threesome intended to underscore Rock Hudson’s sexual bona fides. Yet any mystery, or any plot, actually, simply serves as a peg on which the author hangs the supposedly dirty laundry of his cast of dozens—Duke Wayne, Jimmy Dean (and the entire cast and crew of Rebel Without a Cause), Liberace, Elizabeth Taylor, “Bad Boy Bob Mitchum,” and “Mattress Jack” Kennedy. It’s a delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown, though it runs out of gas before providing much of a climax.

Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier.

Kirkus Reviews