The Enchanters
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
“James Ellroy, the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow. . . . And he sure can shoulder a novel." —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. 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 nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.
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. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
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James Ellroy
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz — have won numerous awards and were international bestsellers. Likewise, the novels of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy — American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. The Quartet and Trilogy are now available in Everyman’s Library editions.
2023 is Demon Dog Ellroy’s Triple Crown year. On April 21 he will be honored with the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime excellence in writing about the American West. Late this summer, the twenty-hour podcast of “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” will drop on Audible. It will be unexpurgated, uncensored, and unabridged. Ellroy himself reads all narrative passages; noted actors read the dialogue. Boffo sound effects and jazzy period music accompany the spoken text. “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” is a revolutionary advance for the podcast form.
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