Widespread Panic

There's good news and bad: Anyone turned off by Ellroy's themes and style won't be converted by "Widespread Panic". If on the other hand you like Ellroy's hard-boiled explorations of the corruption, the sleaze and the crime in yesteryear's Los Angeles (as well as the author's ever more clipped prose), this is definitely for you, checking all the boxes. This time Ellroy tackles sex and crime 1950's Hollywood through the eyes of one Freddy Otash, ex-cop, private eye, as corrupt (and corrupting) as they come. But the world he's living in and making a lot of money from is hardly any better: Blackmail is big business in Hollywood at the time of communist witchhunts and big tabloids looking for the latest bits of sleaze and scandal that movie people like James Dean or Natalie Wood may be involved in and that our man Freddy is willing and able to provide. Ellroy turns Otash's stories into a crime novel that feels oddly epic but also intimate (at times deliciously unpleasantly so), a gripping novel that ranks with the finest in hard-boiled storytelling, I say!