Retrofitted tale reveals Tinseltown's sordid side

Contrarian novelist Ellroy goes another round with Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash

Bruising ex-cop, grubby private eye, Hollywood fixer and confidant Freddy Otash was the kind of behind-the-scenes figure who kept crawling toward the limelight. He was a model for the detective hero of Chinatown. But he couldn't have imagined the star treatment that crime novelist James Ellroy had in store for him.

First, a 2012 novella, Shakedown. Then, a proposed HBO series with director David Fincher. Now, Widespread Panic, a hefty new novel with a sequel already in the works. Freddy lords over all these productions, “the demonic deus ex machina of my tattered time and place.” He is, in short, the kind of anti-hero Ellroy would have otherwise had to invent, instead of simply reinvent.

In the opening pages of Widespread Panic, Freddy has fallen on hard times. For starters, he's dead — and stuck in Pervert Purgatory, where he's assailed by the ghosts of his many victims. His only chance to upgrade to heaven is to make an honest reckoning of his sins. As literary setups go, that's fairly venerable, but it falls away in short order, so Ellroy can spend the rest of his book in postwar Los Angeles, the locale of such highly regarded Ellroy volumes as L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia.

No one who has read those books or watched their film versions will be surprised to learn that young Otash, a former Marine and “lustful Lebanese,” joins the LAPD and goes quickly on the grift.

“Corrosively corruptible and tempted by the take,” he's living the usual amoral lifestyle until he's ordered to assassinate a cop shooter. Soured by the experience, he leaves the force and embraces the private sector, where his unsavoury job skills make him a perfect fit for the smut rag Confidential.

On the magazine's payroll, he smashes faces, bugs phones and pays off police for “tips on quivering queers, jittery junkies, dipsos deep in DT'S.” Throughout, Freddy's credo is, “I'll do anything short of murder, and I'll work for anybody but Communists,” but he murders anyway and sleeps with a communist and lusts unrequitedly for a lesbian basketball player and a Russian assassin and tosses off learned allusions to Goya and Camus and the Book of Revelation. If that isn't enough, he tells his tale in the imbibed style of a Confidential article.

Freddy's prose may sound like Beowulf on uppers, but he isn't beyond redemption. He has a soft spot for imperilled dames, and noir chump that he is, he falls for one of them. Unfortunately, it's in these tender moments that Ellroy loosens the vise grip on his prose. “My heart thudded and thumped and threatened to blow on the spot . ... ”

A proud contrarian at 73,

Ellroy has little use for contemporary sexual politics or mores, but these Chandleresque echoes jangle all the same, because they work against the mission of his career, which has been to excavate a new pulp myth from the wreckage of the old.