Overlord of the demi-monde

James Ellroy is the self-described ‘demon dog’ of crime fiction. Here, he plunges headlong into conspiracy theories surrounding the demise of Marilyn Monroe. Real-life figures abound – or caricatures of them – including the Kennedy brothers, and crooked union boss Jimmy Hoffa. The first-person narrator is Freddy Otash. He’s bugging Marilyn on behalf of Hoffa. Then he’s enlisted to create a smokescreen to keep Jack and Bobby out of the picture – both were reportedly her lovers. There’s also a subplot about what appears to be the kidnap of a B-list movie actress, Gwen Perloff. Ellroy is on familiar ground. He deployed rapid-fire prose and obscure cop abbreviations and vocabulary to devastating effect in American Tabloid, which looked at JFK’s assassination. In The Enchanters, Ellroy plays the same trick, with Marilyn’s tragic story as the backdrop. Does it work? To some extent, yes. It feels like a return to form. For the most part, the elaborate plot is beyond bamboozling. A reasonably helpful dramatis personae and glossary are at the end – they don’t help the listener much. At any given moment, I grasped a fraction of what was going on. But somehow that was enough. Private eye Otash’s intensive surveillance of Marilyn is close to obsessive – although Otash isn’t a fan, insisting that he refuses to buy into her allure. He unpicks layers of mythology around Marilyn in a fever dream of a narrative that requires total concentration (though even if you never lose focus, it’s still confusing). The novel promises more than it delivers in terms of Marilyn’s own story. The conclusions reached are opaque, or plain barmy. It is far more concerned with Otash himself, and the large cast of subsidiary characters in seedy L.A. Fact and fiction merge in an extraordinarily dark tale. It is a long listen and at times a bit of a slog which could have benefited from more rigorous editing. Its strongest attribute is the high-quality narration. This is my first audiobook Ellroy - and I approached it with caution. I am undecided about whether reading it in hard copy would have helped my understanding of what on earth it was all about. I think the answer is ‘maybe’. But I’m glad I listened as the narrator brought the story to life – it was a fantastically demanding job, and he carried it out with aplomb. New listeners should probably start with The Black Dahlia – the opener of Ellroy’s LA Confidential series – or American Tabloid. For my money, The Enchanters is a kind of impressive cover version of American Tabloid – but never quite reaches or surpasses Tabloid’s high standards. But Ellroy fans will enjoy it more than they imagined they would (many were disappointed with Otash’s last outing in Widespread Panic, published in 2021. I haven’t read it – and the reviews are far from promising). It’s another desperate dash through a demonic demi-monde - where Ellroy is the undisputed overlord.

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1 person found this helpful

Ellroy's brilliance is not for the squeamish!

No writer, living or dead, captures Ellroy's panorama of the underbelly of US law, crime and politics of the 20th century.

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Good narrator, awful prose!

I’m six hours into this book, and I neither know nor care what it is about. I cannot understand the jargon, and I have zero interest in attempting to. It is simply awful.

Even Craig Wasson cannot save this book, and once you have said that, you’ve said it all.

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