The Enchanters

Ellroy (Widespread Panic) takes every lurid tabloid headline about Marilyn Monroe and turns them up to 11 in this sprawling alternative-history noir. It’s 1962, and Ellroy’s tainted detective Freddie Otash has been asked by Jimmy Hoffa to surveil Marilyn Monroe and gather dirt on her relationship with the Kennedys. The chief of the LAPD has also charged Otash with finding a kidnapped B-movie starlet who may have staged her own kidnapping for publicity. When Otash pushes one of the kidnappers to his death from a cliff, uncertainty over the man’s identity becomes the linchpin of a mystery that ultimately involves Fox Studios, Los Angeles gangsters, small-time hoodlums, Jack and Robert Kennedy, Peter Lawford, corrupt cops, drugs, and, not least of all, a serial killer—with each of them tied in some way to Monroe and questions about her death. In Ellroy’s grim world, every piety is false, everyone is corrupt, and human nature is portrayed as in a tabloid feature. It’s an extreme vision, but in Ellroy’s hands, it’s not out of line with the novelist’s mission of unmasking illusion to reveal the truth beneath.