My Amazon Review of James Ellroy's "The Enchanters"

West LA Noir

As is his style James Ellroy goes deeply into the underbelly of Hollywood. Most of the activity takes place in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. His vehicle is a novelized version Freddy Otash, a private investigator and police officer who was a well-known Hollywood fixer. The time is Spring/Summer 1962 when Otash was hired by Jimmy Hoffa to find dirt on the Kennedy’s, especially with their involvement with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe comes off as a drug addicted psychotic who was just fired from what would have been her last movie, “Something’s Gotta Give.” She dies of an overdose with suspicions something more was involved.

Along the way we meet Peter Lawford who is married to Kennedy sister Pat. Lawford’s role is to find young women for the Kennedy brothers. Meantime his wife Pat rekindles her affair with Otash.

Ellroy take us into the drug dens and sex pads of Hollywood. Most of the debauchery is known to LA police chief William Parker and LA sheriff Peter Pitchess. We also have a younger Daryl Gates who would later become LA’s chief of police.

Mixed into all of this is Darryl Zanuck’s 20^th Century Fox which is hemorrhaging cash coming from huge overruns on “Cleopatra” an epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As a side note Fox would later sell half its movie lot in what was to become Century City.

Otash is a pill-popping alcoholic who kills a couple of people as the somewhat convoluted plot moves along. I arrived in LA two years later with little knowledge of the depravity the book depicts, probably exaggerated. My warning for the reader is that this is a long book, 448 pages in the print edition. 

For the full Amazon URL see: West LA Noir (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Jake Tapper's "The Hellfire Club"

The Deep State

At a time when there is real paranoia about “the deep state” CNN anchor Jake Tapper lends credibility to those charges. Why is he doing it? His book is set in early 1950s Washington where Joe McCarthy reigns and a deep state exists in the form of the Hellfire Club where legislators mix with lobbyists and executive branch members. Members of the club include McCarthy, the Kennedy brothers and the Dulles brothers, truly a bipartisan cabal.

Into this mix comes Charlie Marder, an appointed Congressman a professor out of Columbia University and prior to that a war hero. He is there with his zoologist wife Margaret and we watch her dismay as Charlie’s good intentions sink into the muck of Washington D.C.  We find dead bodies, blackmail, influence peddling and McCarthy getting with his buddy Roy Cohn getting more and more out of control. Above it all stands President Eisenhower who is steering a moderate path amidst the craziness. But make no mistake, the Hellfire Club represents the deep state and it is modeled after an 18^th Century British Club of the same name and purpose.

Tapper has a fine sense for detail about the era and he did his research on the wild ponies of the Maryland shore that Margaret is studying. However as much as he tried the book doesn’t quite hold together and at many time it strains credulity. It seems to me there is more fluff than substance.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R24EYYKSCIQR0/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv