Widespread Panic A Novel

From the modern master of noir comes a novel about the king of the 1950s Hollywood underground--a tale of pervasive paranoia filled with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films, and strange bedfellows.

Fred Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in Tinseltown. He operates with two simple rules--he'll do anything but murder, and he'll never work with commies.

Fred is a corrupt L.A. cop on the skids. He executed a cop killer named Horvath and it gores him. So Captain "Whiskey" Bill Parker cans him. Now, Freddie dons an array of new hats--sleazoid private eye, shakedown artist, matchmaker for Rock Hudson, pimp for President John F. Kennedy--and, most notably--the lead tipster and head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet--and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink and the scurrilous skank on the feckless foibles of misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all!

In Widespread Panic we traverse the depths of '50s L.A. and internalize the inner workings of Confidential. Dig: You'll go to Burt Lancaster's lushly appointed torture den. . . You'll gas on overhyped legend James Dean as Freddy's chief stooge. . . You'll be there for Freddy's ring-a-ding rendezvous with Liz Taylor. . . You'll be front and center as Freddy runs roughshod over the stars of the silver screen and the demimonde of the Hollywood hills.

JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover, and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.