In James Ellroy’s latest pulp novel, The Enchanters, Hollywood P.I. Fred Otash investigates Marilyn’s death. Otash was a notoriously unreliable source (see here), so the narrative should not be taken literally. (The cover art uses a promotional still from Let’s Make Love, sometimes attributed to Frank Powolny.)
“Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim ‘Opportunity is Love.’ Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create – and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O.’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. The Rolling Stones proclaim it best: We’re just a shout away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama. It is an unparalleled thrill ride. It is resoundingly the great American crime novel.”
Parul Sehgal has reviewed The Enchanters for The New Yorker…
“She is the bait girl nonpareil; no one can touch her. About seven hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies have been published in English alone. There have been biographies by her friends, her foes, her siblings, her household staff, two of her husbands, and two of her stalkers. Norman Mailer didn’t hesitate to publish a glossy art-book appreciation of the actress. Why? Money, honey … Why shouldn’t James Ellroy have a turn?
Yet it’s curious that he would choose to. The sirens of the fifties (more than a few of whom have walk-on roles in The Enchanters) exert a powerful hold on his imagination … He has always seemed indifferent to Monroe, however, and evidently remains so. He speeds through her scenes. Even Freaky Freddy Otash, rifling through her belongings, sniffs her sheets with only perfunctory enthusiasm.
This is not necessarily a flaw; it’s rare to encounter a portrayal of Monroe unconcerned with diagnosing, rescuing, or rehabilitating her. And there’s no question that Monroe could have provided all the details and darkly funny lines needed to carry an Ellroy novel … But Ellroy seems determined to curtail her presence. He can only write about her, it appears, because she is so often in disguise. What risk does she pose?
It’s perplexing to see Ellroy let his story go so slack, to see the tension flatlining, resistant even to the defibrillations of jokey, jittery tabloid-speak. Monroe, who could have been the book’s making, is instead its undoing—which is, consoling thought, an odd sort of triumph on her part.”
The Marilyn Report 
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