Widespread Panic

- Blurb -

A return to the sleazy underbelly of Ellroy' s 1950' s Los AngelesFrom The Modern Master of Noir comes a novel about the malevolent monarch of the 1950s Hollywood underground - a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows. Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in ' 50s L. A. He operates with two simple rules - he' ll do anything but commit murder and he' ll never work with the commies. Freddy is an ex-L. A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - and it got to him bad. So Chief William H. Parker canned him. Now he' s a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the 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 potzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all!In Widespread Panic, we traverse the depths of ' 50s L. A. and dig on the inner workings of Confidential. You' ll go to Burt Lancaster' s lushly appointed torture den . . . You' ll groove 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 centre as Freddy anoints himself the ' Tattle Tyrant Who Held Hollywood Hostage' .