1962, and L.A. is star-struck. 1962, and not every star likes L.A. life. Marilyn Monroe is the star, although she is always off stage, and Freddy “Camel Fucker” Otash is the stricken of Los Angeles. Freddy, a one-time Marine, former police officer, and disgraced private investigator, also known as the Man Hollywood Fears, was a blackmailer, sewer crawler, peeping tom, and general miscreant on the make. Both are real people; both are denizens of the City of Angels. And the legends and facts of both of these people are bent, twisted, and manipulated in the latest of James Ellroy’s novels.

The story springs from the death of Ms. Monroe, but truly starts sometime earlier, with Mr. Otash doing a job for Jimmy Hoffa, a job that entails the complete surveillance of Monroe, from tailing her movements to bugging her house. What is the reason for this? We aren’t sure at first, as Hoffa keeps his cards pretty close to his chest, and, typical of an Ellroy labyrinthine plot, you might not be too sure on the last page. Rest assured, all the T’s are dotted and I’s crossed. To paraphrase Mr. Ellroy, it is all in the book.

And that plot gets wider and weirder as the story progresses, involving more and more real-life people in Ellroy’s imagined world. Deputy Chief Darryl Gates to Bobby “Ratfuck” Kennedy, B-grade movie starlets you might remember to tough guy cops you saw in movies such as The Hat Squad, all make more than walk-on appearances. But none of them are real, everyone gets processed through the author’s imagination and childhood memories of riding his bike on a paper route in L.A. at the time of Marilyn’s death.

It is this blending of fact and fiction that gives the story such a compelling feel, for all of us know the story of Ms. Monroe, how she changed her name after a rough childhood, orphanages, and early marriages, so we are free to imagine her as someone, somebody, completely different than what the legend of her says. But, in all honesty, what do we really know about her? I, for one, cannot remember ever seeing one of her movies. Clips, sure. Photos, of course. She is more of a meme at this point, a fiction created to show how we view the world more than anything else. But we don’t know the name of the home she grew up in: Hollygrove. We don’t know how she rose to fame, nor how it affected her, other than the sad end of her life.

And here, she isn’t that woman on a pedestal, that icon of America’s Fictional Past, ‘50s edition. No, here she is an ex-call girl, petty thief, a habitue of “fuck pads” and other aspects of the early swinging sixties. And make no mistake, this is a book about all the sordid underbellies of those who swung. Creeps, cheats, whores, all make appearances, along with high school kids, psychologists, bug men, comedians, baseball players.

To say that this is Ellroy’s best book in a while is to state the obvious, as his last few outings have been in bad need of an editor. Filled with rhythm-breaking alliterations, they showed the later works of an author too big for his britches, so to speak. Ellroy has become such a force in literature that, like bestseller Stephen King, no one will seemingly tell him that what he has written isn’t very good, that someone else needs to go through it with a fine-tooth comb and weed out these issues. Someone has done that here, whether it was Ellroy himself who did it, or a new editor unafraid to call him out, I don’t know. But this is a positive. The flip side of that is that this work has lost a lot of what makes Ellroy so formidable as a crime writer, indeed as one of the best post-war-era writers period.

What made Ellroy that great of a writer was his refusal to let you stop and take cover in your late 21st-century apologetics, but, rather, forced you to rush headlong into his world, a world that takes every character as their own moral force. He gives you no major viewpoint to sympathize with but treats each person as true to the era they live in. They are racists, wife beaters, closeted homosexuals, blackmailers, dirty cops, and this all affects how they interact with each other. Combine this with Ellroy’s famed breakneck pacing, where he literally removes any words that don’t directly drive the story, chopping sentences into the shortest possible form, and creating the feeling of not quite being in control of what is going on around you, of being drowned in a world that doesn’t care about your point of view.

And this is the downside of The Enchanters. That feeling of events overtaking you has been replaced with a dreamy feeling, not quite nostalgia, but definitely of the rearview mirror, and how that is the best way to view this world. Nothing feels like a 20-ton weight being dropped on your neck, nothing feels worthy of killing or dying for. In his justly famed L.A. Quartet, even small issues, local issues, had a way of becoming worthy of deep obsession, spiraling out of control, and taking everything with them. In books such as American Tabloid, he expands on this idea, showing how these small things, minor racketeering, election cheating, etc., all lead up to world-shattering events.

But this is Ellroy’s world, and, as a writer who is now in his mid-seventies, maybe he is looking back. Looking back at where he started from, and what drove him to be as good as he is. The mere fact that he has made a shift change this late in his career speaks wonders for his drive and skill. Both of these are on display in this latest book, only, not at that breakneck speed that seduced me the first time I picked up one of his books. And that might be the greatest insight from reading this; that I am a reader who is no longer in his twenties, but is now in his fifties, and needs to slow down.

So, is it now time for this reader to slow down, enjoy the fruits of a life-long love of the writing of James Ellroy, and allow Freddy “Camel Fucker” Otash to take the case? Is it time to watch a great writer reflect on his mistakes and course correct? The bait is right in front of me and has been all along.