... quintessential Ellroy, but with enough alliteration, Hollyweird flavor, booze, distressed damsels, communist conspiracies, and extortion to make this the most Ellroy novel he's ever written ... There are many superb elements here, but Otash's voice is what makes Widespread Panic wildly entertaining and memorable. Fast, snappy, and with a level of alliteration that dances between the brilliant and the ridiculous, Otash's voice is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. It also contextualizes 1950s Hollyweird in full sin-emascope and nails the political gestalt of the decade, especially in LA ... Besides his memorable voice, Otash is, surprisingly, a likeable character ... This book packs in everything Ellroy has obsessed about over the course of his career. There are echoes of American Tabloid here, the Black Dahlia makes an appearance, and it's a spiritual companion to L.A. Confidential. Nazi paraphernalia and smut films abound. However, Ellroy makes it feel fresh, and as Freddy O va-va-vooms on the hot-prowl downing Dexedrine and gulping Old Crow for breakfast, buckling up and reading on becomes the only option ... a macho noir-ish romp complete with historically accurate racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. Anyone who's read Ellroy before—or heard him talk—knows his penchant for the underbelly of 1950s Hollywood can make his work ... not safe for work. But the stunning explosion of language he plasters on the page here is definitely worth the ride.

Widespread Panic is not so much a reading experience as an immersion into a time (the 1950s) and place (Los Angeles). The events described by author James Ellroy become more real by virtue of his (occasional) exaggeration in a work that is ostensibly historical fiction. Even the prose that he spits out staccato-style is more than what it appears to be. His sentences are usually short and loaded with alliteration, even as they are cringe-inducing in content and description, designed to elicit enough cuts and bruises to exhaust a giant box of wholesale club bandages. In Widespread Panic, they trample readers and then merrily drag them along ... The stories --- particularly those that never saw the light of day --- are graphic, stunning and in many instances hilarious ... No punches are pulled, and no literary expense is spared. Just to prove that too much of a good thing does not exist, Ellroy is working on a sequel to this book. Please, sir. Write quickly. And don’t forget Bob Crane.

So—should readers approach Widespread Panic...with trepidation? Thankfully not. This 1950s standalone outing, told in a lacerating first person, represents the barely coherent confessions of a corrupt cop who has become an equally compromised private investigator for the scandal mag Confidential ... (with real-life figures galore—such as film star James Dean—all handled in scurrilous fashion) ... Purgatory is rarely this much fun.

Widespread Panic unfolds in shimmering Ellroyvision. In recounting his sinful past, Freewheeling Freddy mainlines the repetitive rhumba of his scandal sheet until it’s become the mother’s milk of his speech and psyche, and he bops to alliteration’s alluring algorithm. The surrealistic, sex’n’violence sequences featuring real people from the semi-recent past may be disconcerting for some readers. Is this posthumous sexploitation? A pornographic flipbook making unlicensed use of famous forms and faces? Or merely the tall-tale purgative of a frantic Purgatorian? Each door is left ajar.

...even in his most grandiloquent moments, he couldn’t have imagined the star treatment that crime novelist James Ellroy had in store for him ... In the opening pages of Widespread Panic, Freddy has fallen on hard times. For starters, he’s dead ... As literary setups go, that’s fairly venerable, but it falls away in short order, so Ellroy can spend the rest of his book in postwar Los Angeles ... Freddy’s prose may sound like Beowulf on uppers, but he isn’t beyond redemption ... Unfortunately, it’s in these notionally tender moments that Ellroy loosens the vise grip on his prose ... A proud contrarian at 73, Ellroy clearly has little use for contemporary sexual politics or mores, but these Chandleresque echoes jangle all the same, because they work against the mission of his career, which has been to excavate a new pulp myth from the wreckage of the old ... In the world of Widespread Panic, it’s much easier to imagine James Dean and director Nicholas Ray conspiring to film a panty raid, as Ellroy depicts them, than conspiring to make art, as they once actually did in Rebel Without a Cause.

Immediately recognizable, Ellroy’s prose—an exuberant, alliterative staccato that could be described as camp noir—requires attention and some persistence. His witty verbiage can serve as pleasure and obstacle both. And perhaps needless to say, reader be warned, the world depicted in Widespread Panic...is sexist, racist, and violent, as befits the Los Angeles, and the United States, of the Fifties ... [an] elaborate thriller ... there is here, as in Ellroy’s other novels, so fully researched and plausible an evocation of the world about which he writes, so deft an intermingling of the real and fictional characters that the novelist asks the reader to believe that these events could have happened, and that some of them (Jack Kennedy’s exhaustive and exhausting philandering, for example) probably did.

Ellroy writes like a red-eyed marauder, spurning the rich metaphors and blue moods of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald to spit hot rivets in staccato bursts. Noun-verb-sock-to-the-jaw, that’s his dominant rhythm, as the action drives like a prowl car up and down every garish street ... Much of the enjoyment of Widespread Panic hinges on how much of this Seymour-sells-seashells-by-the-seashore the reader can take ... the novel’s syncopated barrage of tics and brutal antics will likely become numbing, fatiguing, its peppery hyperactivity and cynical bravado in service of the sludgy attitudes of apes in boxy suits. Yet the audacity of Ellroy’s imagination remains undimmed, his energy torrential, and I laughed ... Widespread Panic could have used a few more such goofy riffs, if only to vary the otherwise relentless tempo.

There is an odd echo of J. G. Ballard, in the sense that Hollywood is at once the most unreal and most truthful expression of the historical zeitgeist ... At barely over 300 pages, this standalone work qualifies in Ellroy’s canon as something like a novella. But it is chewy stuff, not only in its vast cast and complex tangle of betrayals, shakedowns, cover-ups and atrocities but in its language, too. Ellroy’s style has always been densely telegraphic – but here it is also as alliterative as Beowulf ... may not break new ground for James Ellroy, but it is a characteristically vigorous tour of his established territory. And more than usually in this one, to borrow the style, he milks his meshugenah muse for lascivious laffs.

This book’s plot—Freddy’s hunt for a couple of mystery women—is hard to pick out against the background of sleaze and nonstop violence. Freddy narrates the book in prime Confidential style: all alliteration and punchy sentences. Each time-hopping section starts with a blurb from Freddy—these he delivers from Pervert Purgatory, two decades after his death. A weakness in this book is Ellroy’s use of a single narrator, instead of the multiple narrators he uses in previous books; readers never get an escape from Freddy and after a while, it’s too much ... There’s energy in this book, as in all of Ellroy’s fiction, but here it wears the reader down as much as it excites.

This devious and delicious side trip into the life and exploits of real-life Hollywood fixer Fred Otash from MWA Grand Master Ellroy...has a cool conceit ... Numerous celebrities appear in suitably compromising positions, including Rock Hudson, Jack Kennedy, and a sizzling cast of Hollywood femmes fatale. The infamous rape spree of Caryl Chessman (aka the Red Light Bandit) adds another layer of sordidness. Ellroy’s total command of the jazzy, alliterative argot of the era never fails to astonish. This is a must for L.A. noir fans.

A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze. This entertainingly hop-headed narrative seems to occupy a tangled place in the author’s often cross-connected oeuvre ... Those coming to this fresh will find the author operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal ... any mystery, or any plot, actually, simply serves as a peg on which the author hangs the supposedly dirty laundry of his cast of dozens ... It’s a delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown, though it runs out of gas before providing much of a climax. Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier.