2021 novel by James Ellroy. Has the rather bizarre conceit of being a supposed confession the narrator is writing in Purgatory in an attempt to speed his ascension to Heaven.
That narrator is Fred Otash, a real life Hollywood "fixer" and private investigator who previously showed up in Ellroy's novels The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover. Fred's lived a dissolute, hedonistic, criminal life, and now he's putting it all down on paper.
Told from a first person perspective, Widespread Panic chronicles Otash's career shaking down Hollywood celebrities, digging up dirt for Confidential magazine and bedding various women. What starts as a fairly episodic account of Otash's hijinks eventually evolves into a murder mystery that weaves in the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950's, LAPD corruption and the cast and crew of the famous movie Rebel Without a Cause.
This novel contains examples of:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: Absolutely relentless — Otash writes in a deliberately alliterative fashion, replicating the prose style of Confidential magazine. He's not above lampshading this, either (dedicated readers of Ellroy probably remember that Hush-Hush, the thinly veiled expy of Confidential from the LA Quartet and the Underworld Trilogy, was written in a similarly over-the-top fashion).
- Afterlife Antechamber: The book's version of Purgatory is basically a prison cell block where souls wait a certain amount of time before moving on to their final destination.
- Amazon Chaser: Fred has a bit of a thing for tall women, to the extent that he ends up in a quasi-relationship with a 6'6 USC basketball player. She's young and just wants to make out and literally sleep in the same bed as a man, so they never have sex. She ends up leaving Fred for another woman.
- The Fixer: Otash is both a fixer and a shakedown artist, often in the same breath.
- Horrible Hollywood: Oh boy. Every celebrity is a sex-addicted pervert, every one associated with the movie industry is despicable or corrupt and murder is just a shrug-inducing complication.
- Lighter and Softer: It's Ellroy, so lighter and softer means there's still a ton of sex and murder. But Widespread Panic is relatively light-hearted and playful, at least compared to just about everything Ellroy has written since the late 80's.
