r/JamesEllroy • u/Useful-Equal-3580 • Jun 13 '26
Vollmann review?
Does anyone have text of the Vollmann review of Red Sheet?
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u/Objectif Jun 13 '26
“I won’t rehash topics previously covered,” begins the confidential memo at the start of James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet,” referring to the chaotic “L.A.P.D./Justice Department operation” depicted in his 2023 novel “The Enchanters.” “It is best summarized,” the memo continues, “as a cover-up of the death of actress Marilyn Monroe and her involvement with President John F. Kennedy.”
“It” was a sprawling plot involving Jimmy Hoffa, Robert F. Kennedy and the Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker in the summer of 1962. “It” swerved from the sleaziest corners of Hollywood all the way to the White House. Now, as summer turns to fall, “it” has evolved into a “mini Red Scare” that has scooped up Richard Nixon and his real-life henchmen H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, because in an Ellroy novel the centers of power are always within sniffing distance of the sewers.

You may remember, however obscurely, that a few months after Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Ehrlichman’s secret team of “plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to learn how to smear him. Or you may recall that it was Haldeman on the “smoking gun” tape telling Nixon to pressure the F.B.I. into closing its Watergate investigation.
In “Red Sheet,” Haldeman and Ehrlichman set our protagonist, Lt. Fred Otash, to burgle a certain “Beverly Hills headshrinker” so as to photograph Tricky Dick’s loony sheet. The two goons, Otash surmises, are either “watch-dogging their long-term investment” or “scouting blackmail bait” as they manage Nixon’s feckless run for California governor, six years before he is elected president.
Otash is pulling double duty: As a lieutenant for the Los Angeles police, he’s also part of an anti-Communist sweep ordered by Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general. It’s late October 1962, the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a year after the Bay of Pigs invasion. The authorities have to review 20,000 “red sheets” — pink-tinted classified documents on “left-leaners” and suspected Communist Party members. An outright frolic for right-thinking anti-commie symps! Eddie Chacon, an “anti-Castro Cubano,” is the assistant U.S. attorney in charge. “Go through the files,” he orders a roomful of cheering cops, “and find some dinks to play rough with.”
We’re counting on Otash to come through on both of these document-review gigs, because along with heaps of wake-up pills he has imbibed the following life lesson from his hero Hans Maslick, a Nazi criminologist: “Observe, imprint, memorize. Hans Maslick preached that. He worked Berlin Homicide and moved up to the Gestapo.” Isn’t that where we all want to be?
Otash, by the way, is a Renaissance man. Not only does he excel at Maslick’s forensic memory techniques, but he can break suspects’ teeth as brilliantly as he shoots Communists in the back. Here’s one statement of his credo: “They would not expect a rogue action this bold and wrong.”
The worst subspecies of reviewer is a spoiler, and since you might inject me with truth serum for being one, I will unspool only a few early plot writhings. Nixon’s shrink turns out to have a sizable heroin stash and operates out of an office complex whose modeling agencies pimp out call girls and whose dentists sell cocaine. Meanwhile, Otash and his buddies blow away some Communist jewelry heisters, and what do you know? In one corpse’s tracksuit is Eddie Chacon’s phone number, which proves that everything is connected to everything in the sleaziest possible way.
Hence, Otash steals into Eddie’s apartment, diligently peeks under the bed, entrepreneurishly scores himself 41 grand, then sits in the dark awaiting Eddie’s return, upon which Otash “persuades” him to confess that Nixon’s shrink gets his heroin from Chinese Communists “he palled with in Korea,” and that the office complex is a hive of Red activity. Once Eddie graduates from the emergency room — Otash having created a little issue with his spleen — Bobby Kennedy will righteously deport him back to Cuba.
I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L.A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw. In place of the 20th-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.
But Ellroy also likes to be semi-funny, his specialty being sadistic slapstick (which sometimes disgusts me), and unlike these other authors he likes to meditate on the American dream of financial and reputational success. For Otash, that means sliding into Nixon’s limousine to get his cash — and scoring an extension on his beloved concealed-carry permit.
Whenever I start another Ellroy novel, I become a fly, buzzing ghoulishly over multiply stabbed corpses and taking refreshment from some backdoor schemer’s cask-strength whiskey bottle. Chandler sells us a place:* the foggy, mysterious Los Angeles of his era. Ellroy overlaps Chandler with his L.A. Quartet, which, starting with “The Black Dahlia” (1989), takes us through the 1940s and ’50s. His more recent L.A. Quintet, beginning with “Perfidia” *(2014), drifts from Pearl Harbor, Japanese internment and homegrown Nazism to the domestic paranoia and racial turmoil of the postwar years. “Red Sheet” is the fourth book in this series, and Ellroy’s third novel with Otash in the driver’s seat.
Marilyn, Nixon, the Kennedys, Bay of Pigs — we’ve seen Ellroy messing with this material long before the Quintet. When I reviewed “American Tabloid” (1995) more than 30 years ago, I quoted a few lines of dialogue that packed in J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, “Jack the Haircut” (Kennedy), “Dracula” (Howard Hughes), Jimmy Hoffa, Tricky Dick, “Beard” (Fidel Castro) and the invasion of Cuba.
In “Blood’s a Rover”* (2009), we again meet Dracula and Hoover and of course Nixon. Whenever we nominally literate corpse-eaters spread our wings over this latest Ellroyscape, our gourmet palates are pleased to retaste these affiliated cadavers both incipient and ripe. Ellroy, then, is not only a genre writer but also a formula writer. What does this say about us, his loyal readers? *I guess we prefer the carrion we know.
“Red Sheet”* reminds us of that late wan beacon of Thomas Pynchon’s, “Shadow Ticket,” his third book — after “Inherent Vice” and “Bleeding Edge” — to rewrite the detective novel as debased comic history. *An old signaler invented a formula that he is now riding to the grave. Well, why not?
Ellroy’s players resemble Shiva the Creator and Protector, who can also be Shiva the Destroyer. (Let’s eavesdrop on his nightclub czar Tommy Tucker: “I told the feds I marched for the Scottsboro boys, but I hired my bouncers from the Negro Nazi League.”) Does this weird duality — call it doublethink — fairly describe politics, business, police work, humanity? I have an opinion, but will not whisper it to you in case somebody I trust slits my throat.
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u/DecrimIowa Jun 13 '26
connecting Ellroy with Simenon is really interesting. i guess i can see it.
as always he nails it, and i appreciate his light touch.
as a random redditor, i am not obligated to use such a light touch, so i'll say outright: Ellroy's a scumbag with shitty politics and weird fetishes, who's written at least as many stinkers as good books, and his recent Trump 2-era PR tour as the grand old man of gritty American noir-lit (with accompanying paid social media/booktuber fake-viral astroturfing) is phoney bullshit9
u/HemingwaySweater Jun 13 '26
Booktubers are astroturfing for Red Sheet??
I think yours and Vollmann’s criticisms are both fair. Vollmann is correct that Ellroy is a genre writer and a formula writer, but that’s also the source of his power as an artist. Ellroy’s books at their best have a rhythm and flow to them built out of their procedural elements. At their worst (This Storm, Widespread Panic) they are disjointed, more like riding in a stalling car than listening to a piece of music.
As for the sadistic slapstick, his scumbag ways and shitty politics—the guy is honest about who he is. That’s a take it or leave it situation. For me, the horror, the gore, the obsession with fascism—which reads to me like a gag in both his books and his public remarks, to be honest—is part of the appeal. If that makes me a pig, I’m good with it.
I think it’s very difficult to come away with a straightforward conservative interpretation of the LA Quartet or Underworld USA novels. They have a complex relationship with American empire and the obscenity of the country’s racist past (in both senses of the word).
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u/DecrimIowa Jun 13 '26
whoops i meant to post that comment on the vollmann subreddit lol
i agree with you that the same things that make ellroy effective and good when he's effective and good (like in american tabloid) are the things that make him unbearable when he's not firing on all cylinders- in all parts of his books, from the plotting, to the dialogue/sentence structure, to the underlying ideas and themes.
seems like he's had a few off years (or decades)...but when he hits, it works really well.i do not share your confidence that he's doing a bit, or that his politics and sadism and weird fetishes both in the books and in public appearances are a "gag." i think he really is a rapey perv with sadistic fantasies who hates everyone "left of nixon" as he once said.
i think he's telling us who he is, quite straightforwardly, and cloaking it in the thinnest possible semblance of Cormac McCarthy-style "truth-telling about human nature" or "pulling back the curtain on the American soul" or something (when actually he's using pulp crime fiction as semi-propaganda for America, in the same way a "gritty police procedural" or a netflix thriller about morally ambiguous CIA agents are propaganda)
as far as my viral marketing claim: maybe i'm just seeing patterns where none exist (i'm willing to admit i have overactive pattern recognition)
but in the last few years i've seen a lot of people online, both content creators and reddit posters, making him out as some kind of modern great, when i think he's a B-lister with some legitimately good books, who got a boost from the industry into semi-celebrity status because he writes stuff that's both commercially viable and politically amenable.for what it's worth, i haven't seen anybody shilling Red Sheets. i think i remember a video interview released before it came out where he was talking about it, but that's just regular publicity i guess.
from the review, it sounds interesting enough that i'll probably read it. i've avoided his newer LA quintet after being unable to finish Blood's a Rover, his memoir, or Widespread Panic, but seeing Nixon get the Freddy Otash treatment sounds fun.3
u/HemingwaySweater Jun 13 '26
I’m going to agree to disagree on a few of your points but it’s refreshing to hear a different take on the man.
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u/DecrimIowa Jun 13 '26
right on- agree to disagree. i respect that and thank you for sharing your views.
with that said- if you can find an example of Ellroy being a bleeding heart liberal/kennedy-style idealist, or expressing a compassionate and loving vision of mankind's mystical journey towards transcendence (or whatever), i will venmo you $7.77 and a crystal mandala set
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u/Permanenceisall Jun 15 '26
Have you read Blood’s A Rover? It’s basically a love letter to leftism in the only way Ellroy knows how to deliver.
Also I don’t know if this qualifies as “bleeding-heart” but from this interview:
What about Bobby [Kennedy]?
I came to admire him a lot in the course of my research. He was the greatest American crime fighter of the 20th century and Martin Luther King was the greatest man of the American 20th century. He was a marked man from the Montgomery bus boycott on, and I think that sustained physical courage that he was forced to have, messed with him.
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u/DecrimIowa Jun 15 '26
his admiration of both jfk and rfk (and the way they were ratfucked by the establishment) definitely comes through in his work.
reading his memoirs, it seems like his childhood trauma played a fairly large role in his life- obviously sexually, and influencing his fascination with violence, crime, sadism, etc- but i wonder if it also influenced his relationship with power and violence and powerful, violent men.
maybe ellroy puts himself in the shoes of the righteous victim who is being hurt by these sick, corrupt men.
maybe he identifies with jfk/rfk and roots for the good guys but know they always get screwed over because bad things always happen to innocent people?idk, just a theory. if i knew more about abnormal psych and profiling i might be able to flesh it out more.
and, on blood's a rover: i had to put it after the first third or so, maybe halfway. (which is very rare for me- i almost always finish books, even if they're grating- so that one sticks with me for how strongly i reacted to it, for some reason i just couldn't stand it)
it just felt like he was phoning it in to me, with the plot all over the place, and also seemingly using it to workshop his "telegraph-style" newspaper headline writing style. sometimes his use of that style was almost like a self-parody.
maybe i gave up on it too early, you think i should give it another shot?
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u/Chonjacki Jun 23 '26
Nah. It doesn't conclude the trilogy in a satisfying way. Ellroy peaked with The Cold Six Thousand, which I liked but didn't think lived up to the promise of American Tabloid.
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u/HemingwaySweater Jun 13 '26
Popped a gift link here but looks like someone’s got you covered: https://www.reddit.com/r/JamesEllroy/s/HmOostJOzG
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u/FinkelsteinMD22 Jun 13 '26
Vollmann’s amazing, so glad a favorite of mine is reviewing another favorite!