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Red Sheet: A Novel
Turn to the first page. Disavow what you think you know about the so-called Red Scare. This is commie malfeasance and ’60s L.A. as you’ve never read it before.
It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.
Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He’s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy’s overworked and overamped. He’s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—Tricky Dick Nixon’s head goons—have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.
L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension and peddle untold copies of his smut rag.
Red Sheet is James Ellroy’s most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.
It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.
Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He’s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy’s overworked and overamped. He’s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—Tricky Dick Nixon’s head goons—have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.
L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension and peddle untold copies of his smut rag.
Red Sheet is James Ellroy’s most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.
494 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 9, 2026
About the author
James Ellroy
149 books4,369 followersLee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).
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June 9, 2026
Paper Is Never Paper Here
James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet” turns the anti-communist dossier into plot, poison, and one last private act of memory.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 8th, 2026
“Paper Is Never Paper Here” – A shadowed late-night office for James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet,” where red forms, typed pages, and a black telephone turn the desk into a moral pressure chamber and the city beyond into another file waiting to be opened.
Documents in “Red Sheet” do not wait politely in police folders. They sweat, seduce, incriminate, and learn new purposes from whoever steals them next. A red sheet can open a case or close a coffin. It may become pornography, scripture, blackmail, confession, souvenir, paper warrant. Paper is never paper here. It is a blunt instrument with a staple in its ear and a pistol in the desk drawer. James Ellroy’s boldest move is to make the anti-communist dossier behave as plot, weather, appetite, and trap – a way of seeing Los Angeles that also violates what it sees.
Ellroy starts with dead Fred Otash and a memo trying to manage what the dead man left behind. The year is 1992; the subject is the “Mini-Red Scare” of 1962; the anxiety is institutional and papery. Journalists are circling. Requests that drag old police paper into daylight threaten to exhume what the Los Angeles Police Department would prefer to leave under official sediment. Before Freddy’s first-person voice kicks in, loud as a warrant served before coffee, the novel has told us how to read it: as a report trying to outrun other reports, a scandal still warm in its grave, a version LAPD can survive only if the dead stay cooperative.
More immediately, the plot starts just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy, fearing domestic Communist reprisals, orders a red probe in Los Angeles, and LAPD intelligence accepts the assignment with the appetite of an agency handed both a mission and a stage. Freddy Otash, no one’s idea of a clean instrument, becomes lead field man. He is also hired to keep Richard Nixon out of trouble as Nixon stumbles toward defeat in the California governor’s race – lonely, compromised, and already half a ghost in his own public life. A Halloween murder wires the Nixon job to old homicides, colored forms, altered files, forged notes, Rumford money, Bradley’s 10th District race, the red-front CTWA, Hugh Hefner’s cash-register shine, and the singer Judy Henske, who enters like an apparition in a Girl Scout uniform and gradually becomes the one person in the book able to hear Freddy without filing him.
Even that outline is too orderly for what the novel actually does. “Red Sheet” advances by pileup, flash, and recoil. A nightclub party after the missile crisis becomes, within pages, a police surveillance operation, a civil-rights chant, a comic routine, a beating, a stink-bomb attack, a rock-salt assault, a Nixon effigy spectacle, and a call that opens onto blood. Ellroy’s L.A. has no clean rooms. Every celebration is a stakeout. Every joke wants an informant. Every ideology has a back door and a man with a lens parked outside.
“Every Celebration Is a Stakeout” – A red-lit room of music, performance, and half-finished figures turns public pleasure into surveillance, catching “Red Sheet” at the moment the party realizes it has been watched all along.
The cast is a city pageant with a subpoena folded into every program: Nixon, Tom Bradley, W.B. Rumford, Hugh Hefner, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers in ghostly doctrinal outline, and a crooked procession of cops, ex-communists, Birchers, hustlers, agents, pornographers, snitches, killers, and damaged witnesses. The case-knot tightens around the Weiss murders, D.J. Siemers, Virgil Dawes, Doug Kallman, Morris Gelb, and a macabre Lindbergh-note subplot that makes American history seem locked in a suitcase and made to testify. Yet the disorder is engineered; the walls are load-bearing even when the wallpaper is screaming. The book keeps returning to one national reflex: collect dirt, stamp it official, then discover how many doors it can open.
Race is not adjacent to the plot; it is one of the roads the plot keeps barricading. The Rumford Fair Housing Act, Bradley’s emergence, the “Oreo Strip,” and the politics of integration give the novel a housing fight its vice cannot dissolve. Ellroy is not writing a clean civil-rights pageant. He stages the back channels by which Rumford’s cause sometimes travels: payoffs, leaks, staged raids, vice money, bad alliances, and the shabby miracle by which a crooked municipal engine may still push a good cause forward. “Red Sheet” is more wounded than its racket lets on. It knows that a city can move ahead with fingerprints all over the shove.
In Freddy Otash, Ellroy has a narrator both dazzling and appalling. Freddy is brutal, bigoted, chemically lit, sexually voracious, spiritually unhousebroken, and viciously comic. He is also a genius for dirty proximity, for knowing which vice room connects to which office, which folder to steal, which witness to hurt, which lie has become official enough to use. The risk is plain: Freddy is allowed to be right after being cruel. He sees patterns others miss, but his noticing usually ends with someone hurt. His “Man Camera” method – observe, imprint, recall, rewind – makes perception feel like stakeout, seizure, and bruise. To notice, for Freddy, is to take possession. The style follows. The sentences do not stroll; they raid.
Prose, here, is not a neutral delivery system. It is the gate, the weapon check, the bouncer with a badge. Ellroy writes in hard, clipped bursts, with little patience for cushioning. Police argot snaps against tabloid insult. Ideological rant meets bureaucratic phrasing, obscene comedy, Catholic pressure, and mid-century radio static. Clauses strike and lock. Nicknames accrete. Acronyms breed in corners. At its best, the book sounds like a police report being fed into a horn section while someone in the alley loses a tooth. It is musical, but not soothing music: brass, percussion, hot lights, and a singer who knows the exits are blocked.
At sentence level, the aggression is not noise added after the fact. Short clauses and hard labels make judgment feel like force. Freddy’s language classifies before it empathizes. He reduces people to appetites, races, jobs, leverage points, crimes, and usable weaknesses. He can solve a case because he has already turned the world into evidence. Ellroy does not ask us to admire Freddy’s soul. He asks us to feel his terrible utility – his ability to turn contempt into evidence and evidence into action.
Partitioned into dated parts, short chapters, official-looking documents, and memory sections, the novel has more architecture than its first blast suggests. The backward turns into 1942, 1934, and 1937 are not decorative flashbacks. Bradley’s wartime racial history, Dawes’s Lindbergh obsession, and Siemers’s Spanish Civil War trauma make the 1962 investigation the thin surface over older violence: Guernica, wartime Los Angeles, Lindbergh, the Weiss murders. Every current file has a prehistory. Every prehistory has been waiting for the right corrupt reader.
At full voltage, “Red Sheet” makes chaos architectural. The red sheets are not props or title decoration. They are what makes one scene trigger the next. Reports are traded, forged, redacted, stolen, photographed, buried, recovered, and turned into what cops, courts, and newspapers can be made to repeat. Siemers’s file-making apparatus – typewriters, paper stock, redaction tools, handwriting samples – gives the novel its sharpest fear: the file room is not where facts necessarily stay facts. It is where a forged sheet can dress a lie as authority and send it out to ruin lives.
“The Archive as Crime Scene” – Typewriter, paper stock, redaction strips, and red sheets gather under hard light, making the file room in “Red Sheet” look less like storage than the place where authority learns to forge itself.
Deep in the novel, Siemers opens the darkest file drawer. Her Spanish Civil War past, her sexual and ideological entanglements, her rage, guilt, and talent for paperwork complicate what might otherwise be a mere villain apparatus. Through her, Ellroy ties anti-communist vengeance to rape trauma, religious ruin, Communist violence, and the long afterlife of atrocity. The “Guernica” material is necessary because it forces the case machinery to become rape, revenge, guilt, faith, and injury. The file is no longer an abstraction. It has blood under the fingernails.
“Guernica in the File Drawer” – Torn paper, dark folders, and fractured bodily shadows let the Spanish wound inside “Red Sheet” seep through the archive without becoming literal spectacle.
In literary company, “Red Sheet” sits near Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” and Don DeLillo’s “Libra,” though neither quite prepares one for Ellroy’s brass, bite, and bad weather. Like Coover, Ellroy understands red-baiting as press event and civic burlesque. Like DeLillo, he knows that the Cold War turns coincidence into career. But he is less cool than DeLillo and less allegorically antic than Coover. He does not mist the archive with dread or send it into vaudeville. He kicks open the file room, pockets the negatives, beats the clerk, and calls it research.
James Ellroy – “Red Sheet” Literary Watercolor Portrait – A refined literary caricature of James Ellroy set inside the book’s red-and-black file-world, where the author’s public poise meets the novel’s phones, folders, city night, and classified-paper menace.
Machines give “Red Sheet” its period charge: private phones, typewriters, surveillance cars, press plants, subpoenas, redacted reports. Those same machines give it a present-tense aftershock. The novel speaks naturally to any age anxious about kept folders and timed leaks, about what police and federal offices hide, about what newspapers, police, and courts can be made to repeat. No flare is needed. Technology changes faster than the craving to own the record.
I place “Red Sheet” at 86/100, which under my rubric makes it a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That is admiration with one foot hovering over the brake. The book is too strong, too strange, too voice-drunk, and too deliberately engineered to treat as another lap through familiar L.A. rot. It is also too overbright from its own flare to call perfect. One admires the apparatus and occasionally wants to open a window.
The problem is not excess; excess is the house style, the zoning law, the name on the buzzer downstairs. The bill arrives when each clue comes with lights flashing. Ellroy’s recurring pattern – clue, file, insult, beating, confession, raid, larger conspiracy – can start to show its rivets. A murder, a joke, a sexual grotesquerie, a political aside, a historical atrocity, and a procedural revelation may all arrive at the same siren register. The trumpet section is superb. Every so often, one longs for a clarinet.
Readers allergic to corrupt immersion will hit the roughest patch in the language itself. The novel’s racial insult, sexual degradation, ideological invective, and police violence are not accidental, and sanding them down would falsify the book. Still, representation and endurance are different matters. Some will hear the style as forced entry into Freddy’s diseased hearing; others will feel trapped inside the disease with insufficient ventilation. Both responses are predictable. “Red Sheet” divides because it makes excess its ethical test.
One weakness in the book’s brilliance is how eagerly the locks open for the same key. Hiss, Chambers, Nixon, the Rumford Act, Spain, LAPD intelligence, old homicides, red-front unions, and Lindbergh relics snap together with astonishing nerve. Often the result is magnificent, an infernal clock with a switchblade for a minute hand. At times, though, history seems less revealed than shoved into the same interrogation room and told to cooperate.
Perhaps the ending works because it finally lowers the weapon. The raids succeed, the files surface, the bodies are explained. Enemies are dead, exposed, or bargained down. Institutions protect themselves while congratulating themselves. The case is solved by illegal acts the official report cannot admit. Yet the closing movement is not triumphal in any simple way. Freddy and Judy move through a block party, through public celebration and private aftershock, toward marriage, peach malts, and the idea of a memory book. After hundreds of pages in which records have been made to cut, that gesture matters.
Of course, a memory book does not absolve Freddy. It does not acquit the police, erase the violence, or turn Los Angeles into a city that has learned its lesson. Ellroy is too unsentimental for that, and the novel is better for it. What the final pages offer is smaller and stranger: the possibility of keeping something without immediately converting it into leverage. The file has done the cutting all along. Memory becomes a record not made to hurt anyone, or at least its cup of water.
“A Memory Book After the Files” – Two shadowed figures lean toward a small open book, and for once the paper between them is not evidence, blackmail, or leverage, but a fragile attempt to keep something without using it.
Under all that swagger, “Red Sheet” is a savage, comic, overstuffed, morally mud-splashed novel about truth passed through burglars, cops, blackmailers, and killers. It is not elegant unless one considers a blackjack, properly swung, a kind of line break. It is built from raids, hymns, mug shots, dirty jokes, subpoenas, scalpels, slogans, and bruised longing. Its excellence lies in turning the racket into a readable score without making it safe.
Los Angeles, in Ellroy’s hands, is not a city of angels or even fallen angels. It is a file cabinet with traffic and bad sleep. “Red Sheet” leaves Freddy and Judy with their first memory book, trying to make one private record after a novel full of public poison. The image is almost tender, and therefore suspect, and therefore right: two people sitting together in the afterglow of civic arson, hoping that what they keep need not become another weapon.
On the last page, the book does not ask us to believe Freddy has been saved. It asks something harsher and more interesting: whether a man trained to turn every fact into force can recognize, even briefly, the mercy of a fact left unexploited. That is where the novel’s noise resolves – not into silence, exactly, but into the small, improbable sound of paper saved for love instead of blackmail.
Still, after the raids, the files, the forged histories, and the gorgeous racket, Ellroy leaves us with paper again – not redacted, not planted, not subpoenaed, not slipped into a police folder like a knife. Just paper not yet converted into leverage, held between two damaged people who want, for once, to remember without turning memory into another exhibit.
Compositional thumbnail sheet – Early thumbnail studies test the image’s essential geometry: desk as evidence field, figure as shadowed instrument, window as Los Angeles pressure, and border as damaged paperwork.
Value study / noir light map – A stripped-down light study fixes the hierarchy before color: pale paper glare first, black figure second, red room pressure third, with the outer walls left breathing.
Color swatch sheet – The cover palette is translated into watercolor logic, with scarlet, crimson, oxblood, blush, cream, charcoal, and near-black assigned their emotional work before the image begins.
Watercolor border study – A trial margin of red stains, broken document boxes, graphite guide lines, and blackened edges shows how the border becomes file, frame, and unfinished evidence.
Character anatomical study – A restrained figure study searches for the Freddy-like posture without portraiture: shoulder, hand, cheekbone, and shadow arranged as surveillance rather than likeness.
Faint pencil underdrawing – The bare graphite stage reveals the room’s scaffolding, with desk perspective, window frame, paper stacks, figure contour, and title placement still exposed.
Pencil-plus-first-wash stage – The first red and black washes begin staining the paper world into being, while enough graphite and untouched page remain to show the painting thinking itself through.
Red-paper detail / final glazing study – A close study of the desk’s red sheets tests bloom, dry brush, dark edges, and preserved white paper until the documents feel both handmade and dangerous.
Alternative dust-jacket / cover-concept study – Rough watercolor cover studies explore how the book’s red files, shadowed figure, black telephone, and classified-document energy might become poster force without losing the handmade mood of the series.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet” turns the anti-communist dossier into plot, poison, and one last private act of memory.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 8th, 2026
“Paper Is Never Paper Here” – A shadowed late-night office for James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet,” where red forms, typed pages, and a black telephone turn the desk into a moral pressure chamber and the city beyond into another file waiting to be opened.
Documents in “Red Sheet” do not wait politely in police folders. They sweat, seduce, incriminate, and learn new purposes from whoever steals them next. A red sheet can open a case or close a coffin. It may become pornography, scripture, blackmail, confession, souvenir, paper warrant. Paper is never paper here. It is a blunt instrument with a staple in its ear and a pistol in the desk drawer. James Ellroy’s boldest move is to make the anti-communist dossier behave as plot, weather, appetite, and trap – a way of seeing Los Angeles that also violates what it sees.
Ellroy starts with dead Fred Otash and a memo trying to manage what the dead man left behind. The year is 1992; the subject is the “Mini-Red Scare” of 1962; the anxiety is institutional and papery. Journalists are circling. Requests that drag old police paper into daylight threaten to exhume what the Los Angeles Police Department would prefer to leave under official sediment. Before Freddy’s first-person voice kicks in, loud as a warrant served before coffee, the novel has told us how to read it: as a report trying to outrun other reports, a scandal still warm in its grave, a version LAPD can survive only if the dead stay cooperative.
More immediately, the plot starts just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy, fearing domestic Communist reprisals, orders a red probe in Los Angeles, and LAPD intelligence accepts the assignment with the appetite of an agency handed both a mission and a stage. Freddy Otash, no one’s idea of a clean instrument, becomes lead field man. He is also hired to keep Richard Nixon out of trouble as Nixon stumbles toward defeat in the California governor’s race – lonely, compromised, and already half a ghost in his own public life. A Halloween murder wires the Nixon job to old homicides, colored forms, altered files, forged notes, Rumford money, Bradley’s 10th District race, the red-front CTWA, Hugh Hefner’s cash-register shine, and the singer Judy Henske, who enters like an apparition in a Girl Scout uniform and gradually becomes the one person in the book able to hear Freddy without filing him.
Even that outline is too orderly for what the novel actually does. “Red Sheet” advances by pileup, flash, and recoil. A nightclub party after the missile crisis becomes, within pages, a police surveillance operation, a civil-rights chant, a comic routine, a beating, a stink-bomb attack, a rock-salt assault, a Nixon effigy spectacle, and a call that opens onto blood. Ellroy’s L.A. has no clean rooms. Every celebration is a stakeout. Every joke wants an informant. Every ideology has a back door and a man with a lens parked outside.
“Every Celebration Is a Stakeout” – A red-lit room of music, performance, and half-finished figures turns public pleasure into surveillance, catching “Red Sheet” at the moment the party realizes it has been watched all along.
The cast is a city pageant with a subpoena folded into every program: Nixon, Tom Bradley, W.B. Rumford, Hugh Hefner, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers in ghostly doctrinal outline, and a crooked procession of cops, ex-communists, Birchers, hustlers, agents, pornographers, snitches, killers, and damaged witnesses. The case-knot tightens around the Weiss murders, D.J. Siemers, Virgil Dawes, Doug Kallman, Morris Gelb, and a macabre Lindbergh-note subplot that makes American history seem locked in a suitcase and made to testify. Yet the disorder is engineered; the walls are load-bearing even when the wallpaper is screaming. The book keeps returning to one national reflex: collect dirt, stamp it official, then discover how many doors it can open.
Race is not adjacent to the plot; it is one of the roads the plot keeps barricading. The Rumford Fair Housing Act, Bradley’s emergence, the “Oreo Strip,” and the politics of integration give the novel a housing fight its vice cannot dissolve. Ellroy is not writing a clean civil-rights pageant. He stages the back channels by which Rumford’s cause sometimes travels: payoffs, leaks, staged raids, vice money, bad alliances, and the shabby miracle by which a crooked municipal engine may still push a good cause forward. “Red Sheet” is more wounded than its racket lets on. It knows that a city can move ahead with fingerprints all over the shove.
In Freddy Otash, Ellroy has a narrator both dazzling and appalling. Freddy is brutal, bigoted, chemically lit, sexually voracious, spiritually unhousebroken, and viciously comic. He is also a genius for dirty proximity, for knowing which vice room connects to which office, which folder to steal, which witness to hurt, which lie has become official enough to use. The risk is plain: Freddy is allowed to be right after being cruel. He sees patterns others miss, but his noticing usually ends with someone hurt. His “Man Camera” method – observe, imprint, recall, rewind – makes perception feel like stakeout, seizure, and bruise. To notice, for Freddy, is to take possession. The style follows. The sentences do not stroll; they raid.
Prose, here, is not a neutral delivery system. It is the gate, the weapon check, the bouncer with a badge. Ellroy writes in hard, clipped bursts, with little patience for cushioning. Police argot snaps against tabloid insult. Ideological rant meets bureaucratic phrasing, obscene comedy, Catholic pressure, and mid-century radio static. Clauses strike and lock. Nicknames accrete. Acronyms breed in corners. At its best, the book sounds like a police report being fed into a horn section while someone in the alley loses a tooth. It is musical, but not soothing music: brass, percussion, hot lights, and a singer who knows the exits are blocked.
At sentence level, the aggression is not noise added after the fact. Short clauses and hard labels make judgment feel like force. Freddy’s language classifies before it empathizes. He reduces people to appetites, races, jobs, leverage points, crimes, and usable weaknesses. He can solve a case because he has already turned the world into evidence. Ellroy does not ask us to admire Freddy’s soul. He asks us to feel his terrible utility – his ability to turn contempt into evidence and evidence into action.
Partitioned into dated parts, short chapters, official-looking documents, and memory sections, the novel has more architecture than its first blast suggests. The backward turns into 1942, 1934, and 1937 are not decorative flashbacks. Bradley’s wartime racial history, Dawes’s Lindbergh obsession, and Siemers’s Spanish Civil War trauma make the 1962 investigation the thin surface over older violence: Guernica, wartime Los Angeles, Lindbergh, the Weiss murders. Every current file has a prehistory. Every prehistory has been waiting for the right corrupt reader.
At full voltage, “Red Sheet” makes chaos architectural. The red sheets are not props or title decoration. They are what makes one scene trigger the next. Reports are traded, forged, redacted, stolen, photographed, buried, recovered, and turned into what cops, courts, and newspapers can be made to repeat. Siemers’s file-making apparatus – typewriters, paper stock, redaction tools, handwriting samples – gives the novel its sharpest fear: the file room is not where facts necessarily stay facts. It is where a forged sheet can dress a lie as authority and send it out to ruin lives.
“The Archive as Crime Scene” – Typewriter, paper stock, redaction strips, and red sheets gather under hard light, making the file room in “Red Sheet” look less like storage than the place where authority learns to forge itself.
Deep in the novel, Siemers opens the darkest file drawer. Her Spanish Civil War past, her sexual and ideological entanglements, her rage, guilt, and talent for paperwork complicate what might otherwise be a mere villain apparatus. Through her, Ellroy ties anti-communist vengeance to rape trauma, religious ruin, Communist violence, and the long afterlife of atrocity. The “Guernica” material is necessary because it forces the case machinery to become rape, revenge, guilt, faith, and injury. The file is no longer an abstraction. It has blood under the fingernails.
“Guernica in the File Drawer” – Torn paper, dark folders, and fractured bodily shadows let the Spanish wound inside “Red Sheet” seep through the archive without becoming literal spectacle.
In literary company, “Red Sheet” sits near Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” and Don DeLillo’s “Libra,” though neither quite prepares one for Ellroy’s brass, bite, and bad weather. Like Coover, Ellroy understands red-baiting as press event and civic burlesque. Like DeLillo, he knows that the Cold War turns coincidence into career. But he is less cool than DeLillo and less allegorically antic than Coover. He does not mist the archive with dread or send it into vaudeville. He kicks open the file room, pockets the negatives, beats the clerk, and calls it research.
James Ellroy – “Red Sheet” Literary Watercolor Portrait – A refined literary caricature of James Ellroy set inside the book’s red-and-black file-world, where the author’s public poise meets the novel’s phones, folders, city night, and classified-paper menace.
Machines give “Red Sheet” its period charge: private phones, typewriters, surveillance cars, press plants, subpoenas, redacted reports. Those same machines give it a present-tense aftershock. The novel speaks naturally to any age anxious about kept folders and timed leaks, about what police and federal offices hide, about what newspapers, police, and courts can be made to repeat. No flare is needed. Technology changes faster than the craving to own the record.
I place “Red Sheet” at 86/100, which under my rubric makes it a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That is admiration with one foot hovering over the brake. The book is too strong, too strange, too voice-drunk, and too deliberately engineered to treat as another lap through familiar L.A. rot. It is also too overbright from its own flare to call perfect. One admires the apparatus and occasionally wants to open a window.
The problem is not excess; excess is the house style, the zoning law, the name on the buzzer downstairs. The bill arrives when each clue comes with lights flashing. Ellroy’s recurring pattern – clue, file, insult, beating, confession, raid, larger conspiracy – can start to show its rivets. A murder, a joke, a sexual grotesquerie, a political aside, a historical atrocity, and a procedural revelation may all arrive at the same siren register. The trumpet section is superb. Every so often, one longs for a clarinet.
Readers allergic to corrupt immersion will hit the roughest patch in the language itself. The novel’s racial insult, sexual degradation, ideological invective, and police violence are not accidental, and sanding them down would falsify the book. Still, representation and endurance are different matters. Some will hear the style as forced entry into Freddy’s diseased hearing; others will feel trapped inside the disease with insufficient ventilation. Both responses are predictable. “Red Sheet” divides because it makes excess its ethical test.
One weakness in the book’s brilliance is how eagerly the locks open for the same key. Hiss, Chambers, Nixon, the Rumford Act, Spain, LAPD intelligence, old homicides, red-front unions, and Lindbergh relics snap together with astonishing nerve. Often the result is magnificent, an infernal clock with a switchblade for a minute hand. At times, though, history seems less revealed than shoved into the same interrogation room and told to cooperate.
Perhaps the ending works because it finally lowers the weapon. The raids succeed, the files surface, the bodies are explained. Enemies are dead, exposed, or bargained down. Institutions protect themselves while congratulating themselves. The case is solved by illegal acts the official report cannot admit. Yet the closing movement is not triumphal in any simple way. Freddy and Judy move through a block party, through public celebration and private aftershock, toward marriage, peach malts, and the idea of a memory book. After hundreds of pages in which records have been made to cut, that gesture matters.
Of course, a memory book does not absolve Freddy. It does not acquit the police, erase the violence, or turn Los Angeles into a city that has learned its lesson. Ellroy is too unsentimental for that, and the novel is better for it. What the final pages offer is smaller and stranger: the possibility of keeping something without immediately converting it into leverage. The file has done the cutting all along. Memory becomes a record not made to hurt anyone, or at least its cup of water.
“A Memory Book After the Files” – Two shadowed figures lean toward a small open book, and for once the paper between them is not evidence, blackmail, or leverage, but a fragile attempt to keep something without using it.
Under all that swagger, “Red Sheet” is a savage, comic, overstuffed, morally mud-splashed novel about truth passed through burglars, cops, blackmailers, and killers. It is not elegant unless one considers a blackjack, properly swung, a kind of line break. It is built from raids, hymns, mug shots, dirty jokes, subpoenas, scalpels, slogans, and bruised longing. Its excellence lies in turning the racket into a readable score without making it safe.
Los Angeles, in Ellroy’s hands, is not a city of angels or even fallen angels. It is a file cabinet with traffic and bad sleep. “Red Sheet” leaves Freddy and Judy with their first memory book, trying to make one private record after a novel full of public poison. The image is almost tender, and therefore suspect, and therefore right: two people sitting together in the afterglow of civic arson, hoping that what they keep need not become another weapon.
On the last page, the book does not ask us to believe Freddy has been saved. It asks something harsher and more interesting: whether a man trained to turn every fact into force can recognize, even briefly, the mercy of a fact left unexploited. That is where the novel’s noise resolves – not into silence, exactly, but into the small, improbable sound of paper saved for love instead of blackmail.
Still, after the raids, the files, the forged histories, and the gorgeous racket, Ellroy leaves us with paper again – not redacted, not planted, not subpoenaed, not slipped into a police folder like a knife. Just paper not yet converted into leverage, held between two damaged people who want, for once, to remember without turning memory into another exhibit.
Compositional thumbnail sheet – Early thumbnail studies test the image’s essential geometry: desk as evidence field, figure as shadowed instrument, window as Los Angeles pressure, and border as damaged paperwork.
Value study / noir light map – A stripped-down light study fixes the hierarchy before color: pale paper glare first, black figure second, red room pressure third, with the outer walls left breathing.
Color swatch sheet – The cover palette is translated into watercolor logic, with scarlet, crimson, oxblood, blush, cream, charcoal, and near-black assigned their emotional work before the image begins.
Watercolor border study – A trial margin of red stains, broken document boxes, graphite guide lines, and blackened edges shows how the border becomes file, frame, and unfinished evidence.
Character anatomical study – A restrained figure study searches for the Freddy-like posture without portraiture: shoulder, hand, cheekbone, and shadow arranged as surveillance rather than likeness.
Faint pencil underdrawing – The bare graphite stage reveals the room’s scaffolding, with desk perspective, window frame, paper stacks, figure contour, and title placement still exposed.
Pencil-plus-first-wash stage – The first red and black washes begin staining the paper world into being, while enough graphite and untouched page remain to show the painting thinking itself through.
Red-paper detail / final glazing study – A close study of the desk’s red sheets tests bloom, dry brush, dark edges, and preserved white paper until the documents feel both handmade and dangerous.
Alternative dust-jacket / cover-concept study – Rough watercolor cover studies explore how the book’s red files, shadowed figure, black telephone, and classified-document energy might become poster force without losing the handmade mood of the series.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
July 3, 2026
Ellroy unhinged. Not quite the emotional gut punch that is THE ENCHANTERS, here he wrangles the chaos of the early 60s communist movement in California, linking the movement to the Spanish Civil War and dirty trade unions and fascist reprisals and, running through it all, Freddy Otash and the LAPD.
Again, this doesn’t coalesce until the last hundred or so pages. But when it does, and Ellroy indicts all comers—Otash among them—it is electric. There’s a late chapter depicting a funeral that comes off like peak Demon Dog. I felt myself levitating.
Again, this doesn’t coalesce until the last hundred or so pages. But when it does, and Ellroy indicts all comers—Otash among them—it is electric. There’s a late chapter depicting a funeral that comes off like peak Demon Dog. I felt myself levitating.
June 24, 2026
The dog is back! After a slump that started with his only bad book, we finally have something to make us remember why Ellroy is the man!
Freddy O is back and still causing a terror, this time his kamakaze run is aimed against domestic communists and a cabal of reds who birthed themselves during the Spanish Civil War. In this case, knowing about the period and the movements Ellroy describes was a bit of a disadvantage since it's hard to take what was a thoroughly neutered and irrelevant movement in the 1960s as these insanely dangerous revolutionaries. Still, it doesn't affect the stakes of the book and it's great to see Freddy come up against real dangerous people for once.
The dog is selling it as a strongly anti communist book, and while he doesn't have any love for the left, it is somewhat telling that he portrays them as capable and deadly, while the right-wing characters in the book can generously be described as complete morons.
The prose is great here and the dog is back in fine form delivering an incredibly readable book that brims with style and had me laughing out loud probably every third page. There are definitely some phrases he uses a lot (take take a shot of cask strength bourbon every time he uses "cask strength") but overall the prose is the great stuff we expect.
In terms of tone, however, it's a little bit too much at times. The earlier novels contain their fair share of crazy stuff, but this one is all pedal to the metal and it strains credulity at times. There's this heightened reality and it doesn't quite gel with the subdued but still outrageous stories from earlier. I'm also still not terribly enamored with Freddy O, and wish the dog would give us some more characters from his own mind. There's also just a few too many characters who don't get that much time to really stand out.
Minor complaints aside, this was still a fun read and something that you can pick up and just run with. Some plot points from the enchanters are mentioned, but overall it's a fairly stand-alone novel and seemingly disconnected from the wider idea of the second quartet, as even the cursory mentions of Ellroy's first novels are dropped.
Freddy O is back and still causing a terror, this time his kamakaze run is aimed against domestic communists and a cabal of reds who birthed themselves during the Spanish Civil War. In this case, knowing about the period and the movements Ellroy describes was a bit of a disadvantage since it's hard to take what was a thoroughly neutered and irrelevant movement in the 1960s as these insanely dangerous revolutionaries. Still, it doesn't affect the stakes of the book and it's great to see Freddy come up against real dangerous people for once.
The dog is selling it as a strongly anti communist book, and while he doesn't have any love for the left, it is somewhat telling that he portrays them as capable and deadly, while the right-wing characters in the book can generously be described as complete morons.
The prose is great here and the dog is back in fine form delivering an incredibly readable book that brims with style and had me laughing out loud probably every third page. There are definitely some phrases he uses a lot (take take a shot of cask strength bourbon every time he uses "cask strength") but overall the prose is the great stuff we expect.
In terms of tone, however, it's a little bit too much at times. The earlier novels contain their fair share of crazy stuff, but this one is all pedal to the metal and it strains credulity at times. There's this heightened reality and it doesn't quite gel with the subdued but still outrageous stories from earlier. I'm also still not terribly enamored with Freddy O, and wish the dog would give us some more characters from his own mind. There's also just a few too many characters who don't get that much time to really stand out.
Minor complaints aside, this was still a fun read and something that you can pick up and just run with. Some plot points from the enchanters are mentioned, but overall it's a fairly stand-alone novel and seemingly disconnected from the wider idea of the second quartet, as even the cursory mentions of Ellroy's first novels are dropped.
July 3, 2026
This book is baaaaad...but the Ellroy baaaaad. It's insane, violent, full of real life figures doing absolutely unspeakable acts. Drop back into an L.A. wasteland underworld full of commies, Nazi scum, homicidal jazz musicians (and nuns!!) and plenty of dangerous double dealing women and hard drinking, pill popping members of the LAPD. Charles Lindbergh makes a cameo, Richard Nixon is ambling around the streets at night as an ex-VP and Alger Hiss is an aging Don Juan. And yes, there is an actual murder mystery to solve for Freddy Otash.
This is what Ellroy does best and is a return to peak form after a slew of shall we say novels that were definitely sub par. This is one of his finest works, borrowing what he did best from his previous eras, creating a successful Frankenstein noir story that smells like pieces of the Big Nowhere, American Tabloid and even his much earlier single main character narratives like Browns Requiem or Clandestine.
It's nice to have the Demon Dog reclaiming his throne. I dare say we need him working at full potential at this point in time. Remember, all transgressive fiction is written by closeted moralists.
This is what Ellroy does best and is a return to peak form after a slew of shall we say novels that were definitely sub par. This is one of his finest works, borrowing what he did best from his previous eras, creating a successful Frankenstein noir story that smells like pieces of the Big Nowhere, American Tabloid and even his much earlier single main character narratives like Browns Requiem or Clandestine.
It's nice to have the Demon Dog reclaiming his throne. I dare say we need him working at full potential at this point in time. Remember, all transgressive fiction is written by closeted moralists.
July 2, 2026
Weekend at Freddie O's. Likely all a dream anyway.
June 13, 2026
Vintage Ellroy. If you like his style you will like this book; if you don't you will not. I've read all of Ellroy's books. Quite frankly, his style is becoming tiresome, and in this book particularly so. I won't be reading any more, at least until his next one comes out.
June 29, 2026
The Dog's great anti-communist novel and my favorite of the ones that focus on Freddy O. Plot is too crazy to summarize, just know it's James Ellroy and he delivers here. Highly recommended.
June 14, 2026
The year is 1962, and the world is heaving a collective sigh of relief as the nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba has ended through diplomatic compromise. However, the enmity towards Communists and Communist sympathizers in the US has begun to heat up.
Fresh from his work as a fixer in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, Freddy Otash is working for the District Attorney’s office. Freddy, along with ambitious LAPD Lieutenant Daryl Gates, has been entrusted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the rooting out of subversives, especially when it comes to the Civil Rights movement. Kennedy and US Attorney Eddie Chacon believe that the Civil Rights campaign is being undermined by Communists and their fellow travelers.
Freddy has a knack for cultivating snitches who will provide the dirt on the CPUSA, especially if properly compensated. However, there appear to be stiff penalties for defectors or apostates in the organization, as Freddy learns when reading through the voluminous files kept on the seditious forces operating in and around Los Angeles. The vicious murders of a husband and wife eight years prior point to a possible hit squad operating with the sanction of the Communist hierarchy. As Freddy begins to dive deeper into the motivations and personalities of this potential fifth-column group, he discovers that ancient history is too recent for those with undying grudges.
Freddy’s investigative duties become a little more complex when he is approached by former Vice President Richard Nixon’s advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and asked to tail the recent gubernatorial candidate. Nixon has a predilection for taking solitary nighttime strolls with random destinations, and they are concerned that one nocturnal meandering could end badly and scuttle any future political run. Freddy begins his intelligence collection with a black-bag job on Nixon’s psychiatrist’s office. While there is potentially compromising information in these confidential files, Freddy fears that there could be a lot more after he finds the dead body of a woman who was last seen with Nixon.
Laurette Bowen’s relationship with Nixon goes back to the days when he was a red-hunting Congressman going after Communists in the US government. Her murder bears similarities in its brutality to the double homicide that Freddy unearthed in the police files. As he relates his findings to Lieutenant Gates, they realize there are criminal alliances that cross ideological divisions, and they will need to pull out all the stops to halt their machinations.
RED SHEET is the third book to chronicle the exploits of Freddy Otash, and it is engrossing from page one. There is no pretense about the kind of person Freddy is. He is a voyeur with law enforcement credentials, an amoral man whose work hours are usually fortified by a combination of pharmaceutical stimulants and booze. However, as with many of Ellroy’s antihero protagonists, he has a distinct yearning for justice and longs for redemption. He seeks atonement while committing extralegal, if not criminal, acts in order to bring down the conspirators he’s chasing.
Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader’s consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands.
Reviewed by Philip Zozzaro
Fresh from his work as a fixer in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, Freddy Otash is working for the District Attorney’s office. Freddy, along with ambitious LAPD Lieutenant Daryl Gates, has been entrusted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the rooting out of subversives, especially when it comes to the Civil Rights movement. Kennedy and US Attorney Eddie Chacon believe that the Civil Rights campaign is being undermined by Communists and their fellow travelers.
Freddy has a knack for cultivating snitches who will provide the dirt on the CPUSA, especially if properly compensated. However, there appear to be stiff penalties for defectors or apostates in the organization, as Freddy learns when reading through the voluminous files kept on the seditious forces operating in and around Los Angeles. The vicious murders of a husband and wife eight years prior point to a possible hit squad operating with the sanction of the Communist hierarchy. As Freddy begins to dive deeper into the motivations and personalities of this potential fifth-column group, he discovers that ancient history is too recent for those with undying grudges.
Freddy’s investigative duties become a little more complex when he is approached by former Vice President Richard Nixon’s advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and asked to tail the recent gubernatorial candidate. Nixon has a predilection for taking solitary nighttime strolls with random destinations, and they are concerned that one nocturnal meandering could end badly and scuttle any future political run. Freddy begins his intelligence collection with a black-bag job on Nixon’s psychiatrist’s office. While there is potentially compromising information in these confidential files, Freddy fears that there could be a lot more after he finds the dead body of a woman who was last seen with Nixon.
Laurette Bowen’s relationship with Nixon goes back to the days when he was a red-hunting Congressman going after Communists in the US government. Her murder bears similarities in its brutality to the double homicide that Freddy unearthed in the police files. As he relates his findings to Lieutenant Gates, they realize there are criminal alliances that cross ideological divisions, and they will need to pull out all the stops to halt their machinations.
RED SHEET is the third book to chronicle the exploits of Freddy Otash, and it is engrossing from page one. There is no pretense about the kind of person Freddy is. He is a voyeur with law enforcement credentials, an amoral man whose work hours are usually fortified by a combination of pharmaceutical stimulants and booze. However, as with many of Ellroy’s antihero protagonists, he has a distinct yearning for justice and longs for redemption. He seeks atonement while committing extralegal, if not criminal, acts in order to bring down the conspirators he’s chasing.
Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader’s consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands.
Reviewed by Philip Zozzaro
June 14, 2026
The year is 1962, and the world is heaving a collective sigh of relief as the nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba has ended through diplomatic compromise. However, the enmity towards Communists and Communist sympathizers in the US has begun to heat up.
Fresh from his work as a fixer in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, Freddy Otash is working for the District Attorney’s office. Freddy, along with ambitious LAPD Lieutenant Daryl Gates, has been entrusted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the rooting out of subversives, especially when it comes to the Civil Rights movement. Kennedy and US Attorney Eddie Chacon believe that the Civil Rights campaign is being undermined by Communists and their fellow travelers.
Freddy has a knack for cultivating snitches who will provide the dirt on the CPUSA, especially if properly compensated. However, there appear to be stiff penalties for defectors or apostates in the organization, as Freddy learns when reading through the voluminous files kept on the seditious forces operating in and around Los Angeles. The vicious murders of a husband and wife eight years prior point to a possible hit squad operating with the sanction of the Communist hierarchy. As Freddy begins to dive deeper into the motivations and personalities of this potential fifth-column group, he discovers that ancient history is too recent for those with undying grudges.
Freddy’s investigative duties become a little more complex when he is approached by former Vice President Richard Nixon’s advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and asked to tail the recent gubernatorial candidate. Nixon has a predilection for taking solitary nighttime strolls with random destinations, and they are concerned that one nocturnal meandering could end badly and scuttle any future political run. Freddy begins his intelligence collection with a black-bag job on Nixon’s psychiatrist’s office. While there is potentially compromising information in these confidential files, Freddy fears that there could be a lot more after he finds the dead body of a woman who was last seen with Nixon.
Laurette Bowen’s relationship with Nixon goes back to the days when he was a red-hunting Congressman going after Communists in the US government. Her murder bears similarities in its brutality to the double homicide that Freddy unearthed in the police files. As he relates his findings to Lieutenant Gates, they realize there are criminal alliances that cross ideological divisions, and they will need to pull out all the stops to halt their machinations.
RED SHEET is the third book to chronicle the exploits of Freddy Otash, and it is engrossing from page one. There is no pretense about the kind of person Freddy is. He is a voyeur with law enforcement credentials, an amoral man whose work hours are usually fortified by a combination of pharmaceutical stimulants and booze. However, as with many of Ellroy’s antihero protagonists, he has a distinct yearning for justice and longs for redemption. He seeks atonement while committing extralegal, if not criminal, acts in order to bring down the conspirators he’s chasing.
Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader’s consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands.
Reviewed by Philip Zozzaro
Fresh from his work as a fixer in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, Freddy Otash is working for the District Attorney’s office. Freddy, along with ambitious LAPD Lieutenant Daryl Gates, has been entrusted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the rooting out of subversives, especially when it comes to the Civil Rights movement. Kennedy and US Attorney Eddie Chacon believe that the Civil Rights campaign is being undermined by Communists and their fellow travelers.
Freddy has a knack for cultivating snitches who will provide the dirt on the CPUSA, especially if properly compensated. However, there appear to be stiff penalties for defectors or apostates in the organization, as Freddy learns when reading through the voluminous files kept on the seditious forces operating in and around Los Angeles. The vicious murders of a husband and wife eight years prior point to a possible hit squad operating with the sanction of the Communist hierarchy. As Freddy begins to dive deeper into the motivations and personalities of this potential fifth-column group, he discovers that ancient history is too recent for those with undying grudges.
Freddy’s investigative duties become a little more complex when he is approached by former Vice President Richard Nixon’s advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and asked to tail the recent gubernatorial candidate. Nixon has a predilection for taking solitary nighttime strolls with random destinations, and they are concerned that one nocturnal meandering could end badly and scuttle any future political run. Freddy begins his intelligence collection with a black-bag job on Nixon’s psychiatrist’s office. While there is potentially compromising information in these confidential files, Freddy fears that there could be a lot more after he finds the dead body of a woman who was last seen with Nixon.
Laurette Bowen’s relationship with Nixon goes back to the days when he was a red-hunting Congressman going after Communists in the US government. Her murder bears similarities in its brutality to the double homicide that Freddy unearthed in the police files. As he relates his findings to Lieutenant Gates, they realize there are criminal alliances that cross ideological divisions, and they will need to pull out all the stops to halt their machinations.
RED SHEET is the third book to chronicle the exploits of Freddy Otash, and it is engrossing from page one. There is no pretense about the kind of person Freddy is. He is a voyeur with law enforcement credentials, an amoral man whose work hours are usually fortified by a combination of pharmaceutical stimulants and booze. However, as with many of Ellroy’s antihero protagonists, he has a distinct yearning for justice and longs for redemption. He seeks atonement while committing extralegal, if not criminal, acts in order to bring down the conspirators he’s chasing.
Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader’s consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands.
Reviewed by Philip Zozzaro
July 8, 2026
I may be among the first Italians to read Ellroy's latest novel: I've been waiting a couple of years and bought the first American edition as soon as I could. What you will get in short: Nixon, communist-hunting, cops, celebrities and nightclubs, tabloids, drugs, killers and conspiracies... It's the usual, perfect Ellroyian setting.
Reading this novel was a hallucinatory experience. A fever dream similar to a film, but shot through with exaggerated color filters, frenetic editing, and oblique shots.
What's good about this novel? Obviously, its unmistakable style, which ultimately overwhelms any other consideration and is ultimately its strength. Ellroy's writing is always propulsive, syncopated, possessing a bebop cadence, broken and unmistakable, and a prodigious use of slang and alliteration. This gives the novel a delirious pacing, and it is precisely this absolute fidelity to his own stylistic signature that represents, at least in my opinion, the book's main limitation and a potential obstacle for those approaching Ellroy for the first time.
For those familiar with the author's entire career, it's difficult not to see a fairly clear-cut trajectory. After a promising debut, Ellroy went through an impressive period of growth that produced some of the best & essential novels of contemporary noir/crime and historical fiction. Over the last fifteen years, however, that momentum seems to have gradually petered out. The books continue to possess an energy that many authors can only envy and demonstrate an extraordinary talent, but E. don't give off the impression of questioning his own expressive tools, of saying something new. He stubbornly inhabits his own universe, heedless of the very idea of renewal.
What is lacking? A ticking time bomb element! If you go back and read it there's literally nothing rushing these people to solve these crimes or go ahead with the probe. And if there was it wasn't stressed enough, because what transpires is that everyone is doing stuff to please some higher-up. But as a reader it makes you care less. It might be cliché but you need to save someone before something happens, solve something before an impending deadline...
Maybe novel might have also benefited from more pages where the pace slowed to make room for more lyrical and contemplative descriptions of Los Angeles, or from digressions capable of introducing a change of register and restoring emotional depth beyond the usual hallucinatory vertigo. None of this seems to interest Ellroy. The engine remains constantly at full revs, and the only pauses are often entrusted to the characters themselves, called upon to reconstruct events to prevent the dense and labyrinthine plot from becoming completely indecipherable.
Ellroy has an obsessive personality. He thrives on memories. Among fictional characters, real politicians, models, singers, actors, police officers, and Hollywood underworld figures mingle with high frequency. At times, entire sequences seem to exist solely to pit them against each other and let them converse, insult each other, engage in verbal skirmishes that take on the tone of a grotesque private fantasy. This is the privilege of a writer who has achieved such a degree of authority that he can indulge his obsessions without worrying about always making them transparent to the reader. The result is the impression of a twentieth-century American world continually relived, then distorted until it becomes a personal mythology in which memory, invention, and delirium merge.
I secretly wish that Ellroy abandoned Otash as a protagonist, he's rather dull and almost always unpleasant, but for some incomprehensible reason, Mr. E. adores him. It remains an adrenaline-fueled and powerful read, but not essential to his canon.
Reading this novel was a hallucinatory experience. A fever dream similar to a film, but shot through with exaggerated color filters, frenetic editing, and oblique shots.
What's good about this novel? Obviously, its unmistakable style, which ultimately overwhelms any other consideration and is ultimately its strength. Ellroy's writing is always propulsive, syncopated, possessing a bebop cadence, broken and unmistakable, and a prodigious use of slang and alliteration. This gives the novel a delirious pacing, and it is precisely this absolute fidelity to his own stylistic signature that represents, at least in my opinion, the book's main limitation and a potential obstacle for those approaching Ellroy for the first time.
For those familiar with the author's entire career, it's difficult not to see a fairly clear-cut trajectory. After a promising debut, Ellroy went through an impressive period of growth that produced some of the best & essential novels of contemporary noir/crime and historical fiction. Over the last fifteen years, however, that momentum seems to have gradually petered out. The books continue to possess an energy that many authors can only envy and demonstrate an extraordinary talent, but E. don't give off the impression of questioning his own expressive tools, of saying something new. He stubbornly inhabits his own universe, heedless of the very idea of renewal.
What is lacking? A ticking time bomb element! If you go back and read it there's literally nothing rushing these people to solve these crimes or go ahead with the probe. And if there was it wasn't stressed enough, because what transpires is that everyone is doing stuff to please some higher-up. But as a reader it makes you care less. It might be cliché but you need to save someone before something happens, solve something before an impending deadline...
Maybe novel might have also benefited from more pages where the pace slowed to make room for more lyrical and contemplative descriptions of Los Angeles, or from digressions capable of introducing a change of register and restoring emotional depth beyond the usual hallucinatory vertigo. None of this seems to interest Ellroy. The engine remains constantly at full revs, and the only pauses are often entrusted to the characters themselves, called upon to reconstruct events to prevent the dense and labyrinthine plot from becoming completely indecipherable.
Ellroy has an obsessive personality. He thrives on memories. Among fictional characters, real politicians, models, singers, actors, police officers, and Hollywood underworld figures mingle with high frequency. At times, entire sequences seem to exist solely to pit them against each other and let them converse, insult each other, engage in verbal skirmishes that take on the tone of a grotesque private fantasy. This is the privilege of a writer who has achieved such a degree of authority that he can indulge his obsessions without worrying about always making them transparent to the reader. The result is the impression of a twentieth-century American world continually relived, then distorted until it becomes a personal mythology in which memory, invention, and delirium merge.
I secretly wish that Ellroy abandoned Otash as a protagonist, he's rather dull and almost always unpleasant, but for some incomprehensible reason, Mr. E. adores him. It remains an adrenaline-fueled and powerful read, but not essential to his canon.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I’m old enough to remember way back in the early 1960s, when Richard Nixon unsuccessfully ran for president against John F. Kennedy, and when JFK and his brother Bobby, as his attorney general, spent about as much time hunting communists as working for civil rights. In 1962 in Los Angeles, when this story begins, anybody as old as I am will read a whole lot of familiar names; Nixon and the Kennedys, of course, but also Tom Bradley (later mayor), Daryl Gates (later LAPD chief), Hugh Hefner, Nixon’s henchmen Haldeman and Erlichman, and even Quincy Jones.
Freddy Otash is detailed to the DA’s office, and he and Gates are tasked with flushing communists out and putting them away. This is ostensibly fallout from the just-passed Cuban Missile Crisis, but it also might just be a bit of distraction from the Kennedys’ relationships with Marilyn Monroe. Nixon’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for California governor is in the home stretch when Haldeman and Erlichman hire Otash to keep tabs on Nixon after hours, because he’s been acting oddly. Otash may spend a lot of time bombed on booze, uppers and opiates, but he’s excellent at tailing people, illegally entering and searching places, and physically persuading people to cooperate. Who’d have thought that his tailing of Nixon on Halloween night would end up connecting with his commie hunt—and exposing a particularly gruesome murder?
Ellroy’s rat-a-tat style is in full form here, with round-the-clock kaleidoscopic action that makes LA in the Sixties seem strangely attractive, despite its corruption and violence.
Freddy Otash is detailed to the DA’s office, and he and Gates are tasked with flushing communists out and putting them away. This is ostensibly fallout from the just-passed Cuban Missile Crisis, but it also might just be a bit of distraction from the Kennedys’ relationships with Marilyn Monroe. Nixon’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for California governor is in the home stretch when Haldeman and Erlichman hire Otash to keep tabs on Nixon after hours, because he’s been acting oddly. Otash may spend a lot of time bombed on booze, uppers and opiates, but he’s excellent at tailing people, illegally entering and searching places, and physically persuading people to cooperate. Who’d have thought that his tailing of Nixon on Halloween night would end up connecting with his commie hunt—and exposing a particularly gruesome murder?
Ellroy’s rat-a-tat style is in full form here, with round-the-clock kaleidoscopic action that makes LA in the Sixties seem strangely attractive, despite its corruption and violence.
June 26, 2026
I have read all of Ellroy's books, but the last five of them I think have by and large been missing what drew me to his writing in the first place. What I used to enjoy about Ellroy was his skill for portraying underdogs and tortured souls in his main characters, and telling stories that didn't take sides, but instead just showed a larger-than-life underbelly of society where the characters operated in a grey scale.
The main character of Freddy Otash I think was fine in Widespread Panic and The Enchanters, he works better as a PI rather than a cop. As a cop he is a storm trooper and a gorilla, a shallow characterization that is completely unlikeable to me. It's impossible for me to view Red Sheet in a vacuum, and to me Freddy Otash is Lloyd Hopkins minus all the things that make Lloyd Hopkins an interesting character.
This book takes a rather outspoken political stance, which certainly is a choice you can make, but something I don't recognize from early Ellroy. The things that happen in this book come off as a fever dream, and it's just too much. Ellroy was always about exaggeration, but managed to find a sweet spot where it was still somewhat believable. When the conclusions are reached in Red Sheet I just feel nothing, a big shrug and numbness.
The main character of Freddy Otash I think was fine in Widespread Panic and The Enchanters, he works better as a PI rather than a cop. As a cop he is a storm trooper and a gorilla, a shallow characterization that is completely unlikeable to me. It's impossible for me to view Red Sheet in a vacuum, and to me Freddy Otash is Lloyd Hopkins minus all the things that make Lloyd Hopkins an interesting character.
This book takes a rather outspoken political stance, which certainly is a choice you can make, but something I don't recognize from early Ellroy. The things that happen in this book come off as a fever dream, and it's just too much. Ellroy was always about exaggeration, but managed to find a sweet spot where it was still somewhat believable. When the conclusions are reached in Red Sheet I just feel nothing, a big shrug and numbness.
July 14, 2026
Red Sheet, James Ellroy [Knopf, 2026].
Red Sheet is a convoluted saga of crime, political intrigue, and alternative history. Red Sheet features the return of some time Ellroy protagonist Freddy Otash—Lebanese-American, Marine Corps veteran of WWII, disgraced LAPD cop, former private eye, dope fiend, boozer, and lieutenant of the DA’s bureau. Otash leads a team rooting out communist/subversive activity within the Civil Rights Movement. The story unfolds involving a torture/murder, an unsolved double homicide with a similar MO, atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, a drug-addled Hugh Hefner’s aborted plan to open an integrated nightclub, bent cops, political radicals of various stripes and their intercene conflicts, counterfeiting, blackmail, and the ransom of the Lindbergh baby.
***
James Ellroy is the author of the L.A. Quartet, which includes The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. Additionally, his work includes the Underground U.S.A. Trilogy, amongst other works. He has been heralded as “America’s Dostoyevsky” and our “greatest living writer.” Ellroy lives in Colorado.
Red Sheet is a convoluted saga of crime, political intrigue, and alternative history. Red Sheet features the return of some time Ellroy protagonist Freddy Otash—Lebanese-American, Marine Corps veteran of WWII, disgraced LAPD cop, former private eye, dope fiend, boozer, and lieutenant of the DA’s bureau. Otash leads a team rooting out communist/subversive activity within the Civil Rights Movement. The story unfolds involving a torture/murder, an unsolved double homicide with a similar MO, atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, a drug-addled Hugh Hefner’s aborted plan to open an integrated nightclub, bent cops, political radicals of various stripes and their intercene conflicts, counterfeiting, blackmail, and the ransom of the Lindbergh baby.
***
James Ellroy is the author of the L.A. Quartet, which includes The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. Additionally, his work includes the Underground U.S.A. Trilogy, amongst other works. He has been heralded as “America’s Dostoyevsky” and our “greatest living writer.” Ellroy lives in Colorado.
July 9, 2026
This is the first Ellroy novel I haven’t loved. I think a major reason for that is I don’t find Freddy Otash that interesting or compelling. Another problem is that these Otash books are to some extent covering the same ground that Underworld USA trilogy already did (but better). I am disappointed that he decided to write these Otash novels instead of finishing the second LA Quartet.
Problems aside, watching the plot unfold is a lot of fun. It’s just less compelling than usual because I don’t really care about Otash and based on him being a real person I already know that he makes it through everything more or less okay. One aspect that really worked well were the extensive flashbacks that happened periodically with characters where they basically explained why they were who they were (answer: guilt).
Problems aside, watching the plot unfold is a lot of fun. It’s just less compelling than usual because I don’t really care about Otash and based on him being a real person I already know that he makes it through everything more or less okay. One aspect that really worked well were the extensive flashbacks that happened periodically with characters where they basically explained why they were who they were (answer: guilt).
July 11, 2026
Yup. The demon dog is back as Freddy O., the Hat Squad, and a host of others prowl Hollyweird and 60s La-La Land. This time Bobby the K wants them to ferret out communist interference with the the Civil Rights movement in L.A.; along the way Freddy and co. have to deal with Tricky Dick Nixon, Alger Hiss, blowback from the long ago Lindbergh kidnapping, the drug and sex fueled music world, and a whole mess of C. P. Killers who go back to the Spanish Civil War.
Although this part fact, part fiction, and all phantasmagoria tale isn’t quite up to the standards set by the previous book. “The Enchanters”, Ellroy still manages to come up with some hyperkinetic pizzazz as well as a convoluted plot that Raymond Chandler would have been proud of, and an actual mystery. The book vibes Ellroy, Daddy-O!
Although this part fact, part fiction, and all phantasmagoria tale isn’t quite up to the standards set by the previous book. “The Enchanters”, Ellroy still manages to come up with some hyperkinetic pizzazz as well as a convoluted plot that Raymond Chandler would have been proud of, and an actual mystery. The book vibes Ellroy, Daddy-O!
July 14, 2026
Hard to follow. Choppy writing.
Part of me admired the complexity of this novel, but IMHO it was hard to follow. Writing very short and choppy with tons of characters and subplot. Definitely need to concentrate on this one. The Sound and the Fury was an easier read. If you're going to tackle this, be aware there is a key at the end of the book with an outline of each of the numerous characters. Didn't know this until book completed. If you refer to the character outline as you go, it would be a much easier undertaking. A basic knowledge of the Spanish civil war, the red scare and the political machinations of the early 60s would also be helpful. The main character was so hyped on machismo and testosterone it was almost cartoonist. Hard to relate to. I'm sure fans of this author and his style will enjoy this book, but it just wasn't my thing.
Part of me admired the complexity of this novel, but IMHO it was hard to follow. Writing very short and choppy with tons of characters and subplot. Definitely need to concentrate on this one. The Sound and the Fury was an easier read. If you're going to tackle this, be aware there is a key at the end of the book with an outline of each of the numerous characters. Didn't know this until book completed. If you refer to the character outline as you go, it would be a much easier undertaking. A basic knowledge of the Spanish civil war, the red scare and the political machinations of the early 60s would also be helpful. The main character was so hyped on machismo and testosterone it was almost cartoonist. Hard to relate to. I'm sure fans of this author and his style will enjoy this book, but it just wasn't my thing.
June 23, 2026
This book is like getting into the backseat of a car only to discover the driver is high and crazy , and your best hope of seeing the sunrise the next day is to hold on but also be in the flow—- you are along for the ride and there’s no stopping the inevitable. I started to enjoy it more when I stopped trying to analyze each dropped name, place and events, stopped trying to connect it all to the REAL history. The real history is there but will only come to make sense when you let it go and enjoy the holistic plot, point and themes. If you know nada about LA history , I’m not sure this book is for you, but with just the inkling of knowledge it eventually makes sense.
July 2, 2026
It's James Ellroy--complicated plots, crazy violence, dozens of characters, unbelievable behavior, wild dialogue, real people treated slanderously, etc. The plots are always a mix of real events in LA and things that could never happen. The best way to read Ellroy is put your mind in neutral and buckle your seatbelt because you are always in for a wild ride through a dark imagination. His novels tend to be loosely linked and are best read in order, not that it really matters. The payoff for this reader is the outrageousness of it all, not he plot.
June 10, 2026
Take former Hollywood fixer and corrupt PI Freddy Otash, add in the Red Scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Richard Nixon, and what you get is James Ellroy’s new book Red Sheet, an apocalyptic fever dream that will stay with you long after the last page is turned. Ellroy masterfully weaves complex plot lines and a diverse array of characters into his storytelling which culminates in a brilliant starburst of devastation and redemption. Five stars out of five.
July 3, 2026
As one character says, "The AG wanted the probe wrapped up and shut down." Me too, friend. Me too. James Ellroy's trademark machine gun prose and noir obsessions are all here, yet the book often feels less like a literary fever dream and more like a slog. Even so, when a genius misses, it's still fascinating to watch. Whad'ya gonna do?
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A gripping, grinning madness that rebuilds American history into its own deep state conspiracy mythology. Counter-counter-counter revolutions pan out into simple cons. Everyone is working an angle and turning state’s evidence if they can.
June 26, 2026
4.2
Mil
Mil
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2026
His writing style has gotten tiresome to me. The story is good and revealing but I have to force myself to deal with the jerkiness of his narrative. This will be my last book by him.
July 5, 2026
Not much of a story, but literally no one writes prose like this.
July 7, 2026
I usually enjoy Mr Ellroy but this one was a struggle . Unusual style of writing was extremely annoying .
July 14, 2026
not great.
Elroy keeps going back to the same ground over and over. his last few novels have been subpar and if written by an unknown author probably would not have been published.
Elroy keeps going back to the same ground over and over. his last few novels have been subpar and if written by an unknown author probably would not have been published.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hurled into the middle of a sprint in the opening page of Red Sheet, with whiplash the reader runs alongside LAPD DA Lieutenant Freddy Otash, our hero-narrator. The country is obsessed with post-Bay of Pigs Communist Red Panic and a pair of bad guys, one black and the other white (coined Salt and Pepper) are terrorizing LA in October, 1962. The police are fully immersed in the search for the mystery duo while Otash tails Ex-VP Richard Nixon who is running for Governor of California. Powerful people expect Tricky Dick to lose the gubernatorial race but still hope to discover dirt on the Republican powerhouse. On Halloween, a murder occurs at a location where Nixon just departed and Otash lashes on to the mystery like a cranked-up junkyard dog.
This is historical fiction told in the back of '61 Cutlass going 80 miles per hour. Alger Hiss, Charles Lindburgh, Hugh Hefner, Richard Nixon, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Eddie Chacon and other household names make regular apperances. The book fields a huge cast and includes a helpful dramatis personae of over fifty characters. After brilliant set pieces establish the story, Otash suspects four boys, born to a Communist women horribly traumatized during the Spanish Civil War, are living in sleeper cells in LA. They are ultra-dangerous and could be anyone. Otash also connects the unsolved death of two women from the 1950s to the murder on Halloween and he's driven down countless dangerous paths in an effort to uncover Commies and connect the killings.
Otash is a fascinating protagonist. He's a methodical detective, capable of studying and fingerprinting a room with precision that borders on savant artistry, but he's also a violent beast who consumes astonishing amounts of drugs and employs a highly flexible moral code. 1960s nomenclature adds authenticity as Freddy writes real reports to his bosses but jive reports for public consumption. Scram, bop, stiffs, malts, hip, square, jazzed, caper, drift, and dig work into sharp prose without every feeling cheesy or forced. Fast talk and pace slightly dampens the intense violence in the story.
Red Sheet will be loved by fans of Quentin Tarantino films and those who enjoy Hunter S. Thompson level insanity. It also comes highly recommended to readers of Colson Whitehead as Ellroy’s slick prose matches his in many ways.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for a review copy.
This is historical fiction told in the back of '61 Cutlass going 80 miles per hour. Alger Hiss, Charles Lindburgh, Hugh Hefner, Richard Nixon, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Eddie Chacon and other household names make regular apperances. The book fields a huge cast and includes a helpful dramatis personae of over fifty characters. After brilliant set pieces establish the story, Otash suspects four boys, born to a Communist women horribly traumatized during the Spanish Civil War, are living in sleeper cells in LA. They are ultra-dangerous and could be anyone. Otash also connects the unsolved death of two women from the 1950s to the murder on Halloween and he's driven down countless dangerous paths in an effort to uncover Commies and connect the killings.
Otash is a fascinating protagonist. He's a methodical detective, capable of studying and fingerprinting a room with precision that borders on savant artistry, but he's also a violent beast who consumes astonishing amounts of drugs and employs a highly flexible moral code. 1960s nomenclature adds authenticity as Freddy writes real reports to his bosses but jive reports for public consumption. Scram, bop, stiffs, malts, hip, square, jazzed, caper, drift, and dig work into sharp prose without every feeling cheesy or forced. Fast talk and pace slightly dampens the intense violence in the story.
Red Sheet will be loved by fans of Quentin Tarantino films and those who enjoy Hunter S. Thompson level insanity. It also comes highly recommended to readers of Colson Whitehead as Ellroy’s slick prose matches his in many ways.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for a review copy.
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