It turns out the history books have it all wrong. Richard Nixon was a hero. Dalton Trumbo was a snitch. And Elia Kazan, the most notorious name-namer of them all, was simply a courageous patriot who told the truth.
All this is courtesy of James Ellroy, the cantankerous 78-year-old crime novelist — The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid — who never met a consensus he didn’t want to burn down. His latest obsession — aired out in part in Red Sheet, his 18th novel, out June 9 — is the Blacklist, which in Ellroy’s estimation was a greatly misunderstood act of flag-waving righteousness that Hollywood has been scandalously misrepresenting ever since.
“The Hollywood 10 — they were either ex-Party or Party,” Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. … That’s who [these] people were.”
In the new novel, Ellroy once again resurrects Freddy Otash, the real-life Hollywood private dick who, in the 1950s, was famous for wiretapping movie stars for Confidential magazine. Otash last popped up in Ellroy’s fiction in 2023’s The Enchanters, which delved into the cover-up of Marilyn Monroe’s “murder.” This new tome picks up a few months later, in the jittery aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and has Otash mixing it up with Nixon’s doomed gubernatorial campaign and a corrupt communist trade union as he heads a Red-hunting government probe launched by Robert F. Kennedy.
