It has no mobile. No computer. Not even a typewriter. He hates television and says that the black novel has died from Hammett. He is considered an artisan of the trade, born 76 years ago in Los Angeles. Turn off the light of your house by … Nights to listen to the Sonatas de Beethoven in the dark. They call him the ‘American Dostoevski’ and boasts of never having read any Russian author. It is James Ellroy, a paradigm of a genre that denies.
Ellroy has just published ‘The seducers’, a book about the death of Marilyn Monroe, of which she affirms that she was “a stupid, superficial and without talent.” He also says that it was not beautiful, but rough and rude, consumed by drugs and alcohol and unfaithful.
‘The seducers’ is a novel of more than 500 pages that starts on August 4, 1962 when the mythical actress is found dead, apparently by an overdose of barbiturates, at her home of Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood (Los Angeles). His keys of keys saw light after the door of his bedroom and, having no response, called Marilyn’s doctor, who found his body after entering a window. It was half past three in the morning.
The entire narrative is built on the enigma of the death of the protagonist of ‘The Knights prefer them blondes’, who was 36 years old at that time and was in the zenith of his fame. His death shocked the world and unleashed a series of speculations that have not turned off six decades later.
The entire narrative is built on the enigma of the death of the protagonist of ‘The Knights prefer them blondes’
With a mixture of reality and fiction, Ellroy describes the suffocating and sordid atmosphere of Los Angeles, in which Marilyn is one more piece in an environment of police corruption, sexual debauchery, alcohol and drug addiction and wild exploitation. Nothing is safe from his relentless gaze, which, however, lets nostalgia for an era that he lived in his adolescence and continues to populate his dreams.
The protagonist of the novel, recounted in the first person, is Freddy Otash, a corrupt, drug addict and blackmaker. He is hired by Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the powerful truck drivers to look for dirty rags against John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, who investigate him for his mafia practices. It was an open secret that the president of the United States had maintained a relationship with Marilyn. When the actress expires, Hoffa commission OTash to provide material to destroy them if they continue to harass.
Otash discovers clues that suggest that Marilyn was killed by a psychopath and connects it with the kidnapping of another actress to whom she had met and with which she had exercised prostitution in the inco of her careers. Everything changes when Robert Kennedy stops Otash, seizes the material and orders him to continue investigating to discredit Marilyn and protect his brother.
While Otash continues to tour the streets of Los Angeles, questioning witnesses and manipulating evidence, Ellroy shows us the brutal methods of the Los Angeles Police and the Department of Justice, which, without the slightest moral scrupulum, undergo crimes and twist the law at the service of Hollywood studies and political clans.
No one is saved
The novel goes far beyond demystifying the Kennedy and the glamor of Camelot, the symbol of the transformation they wanted to carry out. Ellroy presents them as two ambitious characters, without principles and who do not hesitate to use their power to erase the traces of their runs. John Kennedy is described as a sexual obsessive, who looks for young girls and leads a double life that hides his perverse habits. Robert protects him by trampling the law.
No one is saved in Ellroy’s narration, in which the protagonist throws a vacuum criminal. The Los Angeles Police bosses are corrupt and opportunistic types, Hollywood actors are libertine and drug addicts, journalists are dedicated to blackmail and spread bulls there are no in ‘The seducers’, a vast choral story with more than 40 characters, none that shows the slightest bunch of morality.
Written with short and incisive phrases, in a telegraphic way, as is his usual style, Ellroy achieves a great fresco of the time and an angels in which the myth overlaps reality. As the journalist of ‘Liberty Valence’ says, when the facts and legend collide, it is always preferable that the legend prevails. The negative that projects in ‘the seducers’ does not destroy, but reinforces the myth.
#Pedro #García #Cuartango #Demoling #Marilyns #myth
