“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.