The Enchanters: Ellroy’s captive audience
For the following piece we welcome back to the blog James Ellroy aficionado and all-round good guy Jason Carter:
“I put a spell on you!!!”
James Ellroy left his Denver audience in no doubt as to who runs an Ellroy presentation. “You’re nobody’s audience but MINE!”
Just minutes before, an employee of Tattered Cover’s Colfax location warned the audience in her introduction of Ellroy that the Demon Dog would likely utilise some colourful language that would easily offend.
The warning was well timed, as Ellroy then launched into an extra-lengthy rendition of his signature “Peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants” introduction, followed by the Reverend Ellroy’s promise of unlimited bedroom action sans adultery, negative ramifications and STDs for anyone brave enough to purchase literally thousands of copies of his new novel The Enchanters.
And while this salaciously solicitous greeting is often a standard feature of Ellroy’s introductions, tonight it carried even greater gravity as the Tattered Cover—an iconic independent Colorado bookstore with a decades-long history and locations throughout the state—had just announced its bankruptcy filing and also the soul-crushing closure of three of its locations…
Ellroy has always championed brick and mortar bookstores and printed physical books verses their electronic counterparts, and Tattered Cover’s recent bankruptcy actions heightened the urgency exponentially: “Buy multiple copies of this book, or a serial killer I have waiting in the parking lot will slaughter all of you!” Ellroy commanded. “And don’t buy this book on the internet… it doesn’t count as much towards the New York Times best seller list.” This evening, October 18th, 2023 also came just four days shy of the 14th anniversary of when I met Ellroy for the very first time at this very bookstore on October 22, 2009… I saw the Demon Dog for a second time here on June 21, 2019 during his tour for This Storm, and that evening was memorable because Ellroy—our premier practitioner of profound profanity—chose deliberately to not use any foul language, even going as far as refusing to read any passages from This Storm due to the novel’s ubiquitous vulgarity.
“The Enchanters is my best book ever!” Ellroy followed this confident pronouncement with a far more nuanced rumination: “Ninety-six years ago, Dashiel Hammett’s first novel Red Harvest was published… Now in 2023 comes its corollary… Hammett and I represent the alpha and omega of the American hard boiled novel.”
Ellroy did also manage to insert his now famous commentary on the dividing line between Hammett and Raymond Chandler—“Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be, and Hammett wrote the man he feared he was”—while also declaring that “Hammett is infinitely greater than the candy-ass Raymond Chandler…”
Dog then read from The Enchanters exhilarating opening chapter, and then opened the floor for questions—though with strict limitations: “No questions about politics, no questions about my life, no questions about movies I might have written… I’ll cut you off at the knees!!” Only questions about The Enchanters were acceptable.
Ellroy soon contradicted this absolution however, when a patron asked him whether he would ever narrate any of his novels, as it was a perfect opportunity to promote Audible’s upcoming unabridged verbatim rendering of American Tabloid, which features Ellroy reading the narrative and the dialogue performed by a full cast, all in an epic runtime of nearly 22 hours.
The Demon Dog did also acknowledge why he chose to expand the once-second L.A. Quartet to the now L.A. Quintet—comprised chronologically of Perfidia, This Storm, The Enchanters, and two future Fred Otash novels set during the final months of 1962. “It’s a micro-history of L.A. in 1962 when I was 14…”
The number 14 is quite significant to me also… I was that same age when James Ellroy first crashed into my life thanks to a now-classic Unsolved Mysteries episode in March, 1996. While The Enchanters is heavily concerned with the death of Marilyn Monroe, Ellroy cautioned his Denver audience not to think of the book as a tribute to Ms. Monroe: “The Enchanters is classic P.I., and while it gives you the protracted life and death of Marilyn Monroe, I never liked her… I dislike her as a human being and as an actress… She never did a thing for me as a woman.”
The Enchanters is published by Penguin Random House.
Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is published by Bloomsbury.
The Venetian Vase 