Which brings us to Red Sheet. The book begins on Oct. 29, 1962 — the day after the Cuban Missile Crisis had concluded. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, fearing that communist subversives are out for revenge, engages the Los Angeles Police Department in an investigation, hoping to roust and expose local Reds. Informally, the man who ends up largely leading that investigation is our antihero, Freddy Otash, a mostly off-the-books fixer for the LAPD who pops Dexedrine pills like they’re Tic Tacs and reports directly to the LAPD’s top brass. He’s an expert in surveillance and illegal black bag jobs; in spite of his drug habits and indifference to legal boundaries, Otash’s obsessive methods of mentally imprinting information make him an excellent detective. 

Separately from the Red investigation, Otash and his immediate boss — the No. 2 man at the department, Daryl Gates — are approached by two aides for the current Republican gubernatorial candidate. The election is in a few days, and it seems H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are concerned that the former vice president, Richard Nixon — well aware that his campaign for governor is doomed — is acting out in ways that might be compromising. Otash soon tails Nixon to a house where he’s with a woman in the middle of the night, and shortly after Nixon leaves, Otash discovers the woman has been murdered. The murder appears tied to a double homicide several years back, and all three stiffs lead straight back to revelations from the inquiry into the local Reds, which, in turn, raises questions about the possible existence of a shadowy group of psychosexual assassins who have no known identity because they were born and raised collectively in secretive communist sleeper cells. 

Meanwhile, there’s an up-and-coming black man on the political scene — a former LAPD man, no less — who’s about to get elected to the city council. Naturally, Tom Bradley is pushing civil rights and the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Eager to exploit the city’s newfound civil rights foray is Hugh Hefner, who’s looking to expand his Playboy Club empire into a mixed-race neighborhood in a city that’s a powder keg of criminal activity and… well, we’re just the first 50 pages or so. The genius of Ellroy is that he’s simultaneously economical and sprawling; over the course of 500 pages, he’s somehow capable of efficiently explicating the equivalent of several seasons of The Wire with a rhythmic parataxis that aims to punch the reader in the throat. 

Despite heightening the contradictions wherever he can, Ellroy manages to get away with it because he’s also able to convey a great deal of verisimilitude in and around the margins. His skill as a historical novelist is almost as notable as his talent for crime fiction. The period details, particularly his grasp of the LAPD’s inner workings and the city politics of the era, are convincing. Real-life figures wander on and off the page, and Ellroy isn’t afraid to challenge the popular portrayals of politicians and celebrities. Hefner is portrayed here as a greedy, strung-out quasi-criminal, which feels refreshingly accurate relative to the pervy-but-avuncular free-speech warrior described in his obituaries several years back. 

As such, half the fun of reading Red Sheet comes from sorting fact from fiction. It’s doubtful most readers will know that Otash’s love interest — the throaty, 6-foot-tall folk singer Judy Henske — was a real person until they see her photo and dedication at the end of the book. Although she faded into obscurity, in the early 60s, Henske was beloved as much for her talent as her charisma. She famously dated a young nightclub comic named Woody Allen, and it is no coincidence that Henske and the fictional Annie Hall both hail from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It’s nice to see Ellroy giving Henske her due. 

And at a time when most bookstores look like the merch table for #TheResistance, Ellroy isn’t afraid to squarely challenge the beliefs of readers and critics. Ellroy is no ideologue, but he has always been preoccupied with the themes of integrity and justice in ways that flout political correctness. (For what it’s worth, Ellroy acquired these preoccupations the hard way: his own mother was murdered.)

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Accordingly, the book begins with an affectingly Christian epigraph by famed anti-communist memoirist Whittaker Chambers, and despite a full cast of compromised characters, there is no doubt about who the villains are in Red Sheet. The post-Soviet historical record pretty much confirms Hollywood and various unions were crawling with genuinely dangerous anti-American subversives in the 50s and 60s. To the extent that Ellroy’s literary contemporaries have engaged this same era, historical events such as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist have been near-universally, and inaccurately, portrayed as the result of outrageous paranoia. But in Red Sheet, the communist threat is, and to a nontrivial extent remains, real. 

Ellroy’s critics might be tempted to write him off as a reactionary, and there could be something to that. He’s so old-school that he doesn’t own a computer. He recently told the Guardian that our modern dependency on computers is “satanic.” But while technology is ever-changing, Ellroy’s fundamental grasp of the inherently dark aspects of human nature remains a constant. Red Sheet is perhaps not Ellroy’s best work — the uninitiated are still best served starting with his LA quartet, which famously includes L.A. Confidential, the source material for the Oscar-winning film. That’s not much of a knock on Red Sheet, because at 78 years old, Ellroy is still operating near the top of his game. Readers ought to be grateful for what they’ve got, because no one is coming up behind Ellroy with a similar talent for being confrontational and iconoclastic yet skilled enough to leave readers wanting more.

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at RealClearInvestigations and the books editor at the Federalist.