(by Alessandra Baldini) Marilyn Monroe was murdered because of her “dangerous relationship”? Crime writer James Patterson is convinced of this, and his next book, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe: A True Crime Thriller, will revisit the rise and fall of Hollywood’s most legendary diva.
“I think she was in a very dangerous situation,” said the world’s best-selling thriller author in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter: “She had extraordinary relationships with President JF Kennedy, with Robert Kennedy, with Frank Sinatra and with Mafia figures. People who told her things that she was monitoring. Marilyn knew about things that were potentially dangerous.”
The famous Some Like It Hot star was found dead 63 years ago in the bedroom of her Brentwood home: a medicine box on the bedside table and an empty bottle of Nembutal sleeping pills on the floor led authorities to rule it suicide. The death of the diva, who was 36 years old and at the peak of her career, remains one of pop culture’s most enduring fascinations, a historical tale perfectly suited to our conspiracy theory-obsessed age.
Patterson’s book, co-written by British author Imogen Edwards-Jones, will be released in bookstores on December 1, joining a myriad of narrative explorations of the actress’s life and death: among the most recent, two 2022 Netflix productions, Blonde with Ana de Armas, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, and The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, a documentary inspired by Anthony Summers’ 1985 book, Goddess.
Patterson believes the public is ready for new insight into the diva’s mystery: “A lot of people don’t know her story. I didn’t know much before I started either.” Among the ‘discoveries’ of the crime writer, author of more than 250 books that have sold more than 475 million copies, includes the eleven families that Norma Jean Mortensen later raised as a child and the fact that she stuttered as a child. “I don’t know much about his death, the autopsy wasn’t as complete as it should have been, and one of the detectives who arrived on the scene believed he was staged. The key is: a lot of people knew something about him, but not much.”
Contrary to the cover’s claim that Marilyn is a “true crime thriller”, the book includes a small caveat in the notes that it is “a work of fiction”. There’s a substantial bibliography, but also imagined dialogue: “I learned it from Norman Mailer. I believe, as long as you’re honest with the public”, says Patterson who now hopes to find someone to adapt ‘his’ Marilyn into a TV series.
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