LOS ANGELES — The Dark Ages by Dennis Broe is a noir murder mystery. It’s about a time when people with money influenced people with political power to restructure the United States economy for their own benefit. A time when a small group of people were demonized and scapegoated. A time when union organizing was vehemently attacked. When there was a distrust of education. When free speech was assaulted, and books were banned. When government funds were redirected away from helping the less fortunate in order to lower the taxes of the rich. A time when dissident voices were silenced on the big screen, in the press and on the street. Careers were ruined. Some families were stressed to the breaking point. A feeling of suspicion pervaded communities, and culture was homogenized. Pertinent?
The Dark Ages is the second novel in Broe’s second detective thriller trilogy. We are ushered into 1950s Los Angeles. The House Un-American Activities Committee has already charged the Hollywood Ten with contempt of Congress, and the repercussions of the Hollywood Blacklist are being keenly felt. Harry Palmer, our hard luck detective, finds himself investigating a series of murders. Crystal Eckart, who started out as Harry’s assistant many books ago, has been promoted to partner. She has her own skills and charms that allow her into worlds closed off to Harry. Harry and Crystal each narrate their own adventures. Harry’s self-proclaimed luck, curiosity and investigative prowess allow us to patchwork together a whodunnit, or really a whydunnit tale. The twists and turns are highly entertaining. But what I found most fun is Broe’s nonlinear depiction of the forces behind and the engine propelling the Blacklist forward.
Broe has obviously done his research. He might compress time or composite people, but the essence of the era remains. Broe peppers the story with people and places historic to Los Angeles, giving the novel palpable vitality and verisimilitude. You can feel his playfulness as the novel takes us into glamorous celebrity haunts. The Brown Derby where the Cobb Salad was invented, Perino’s with its enormous central table where the rich and powerful could hold court, the luxurious Ciro’s where Hollywood and the Chicago mob mixed, and the (at the time) all-male Friars Club known for their celebrity roasts.
The novel isn’t at all about glitz and glamour. Harry is sympathetic to the struggles of the underdog, and his narrative reveals the effects of the Blacklist on the lives of writers who didn’t name names. One client recounts: “My story is typical. Right now, there are once highly paid writers doing all kinds of menial jobs. A close friend works in a warehouse, another works the lights in a nightclub in San Francisco, and another, instead of writing for television, now works as a TV repairman.”
Another client describes his diminishing power in Hollywood because of his dependence on a “front” to sell his script to the studios. “It’s gotten so bad that on the script before last when Trigger, my front, raised his rates, he claimed that he was doing most of the work because he had to go to the studio meetings while I got to sit home in front of my typewriter all day.”
And the havoc caused by the committee: “Virtually overnight there was an atmosphere of terror. Lives wrecked, careers destroyed, marriages and families broken up. Friends betrayed you, sometimes after swearing the night before they would stand by you until the end.”
Harry’s adventures take us from the Los Angeles suburbs where writers are trying to eke out a living to the picturesque town of Cuernavaca, Mexico, where a number of writers went to try and escape the Blacklist. Cuernavaca, 90 minutes out of Mexico City, offered an inexpensive lifestyle that was accessible. At the time you didn’t need a passport to enter Mexico. Yet even there, the expat community found many of the same dynamics they had tried to leave behind, but on a smaller scale.
I found the scenes Crystal narrates like the sorbet offered between different courses in the meal. She fills out the narrative with secondary story lines and provides us with a woman’s view of how to get stuff done in 1950s Los Angeles. Their strategies always involve glove-like clothing corseting ample bustlines. Broe’s women characters are always smart and strong, and they consciously use their sex appeal for good ends. “She didn’t feel so great about once again having to play the vamp to get what she needed, and she didn’t know how much longer she could continue to do this.” I, myself, can’t wait for Crystal to find herself in the liberated ’60s.
We also see signs of change in the future for Harry. Broe is adept at braiding together numerous story lines, and among them one line in particular broadens Harry’s character and makes him sympathetic. Harry lives the noir detective lifestyle of bars, booze and women. Despite a parade of women in Harry’s life we see his yearning for more meaningful relationships. We are treated to a great scene with a therapist (also an ongoing female character in the trilogy) where Harry and Crystal each share stories of their childhood in order to better understand their own behavior patterns. Harry is one of the good guys. We root for him as we see him make small changes and hope he will have more success in the future.
In the early ’50s Freud was still held in good regard. Broe being Broe, he doesn’t just present Harry’s personal journey with psychiatry. We also become introduced to a phony (very historically real) psychiatrist who uses the couch in nefarious ways to further the Blacklist. And, we come to understand that although psychiatry was favored by some, many on the left were wary of its individualist solution to systemic problems of capitalism. This is just one example where Broe comes at an issue from many angles so we can come away with a whole piece.
Crystal’s sleuthing bookends our story. At the beginning of The Dark Ages she takes on a case involving a working man whose home is unjustly being taken from him by a developer. This story line harkens back to Broe’s previous book in the Trilogy, The House That Buff Built. Toward the end of the The Dark Ages Crystal takes us to underground Los Angeles and a “pop-up” sex slave auction. What adventures await us in Broe’s third novel in his second Harry Palmer Trilogy? Breaking away from the Blacklist theme, this one’s called “Pornocopia.”
Broe’s comment on the relevance of The Dark Ages to today’s climate of suppression of ideas can be found here. A video interview with the author can be viewed here.
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