Books by Dennis Broe

“Dennis Broe, a renowned scholar of film noir, has written his own hard-boiled noir masterpiece, sprinkled with murder, blackmail, and sexual intrigue”—Peter Kuznick, co-author with Oliver Stone of The Untold History of the United States  “A terse mash-up of hard-boiled prose and good old-fashioned historical research” --Jon Lewis, author of Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles “A well-written, entertaining pastiche of the Chandler/Ross Macdonald style. Its theme – the blacklisting of central Hollywood characters” ––Gunnar Staalesen, author of the Varg Veum novels and predecessor to Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo and Henning Mankell “A gripping crime thriller [and] a wild rollercoaster ride through the many physical and social environments of Los Angeles of the late 1940s. From palatial mansions to studio lots with the glamorous stars to seedy offices and dives, to tiny bungalow apartments where wannabe starlets pool resources to live until their big break comes along”—Eric Gordon, Better Lemons Critic Award, 2019ΓÇï“One of the fun things in writing the novel was the thrill of using many of the stories I knew from having briefly worked in Hollywood and from having studied it for so long. In the novel I get to retell them but with a slight twist in a way that makes them even more suspenseful” –Interview with the author on Barry Forshaw’s Crime TimeLeft of Eden is a sordid noir set in postwar Hollywood at the moment when everything in the film industry and the country is about to change because of the looming McCarthy witch hunt and the blacklist. Detective Harry Palmer follows a trail of murder and mayhem that exposes the inner workings of the town and includes: one of the biggest studio heads, New York banker-financiers, writers and directors being hounded by the F.B.I., two-fisted union leaders who act like gangsters, actress wannabees living on the edge, the twisted family of a Hollywood starlet, and the most beautiful and desired woman in the town at the moment.Detective Harry Palmer has been kicked off the LAPD Homicide Squad for graft but that gives him just the right credentials to try to foil a badger or blackmail plot against activist actor Jason “Gabby” Gabriel for a supposed liaison with the underaged daughter of his former co-star. Harry becomes friends with Gabby who is about to be called to testify about his politics, falls hard for Gabby’s beautiful girlfriend, and must wind his way through the labyrinth of a duplicitous starlet’s family as all around him the bodies are dropping and as everyone seems to want to cash in on Gabby’s fast-talking personality, whether he is alive or dead.Harry will be back, exploring the dark corridors of LA’s aerospace and defense industry in A Hello to Arms and caught in the labyrinth of the drug trade involving his former police mates and the ever expanding pharmaceutical industry in The Precinct With the Golden Arm. 

Film noir, which flourished in 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles and sentiments of postwar America. Dennis Broe contends that the genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period.By following the evolution of film noir during the years following World War II, Broe illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor unions achieve broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir figure shifts from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop.Expanding his investigation into the Cold War and post-9/11 America, Broe extends his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor history. A brilliant, interdisciplinary examination, this is a work that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.