A Hello to Arms

A Hello To Arms

Semi-corruptible ex-LAPD cop Harry Palmer is hired by an African-American defense industry worker who claims he was a victim of workplace contaminants. He needs Harry’s help to get his pension from an airline industry which may or may not be going bankrupt. Harry is also asked to plug a leak in the Henry Wallace presidential campaign which is sabotaging its efforts to get off the ground. As he follows a trail strewn with corpses and sex, confronting airline industry bigwigs, philandering generals and their lascivious wives, and an Oakie foreman with ties to the Tulsa massacre, Harry starts making dangerous connections.

"An ingeniously plotted look at a side of postwar America we don’t often see, and extremely relevant today." --Ellen Clair Lamb, author, editor, and assistant editor of Books to Die For.

“Dennis Broe is an international expert on film noir…[whose] expansive knowledge informs his homage to past crime writers. Compelling characterisation and clever dialogue…highlight a wonderfully compromised private detective, troubled clients, a cohort of devious criminals and plodding FBI muscle, all of which expands upon the political corruption at the heart of the US.” -- Paul Simon, Morning Star

Praise for Left of Eden

“This potboiler takes us on a wild rollercoaster ride… from palatial mansions with glamorous stars to studio lots to tiny bungalow apartments where wannabe starlets pool resources to live until their big break in this predatory company town. Broe’s crystalline commentary on Hollywood history and practice distinguishes his writing from the run of the genre… We do not often get the political clarity that we find here.” -- Eric Gordon, Better Lemons Most Prolific Critic Award, 2019.

The first novel in the trilogy, Left of Eden, followed the adventures of ex-cop Harry Palmer as he threaded his way through a web of deceit and murder in a case that dealt with the Hollywood Blacklist at the moment of its being installed in the industry. Peter Kuznick who co-wrote The Untold History of the United Stateswith Oliver Stone, called the book“a suspenseful joy-ride down the twisting roads of Laurel Canyon into a Hollywood netherworld that is anything but the glamour industry many assumed it to be”and Gunnar Staalesen, the author of the Norwegian Varg Veum novels said “I read with pleasure Left of Eden, a well-written, entertaining pastiche of the Chandler/Ross Macdonald style. The novel is well-researched about the blacklist period, a theme I do not remember either Chandler or Macdonald ever mentioning.”

Dennis Broe is the author of the Harry Palmer L.A. Trilogy, the first book of which is Left of Eden and the third is The Precinct With the Golden Arm. He is also a journalist, scholar and professor whose area of expertise is the crime film or film noir, '40s Hollywood cinema, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. His books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood; Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art;and Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception. He has taught in the film and television department at the Sorbonne and is a critic and Paris correspondent for the Pacifica Network in the U.S., Art District Radio in Paris, the websites Crime Time, Culture Mattersand People’s Worldand the British daily Morning Star.
He covers the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals but prefers the quiet solitude of little cinemas of Paris' 5th arrondissement which play Westerns and crime films.