Left of Eden

“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

Left 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 sordid family of a Hollywood starlet, and the most beautiful and desired woman in the town at the moment.

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.

The book is the first of a trilogy about Los Angeles in the 1940s, with the second and third books set respectively in the booming defense industry that surrounds the city and amid the politics and prejudices of the LAPD as Harry grapples with his past on the force. Dennis Broe is a film noir and classic Hollywood scholar who has taught at The Sorbonne and is the author of Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood.

Dennis Broe taught Television Studies at the Sorbonne and is the author of two previous studies of the crime film: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood and Class, Crime and International Film Noir. He lives in Paris and haunts the “petite salles de la cinquieme,” the little movie theaters of the 5th Arrondissement, which show American film noirs and Westerns.