Paul Simon reviews the latest novel from Dennis Broe, A Hello to Arms

Fresh from exposing the murderous and duplicitous Hollywood of the immediate post-war period, Harry Palmer finds his next commission broadly doing the same for California’s other boom sector of the time: aircraft manufacturing. As with Dennis Broe’s first outing for the ex-LAPD private investigator, A Hello to Arms is first and foremost a knowing homage to the classic US version of the detective genre. But it is also a respectful one, steering away from postmodernist sneering.

The author uses the required conventions: dry, if not always droll commentary, a hero teetering on the brink of earning the sobriquet ‘anti’ before that title, the over-use of coincidences ('I was in luck') and a cast of memorable and flawed characters, especially the female ones. But these fixtures and fittings allow Broe a huge degree of confidence and latitude to explore topics and develop narratives that are usually unreferenced or only obliquely noted in more traditional interpretations.

He even introduces a female Palmer sidekick, although the third person accounts of her novice investigations slightly jar against Palmer's stentorian first-person descriptions. This combination of familiar tropes seen through new perspectives also allows the reader to orientate themselves and immerse their attention in a thoroughly enjoyable story.

In this novel’s predecessor, East of Eden, Palmer found himself in a world dominated by exploitation built upon the aspirations of millions. A Hello To Arms is likewise focussed on exploitation, this time by the growing strength of the military-industrial complex and its tightening grip on US foreign and economic policy.

The lives of ordinary workers at Aerodynamics is especially dangerous and insecure, as the company looks to maintain its vast profits and beat back union organising efforts. Palmer is commissioned by Horace Williams an African-American who has been sacked from this job at the Stink Works, an especially secretive part of the complex. Whatever is going on there has impacted upon his client's memory and he is seeking compensation and some measure of justice. The sprawling interests of the arms industry are shown both in vivid descriptions of massive factory encroachments into the desert and through their embrace of the main political parties.

The novel's action is helpfully set during a series of rallies held by the Progressive Party presidential and anti-war candidate, Henry Wallace and soon Palmer is embroiled in investigating not just Williams' case but a political assassination as well. Being Harry Palmer, his manages to pick up a number of intertwined commissions along the way, further heightening the reader's sense that they are entering a moral and political maze with no obvious way out.

Broe more than hints at the impact of all this cross-stitched covert work on Palmer's own mental health as we see his downward despair into alcoholic and sex worker-infused binges. With references to contemporary 1940s culture and the blistering impact of racial injustices on individuals and whole communities , including a very personal playing out of the Tulsa riots, this novel is a mission accomplished. By being structurally true to its core genre, but endlessly extending it through a radical choice of issues and narrative backdrops, A Hello To Arms is a thoroughly enjoyable and successful literary mash-up.

Paul Simon reviews From the Plough to the Stars, edited by Jenny Farrell

This anthology is another impressive book from the Culture Matters imprint and is funded by a range of Irish trade unions and trades councils. Inspired by James Connolly's freedom call, these 49 compact works are the product of some of the most original and vibrant contemporary working-class Irish voices.

When offered such a breadth and variety of formats and topics, it is best that the reader plunges in a way best suited to them rather than following any pre-determined path. Just follow your nose for subversive ideas and punchy but lyrical writing and this collection will provide oceans of wonder.

For me this meant starting with Andy Snoddy's arrestingly titled The Radical Protestant Tradition in which the author recounts to his grandchildren the roles taken by his and others' forebears in the battles for Irish Independence. In doing so, Snoddy cleanly resets the establishment narrative that the Catholic and Protestant communities are pre-determined to be in opposition to each other.

His reference to the role of Linda Ervine's Gaelic Language classes in East Belfast hooks me onto her own life writing contribution here – Education. Here, Ervine recounts her determination, throughout an adult life initially defined by children and a violent husband and the pompous middle-class snobbery of some fellow students, to rise above her bouts of uncertainty. This is inspirational writing, charting an upwards trajectory bursting with working pride and achievement.

An adjacent piece of what the book rather limply refers to as memoir is very much of the COVID moment. In Mothering Through The Pandemic, Attracta Fahy conveys the stifling, cloying atmosphere of a room in which a mother keeps in touch with her children across the globe via video calls. The children, especially her eldest child a hospital worker in California deliberately resort to protecting their mother with the deadpan 'grand' when asked how they were doing creates a mounting sense of worry.

In the first work of fiction I turned to, this emotional journeying is wonderfully, puckishly inverted. In The Dodgy Box, Rachael Hegarty locates mum Debbie as she wanders further and further into an unfamiliar neighbourhood in search of a contact who will sell her a pirated decoder, allowing her family to avoid going stir crazy during the COVID restrictions.

Hegarty skilfully, almost imperceptibly, builds up the tension as Debbie's sense of threat begins to heighten in this, to her, strange environment. She's both dressed down and also keeps her eyes down from the curious glances of local residents. Yet rather than a traditional denouement or cataclysm, the author concludes with an act of both breathtaking, but also every day working-class solidarity and care. Far from being an anticlimax, this actually leaves the reader fist pumping in recognition of this eternal truth.

Back to life writing, but on a similar theme, Liz Gillis's The Liberties: We Don’t Eat Our Young Here Anymore is as close as any piece of writing can possibly get to being a clenched fist of resistance. A perennially disregarded 'other' part of central Dublin, Gillis recounts the community battles of the Liberties going back centuries against opportunistic spivs, OCD planners and others to reform, sanitise and destroy this cohesive but unacceptable working-class enclave. Her account never romanticises the people: it doesn't need to: they are heroes united in their struggle.

Victoria McNulty recalls another hero – a long dead mother – in her microscopically observed White Horses. Part of the Irish diaspora generationally settled, but not always welcomed in Scotland, her daughter recalls in the 1990s an industrious and kind woman, perplexed by the carnage taking place in her birth home of Derry. Elegiacally, McNulty conjures up Proustian wonders, from the steaming kitchen where her mother prepared the family's meals to her nervous love of the sea. The daughter, pulled back to Ireland, takes her son on a Troubles tourist trail to recapture her mother's elusive beginnings.

As unfettered capitalism and the COVID pandemic exacerbate the conditions of the working class in Ireland – and everywhere else – this book is a barricade of collective, imaginative resistance to our economic and political enemies. 

From the Plough to the Stars, ISBN 978-1-912710-36-2, £11 plus p. and p. from here.

Paul Simon reviews Dennis Broe's new novel

Author Dennis Broe is an international expert on film noir and an acclaimed socialist writer, as his dialectical and highly readable contributions to this website and his reviews for the Morning Star evidence.

In his first novel Left of Eden, his expansive knowledge informs his homage to past crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and to the US film workers and socialists who faced the purges of the McCarthy years of the late 1940s and 1950s.

Eschewing a self-mocking pastiche, Broe toys with the hardboiled American crime-thriller genre in the novel and, within the firmly established canon of a smart but wonderfully compromised private detective, various troubled clients, a cohort of devious criminals and plodding FBI muscle, he expands upon the political corruption at the heart of the US.

Harry Palmer, ingloriously late of the LAPD, has been hired by Democritus, a leftist film studio specialising in grittily realist tales, to uncover who is blackmailing its leading actor Jason “Gabby” Gabriel. Palmer quickly bumps up against the desperate and exploitative wings of a Hollywood culture that is bending to accommodate the growing state-sponsored anti-communism of the years immediately after the second world war. Broe adeptly demonstrates that the ecology of the US film business is an augmented version of society as a whole, with a few studio owners, themselves in hock to Wall Street, inflicting sexual and economic despotism over a dizzyingly large number of wannabe actors, mostly young women.

Palmer’s investigations see him commissioned by other clients connected to Gabriel, such that the plot eventually resembles a gigantic ouroboros, a serpent consuming itself and everything else in its way. Murder, beatings, exploitation, hidden sexuality and artistic freedoms and integrity are dominant themes in the novel and, in the hands of a less assured writer, they would surely strangle its narrative and impetus.

But Broe manages to successfully carry the whole project through to a most satisfying conclusion, thanks to compelling characterisation and clever dialogue, in which wisecracking conversations provide moments of humour, as in this exchange between Palmer and Democritus’s accountant:

“Are you honest?”
“As honest as the day is long,” I said.
“The days are getting shorter.”
“Exactly.”

Left of Eden is published by Pathmark Press, £11.66.