The just-published Harry Palmer/Crystal Eckart novel The Dark Ages, takes place in 1951 as McCarthyism, in the form of the House Un-American Activities Committee, comes to Hollywood, summoning hundreds of Hollywood artists, many of them writers, to a Star Chamber where the Grand Inquisitor, in this case in the form of an otherwise mealy mouthed Geogia Democrat John Wood, sanctioned those who would not name names and consigned them to unemployment and hopefully, in the eyes of the committee, to oblivion.
Harry is hired by a group of these writers being cheated by their “fronts,” false authors who presented their scripts to the studios and took an ever larger cut for doing so. What follows is a trail of murder, betrayal and lust in not only Los Angeles but also Mexico’s Cuernavaca, where many of these writers fled.
After writing the novel I started reading the Russian/Ukrainian writer Gogol and watching a series which drew freely from Gogol’s early works where he retold all kinds of terrifying folk tales from his Ukrainian village Dikanka, acting in some cases as much the role of anthropologist as novelist. The series strung bits and pieces of these tales together under the conceit that Gogol, the writer, had turned detective and returned to this village to solve a series of gruesome murders.
As I was writing The Dark Ages, I realized that I was doing the same thing, pulling all kinds of stories recounted from many different sources not about a Ukrainian village but about that peculiar global village called Hollywood and incorporating them into my tale.
These stories were legion. There was the conservative script writer who wanted to marry his stepdaughter and plotted the demise of his wife in a plot that when foiled still had, for him, a happy ending. There was the out-of-work writer who got hired by a lawyer as, of all things, a private detective, and whose shining moment was his writing a court plea which helped exonerate an African-American man from a charge of rape. And there was the “moral, upright” scriptwriter who testified against his fellows but who refused to pay child support and welched on his personal debts by declaring that the “statute of limitations” had run out.
There are also encounters with the famous and the notorious. Marilyn Monroe has a cameo in the novel taken from an actual event where she warns a fugitive director that the sheriff is lurking just below his home in a canyon to slap him with a subpoena. The surrealist director Luis Bunuel appears to collect a script since he worked in Mexico with many of the ex-pat writers. The writer accepts his invitation to dine, noting that “he makes the finest paella.” Finally, there is the double-dealing Ronald Reagan, turning his fellow thespians in to the FBI even as he heads the Screen Actor’s Guild.
You can’t make this stuff up and I didn’t. My job is to take these stories, twist and turn them and then incorporate them into the overall narrative, here about a mysterious report which some person or group is willing to murder to keep buried.
I love collecting and retelling these industry stories and I can’t wait for Harry’s next adventure Pornocopia, where he encounters that industry at the moment where it is about to be taken out of the hands of gangsters and put into the hands of even greedier, and less scrupulous!, corporate investors.
The Dark Ages
“A good read with plenty of twists and turns” “Jake Gittes eat your heart out”
Harry and Crystal in their deadliest adventure yet
“Dennis Broe has done it again. On the one hand, we have his usual electrifying prose, dense atmospheric feel for LA, and sharp plotting. On the other, we have the sneaking sense that the backdrop of the 1950s Hollywood blacklist is becoming our own backdrop. Today. Dissident voices about world politics are being silenced even as we … speak”—Toby Miller, Global Media Scholar and author of Why Journalism? A Polemic.
The Dark Ages Dennis Broe – (amazon.co.uk)
Dennis Broe is the author of the previous Harry Palmer trilogy “Calamitous Corruption” which includes Left of Eden, A Hello to Arms and The Precinct With The Golden Arm. The second Harry Palmer trilogy “The Dark Ages” includes The House That Buff Built, The Dark Ages and Pornocopia.
