The headlines today are ablaze with two stories that the public is rightly obsessed with. The first is police violence and corruption as witnessed by the current beating to death of yet another young black man in Memphis, with communities across the U.S. again forced to take to the streets to seek justice. This has resulted in the charging of a number of officers and the disbanding of the SCORPION unit which, according to reports, ran wild in the Memphis streets. All of which recalls the novel’s epigraph from the former head of the London police, who described a good year as one where “we arrest more criminals than we employ.”
The second ever-persisting story is that of the drug overdose that plagues the U.S. with the opioid crisis now giving way to an even deadlier fentanyl crisis, and that drug now laced with elements that can result in immediate death for those who fall victim to it. The worst part of the crisis being that both drugs were discovered, pioneered, and distributed not on the street but by mega-pharmaceutical firms that profited enormously from this destruction.
These twin plagues are visited most heavily on minority communities.
The three elements are the key ingredients in the new Harry Palmer Mystery The Precinct With The Golden Arm, oddly, set not in the present but in LA’s past, in the year 1949 as ex-cop Harry Palmer tangles with an LAPD, supposedly on track to clean up its corrupt, scandal-ridden ways with the coming ascension to power of the unshakable William Parker, from Internal Affairs, and the formation of The Gang Squad to combat the worst mob abuses.
Harry is hired by the mother of a would-be budding film star, hopefully of the Mexican and then the American cinema in the mode of her idol Dolores Del Rio, to get her daughter out of jail, where she has been arrested for heroin use, a drug that is just starting to infiltrate the now majority Mexican American community of Boyle Heights. The atmosphere is tense as that community, still scarred in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion during the war, is increasingly subjected to intimidation in the form of beatings and deaths by the police. Harry himself in taking on the two arresting officers, sergeants just named to the Gang Squad, flashes back on his sordid past on the force where in the hardened Figueroa section of the city he himself had been witness to a form of corruption that had it become known would have shaken the city worse than the previous scandal where the police chief backed his officer who consorted with the madame who ran one of the city’s most elaborate houses of ill repute.
Adding to these layers of corruption is the mystery of where a new strain of incredibly potent heroin is coming from. In this vein Harry encounters the omnipresent Omerta corporation which manufactured penicillin during the war, saving army casualties dying from infection, and which is now moving into the more lucrative business of finding drugs for all types of pain. Harry is taken both by the head of the company and by his seductive sister who runs the financial end of the business and seems to cavort with all numbers of men around town, ranging from beach bums to Hollywood producers.
The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was– not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring.
One of the most frequent comments thus far on the book is that it sounds exactly like today. How can it resound this way? In each of the three books of the Harry Palmer LA Trilogy, collectively called “Calamitous Corruption,” the first Left of Eden, tracking the Hollywood film industry at the time of the blacklist, the second A Hello To Arms, about the rise of the weapons industry in a time of peace, and the current Precinct With The Golden Arm, I have matched the research on the period with a constant following of the industry and milieu Harry encounters. In the third novel, this involved following how the LAPD, Big Pharma and the role of Mexican Americans in LA have played out in the current pages of the cities’ newspapers. This is the topical element but it is not imposed on the time period, rather the topicality springs naturally from the unresolved nature of these problems.
For me one of the fun aspects of writing a historical novel, and the trilogy begins in 1947 and moves forward approximately one year for each book, is the way it resounds in the present. That and the portrayal of Harry’s own dogged determination as he attempts to find the truth about a questionable arrest and as he is drawn deeper into a web of sexual intrigue and corruption from which this time, he may not be able to extricate himself.
The Precinct With The Golden Arm is available in digital and paperback from Amazon, Nook, Apple and Kobo.
