This series, set in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s, in the first volume Left of Eden, dealt with the staple of the city’s economy Hollywood in the time of the blacklist where studio moguls were hiding the fact that the industry, one year never so prosperous, the next year was near financial collapse. Ex-cop Harry Palmer threads his way through layers of deception and murder at the time of the blacklist.
This second novel, A Hello Arms, similarly deals with that other mainstay of the Southern California economy, the aircraft and weapons industry. Once again Harry finds himself in the midst of a boom-and-bust situation. This time he is thrown headlong into a reeling company as he investigates the use of hazardous materials for a client fired after his exposure to those materials in a top-secret installation. If that isn’t enough, Harry and his secretary turned co-private eye Crystal, are also thrown into the Henry Wallace Presidential Campaign where they must determine who is leaking information on the campaign which has an array of both Democrats and Republicans poised against it.
I had fun writing this second novel because it became a combination of themes prevalent today and meticulous research on the airline and weapons industry during the postwar, particularly on how it survived and “got its groove back” in a time of peace. It is always enjoyable to unearth a hidden history of any period and this one includes some elements which make it extremely compelling: false war scares to increase a military budget, Nazi’s being spirited out of Europe and into the U.S., and the beginning of the “revolving door” as army and air force personnel pass out of government into corporations and back again.
The parallels though between that time and our own began to grow on me as my research deepened: The continual huge increase in the war—now called defense—budget; the progressive Wallace campaign being under constant attack by all sides of the political spectrum as was Bernie Sanders; and the evolving Lockheed scandal which revealed much about how government and airlines were cooperating not to ensure safety, but to speed up the process of getting money making planes in the air.
Finally, there was the Black Lives Matter protests in the present which had their echo in ‘40s LA in the culture of the just emerging “rhythm and blues” and the attempt by the city’s African-American population to expand the tight living quarters in which they had been confined. In the novel, Horace Williams, the ex-airline worker seeking his pension, wants to buy a home outside this restricted area for him and his girlfriend, a black club singer named Dixie Watkins and in that way he hopes to contribute to making the city more diverse by breaking these restrictive covenants.
There are of course other parallels—history as they say does not repeat, but it does rhyme—as Harry must confront philandering generals and their lascivious wives, Howard Hughes-type fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants airline execs, and an Oakie foreman with ties to the Tulsa massacre, all torn from the headlines of both today and yesterday.
Dennis Broe
A Hello to Arms is published by Pathmark Press
