Harry Palmer

Created by Dennis Broe

“I learned how to doctor evidence in my years on the LAPD.”
— Left of Eden

Set in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s, ex-cop HARRY PALMER and his secretary turned fellow private eye Crystal seem to have a knack for getting in over their heads and annoying very powerful people, in this promising noir-tinged and well-researched series of historical mysteries by French writer Dennis Broe.

In Left of Eden (2020), they dive into the fetid intersection of Hollywood and the Blacklist, and in the second novel, A Hello to Arms (2021) they find themselves poking into Southern California’s massive aircraft and weapons industry–and not winning many friends along the way.

According to the author:

“One of the fun things in writing the novel was the thrill of using many of the stories I knew from having briefly worked in Hollywood and from having studied it for so long. In the novel I get to retell them but with a slight twist in a way that makes them even more suspenseful.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dennis Broe is a journalist, professor and scholar whose turf is the film noir, 1940s Hollywood, television, and the  Cold War. His books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood; Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art; Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception; Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure and Maverick or How The West Was Lost. He has taught  at the Sorbonne and serves as a correspondent and critic for the Pacifica Network in the U.S., Art District Radio in Paris and the websites Crime Time, Culture Matters, People’s World and the British daily Morning Star. He lives in Paris.

UNDER OATH

• “I read with pleasure Left of Eden, a well-written, entertaining pastiche of the Chandler/Ross Macdonald style. The novel is well-researched about the blacklist period, a theme I do not remember either Chandler or Macdonald ever mentioning.”
  — Gunnar Staalesen
• “An ingeniously plotted look at a side of postwar America we don’t often see, and extremely relevant today.”
  — Ellen Clair Lamb
• “‘Harry Palmer.” Heh-heh.”
  — Butt-Head

NOVELS

• Left of Eden (2020) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• A Hello to Arms (2021) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• The Precinct With the Golden Arm (to come)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.