Social Realist Noir, The Neo-liberal Order and The Precinct With The Golden Arm
Writing the "Topical" Historical Crime Novel
The strange death of social realism
The writer DENNIS BROE reflects on the historical staying power of the crime genre as a reflection of unresolved social issues
Aaron Pedersen and Jada Alberts in Mystery Road (2018) Photo: IMDb
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 US 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 epigraph in my new novel Precinct With The Golden Arm 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 US with the opioid crisis, now giving way to an even deadlier fentanyl crisis, a drug 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.
These elements are the key ingredients my third novel in the Harry Palmer LA trilogy collectively titled Calamitous Corruption. But The Precinct With The Golden Arm is set not in the present but in LA’s past, in the year 1949.
As a historical novel it outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end.
In the background is the Mexican community, still scarred in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion during the war, that is being subjected to intimidation in the form of beatings and murders by the police and as it attempts to organise and fight back through the election of Edward Roybal, the first Mexican member of the LA City Council in 100 years.
In addition is the mystery of where a new strain of incredibly potent heroin is coming from.
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.
One of the most frequent comments thus far on the book is that it sounds exactly like the present. How can it resound this way?
In each of the three books of the trilogy, I have matched the research on the period with attention to the contemporary existence of the industry and milieu Harry encounters.
In the third novel, this involved following how the LAPD, Big Pharma and the exploitation and harassment 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 historical period; rather the topicality springs naturally from the unresolved nature of these problems.
History is often said to repeat or at least to rhyme, but in LA, as in many corners of the capitalist world, this repetition owes nothing to natural law but rather is the result of a society and an economic system that does not resolve its problems and contradictions but simply ignores them and over time they then worsen.
The form that the crime fiction and the crime film of the period adopted, called “noir,” springs from and acutely conveys a world steeped in these unresolved contradictions.
Two points about this form.
First, the best noirs offer, as the young Marx promised: “Ruthless criticism of the existing order.” They expose the corruption at all levels of the society but do not offer any easy solutions to remedy such contradictions, as more traditional forms do.
One criticism of the form is that, if justice is achieved, it is only achieved by the individual as such is the limit of plotting available to the author of noir, both on the page and in film.
To counter this, in Precinct, I have favored a highly unusual collective solution involving the Mexican American Boyle Heights neighbourhood.
Second, today what used to be called “social realism” has almost entirely disappeared and if it exists at all has been folded into the crime novel and film with its tradition of critique.
The “‘new’ social realism” in Native American, Australian, and Irish production, for example, all falls under the noir or detective label.
While this is a net loss for the social realist form and speaks to a repression of working-class representation, it also indicates that the level of corruption in this late stage of imperial neoliberalism is felt to be so acute that it is only the crime novel or film that most accurately expresses a world perpetually steeped in financial extortion, where exploitation oozes from every pore and has seeped into all layers of the society.
The Precinct With The Golden Arm is available in digital and paperback from Amazon, Nook, Apple and Kobo.