The House That Buff Built: A Harry Palmer/Crystal Eckart Mystery

by Dennis Broe

Overview

In The House That Buff Built, . detectives Harry Palmer and Crystal Eckart expose the crime lurking not just on the seedy backstreets of LA but also on the gleaming main streets of the real estate paradise of suburban boom towns in the early '50s. Everywhere they find dispossession in the Mexican, Negro and especially Chinese communities, all of which may be sparked by land holding interests tied to major media outlets. The trail is perilous and leads both of them to question how they can live and love amid so much corruption and double dealing.

"A Chinese American woman fears for her life in her first night in in the house she's bought in an all-white suburb. The only one who'll help her kung-fu Maoist daughter protect her is a low-rent private dick, Harry Palmer. Dennis Broe's newest meta-noir drops his shamus into the corruption and racism of 1950's L.A. real estate. It's a heady trip among a galaxy of career lowlifes with delirious prose framing this metamorphosis of fact and fiction through a lost and insidious history." -David James, USC Professor of Film and Television and author of Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance With Popular Music.

"Dennis Broe's latest is a farrago of invention not just about Los Angeles in the 'urban removal' era but about the corporate politics behind that same process in every major American city in the postwar period. Another triumph linking the criminal underworld to villainy in the suites." -Eric Gordon, LA Progressive

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798855681437
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	12/11/2023
Series:	The Dark Ages, Part 1 of the second Harry Palmer LA Trilogy , #1
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Dennis Broe’s First Harry Palmer L.A. Trilogy consists of: Left of Eden, about the Hollywood Blacklist; A Hello to Arms, about the postwar buildup of the weapons industry; and The Precinct With The Golden Arm, about the LAPD and the Hispanic Community of Boyle Heights. He is an expert on 1940s Hollywood cinema, the crime film, and art and culture of the Cold War. His contemporary writing on film, television, art and aesthetics is available at Cultural Politics For Those Who Care. He haunts the petite salles de cinquième, the little cinemas of the Latin Quarter watching crime films, melodramas and westerns.