Phillips The Devil Raises His Own

A violent, literary noir about broken dreams, buried bodies and the rise of Hollywood sleaze
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83501-357-1
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

'Phillips is dark, dangerous, and important . . . Crime fiction at its best.' Michael Connelly This dark historical adventure captures the beginnings of the Hollywood studio system and the 'blue movie' industry that grows up alongside it. Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in seedy Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia - a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her drunken, abusive husband to death. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep. We meet a cast of unforgettable characters living on the margins looking to make a quick buck, launch a career, or just keep their family together. The Devil Raises His Own is a stripped-down noir thriller and a panoramic look at Los Angeles at the beginning of motion pictures - a Boogie Nights set in the era of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin from one of the best crime novelists working today.

Scott Phillips is a screenwriter, photographer and the author of seven novels and numerous short stories. His bestselling debut novel, The Ice Harvest, was a New York Times Notable Book and was adapted as a film starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. He is the winner of the California Book Award, as well as being a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Hammett Prize and the CWA Gold Dagger Award.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Phillips, Scott

Leseproben

1

1916

Mrs Chen had taken to her bed with the ague. Bill’s breakfast consisted of coffee, two eggs, sunny side up, and flapjacks with butter and marmalade, consumed at leisure while seated on an upholstered stool at the horseshoe-shaped lunch counter of the local Pig and Whistle. The red-nosed, sallow-complexioned counterman had opinions about the war in Europe and about the role Freemasonry played in the United States’ potential entry therein, and though Bill let his attention drift back to the city section of the Examiner, with its lively accounts of stabbings and burglaries and boarding house sneaks, there came a point in his soliloquy where he seemed to want acknowledgment of something he’d just said.

‘Is that right,’ Bill said.

‘You can bet your life on it, friend. They won’t rest until the whole world’s under their thumb.’

He gave the man a thoughtful frown and nodded, uncertain whether he was still het up about the Freemasons or if his fancy had meandered over to world Jewry, the papacy or the Bolsheviks or some combination thereof.

He returned his attention to the California state section. A man in the hamlet of Three Rivers had murdered his wife’s brother, embedding an iron spade in the left side of the man’s head, and at trial neither he nor his spouse would give a motivation for the crime; near Bakersfield a farmhand aged thirteen years had taken an axe to the sleeping foreman of the chicken ranch to which he was on hire from a local orphanage, after which crime he turned himself in to the county sheriff; before the eyes of a shop full of customers, a San Francisco jeweler had shot and killed a fleeing thief after the latter smashed a display case, emptied it and sprinted for the door.

A loud klaxon sounded outside, followed by the ringing of a bell, and he looked up from the paper to see a man prone on the streetcar tracks, stirring with apparent difficulty. ‘Looky there at that,’ the counterman said. ‘Trolley knocked that smart son of a bitch right over on his ass.’

A crowd formed and the conductor came down off the trolley to examine the stricken man, a beefy fellow dressed sportily in an ascot and a sleeveless sweater with a carnation in its breast pocket. At his side was a petite young woman with peroxided hair done up in a permanent wave, wailing with more excitement than the matter seemed to call for. Among the crowd were a couple of newspapermen, one of whom carried a handheld rangefinder camera. The other took notes, addressing the trolley’s victim, who had risen to his feet uninjured. The conductor started berating the fellow, pointing variously at him and the train and the tracks, yelling something vehement Bill rather wished he could hear.

Approached by a policeman, the dandy held out his hand to shake, which the copper ignored. He then indicated, via the exaggerated gestures of a pantomime artist, that he was physically undamaged, upon which the patrolman gestured to the conductor to be on his way. The assemblage dispersed and the young fop and his bottle-blonde companion, accompanied by the two newspapermen, crossed the street and came into the Pig and Whistle, where they took seats at the counter a few down from Bill. They were in a jolly mood, the four of them, and once they’d ordered, the first pressman got up to use the telephone booth. Bill nodded at the one with the camera.

‘That a Speed Graphic?’

‘It sure is,’ he said.

‘Wonderful piece of machinery. When I started out the cameras were portable but you needed a mule to get them from one place to the next.’

The man who’d been knocked over looked at him with a vacuous lack of expression. ‘Are you all in one piece?’ Bill asked him. He was a handsome fellow, better dressed than Bill suspected was his habit.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Takes more than a streetcar to get the best of Jack Strong.’ His accent was distinctly Southern, from Tennessee or Arkansas. He extracted a business card from his inside pocket and handed it to Bill.

‘Bill Ogden.’ He produced his own carte de visite and flung it spinning across to the young man’s side of the counter. The actor caught it with a studied insouciance that might have looked good in a picture show.

The girl’s eyes widened and she gave Bill a big, closed-mouth smile. ‘I’m Purity Dove. Pleased to meet you.’ She sounded just like her beau did; he guessed they’d come west together to be in the pictures, and Bill couldn’t see such a story ending up happily.

‘You in the pictures?’ he asked.

Young Jack Strong fairly beamed. ‘You’ve seen me, then.’

‘No, I don’t see too many of them. But your names sound made-up, like Bessie Love, and when you had your mishap there just happened to be a couple of newspapermen present, one of them with a camera.’

The two of them looked nonplused, and so did the photographer, but after a moment they laughed. ‘It’s all part of the business. Jack here gets some free publicity, we get an exclusive,’ the lensman said.

‘Which paper?’

‘The Examiner.’

He held his copy up, tapped it and nodded. ‘It’s a good newspaper, but I don’t see how you manage to fill a whole section out of motion picture news.’

‘Photoplays are more popular than anything in the show world any more,’ the actor said, as though that were a good thing.

‘I suppose they are. It can be a hard life. My second wife was an actress.’

The first reporter came back from the phone booth. ‘We’re in the evening edition, but they may run it in the city section instead of the motion picture pages.’

The girl was crestfallen. ‘That’s awful luck. Jack could’ve gotten himself killed with that stunt, and we don’t even make the pictures section.’

‘Think of it this way,’ Bill said. ‘All sorts of nobodies get mentioned in the motion picture pages. But if you’re in the city section it means he’s important enough to rate a mention as real news. If you see my meaning.’

She nodded and exchanged an enlightened look with the actor. ‘I see. If some plumber got knocked down by a trolley, it wouldn’t make the papers at all, would it?’

‘There you go.’ He didn’t believe it himself, but was glad to make her feel a bit better.

He picked up the evening edition after he’d finished his darkroom work for the day, just to see if Jack had made it in. The incident had been deemed worthy of the front page of the city section, accompanied by a photograph of a grinning Jack Strong that must have cost the photo editor a couple of hours’ worth of retouching.

PICTURE STAR SHAKEN BUT UNINJURED IN STREETCAR MISHAP

A streetcar accident this morning at Spring and Third Streets upended one of the Film Colony’s brightest up and coming lights, Mr Jack Strong, whom readers will recall as the stalwart younger brother in last year’s Foxfilm production of A Tale of the Bowery. The wheaten-haired thespian was not wounded, but a patrolman at the scene warned the train’s conductor to pay closer attention to pedestrian traffic before letting him proceed with only a mild rebuke and no fine or order to appear. Our photographer at the scene snapped a candid pose of Mr Strong, who will shortly appear on screen in the Cowper comedy production entitled The Jiltin’ Fool.

There wasn’t any mention of the girl who’d accompanied him, which made Bill a little sad.

IT SEEMED TO Grady that the trouble with Trudy was she looked like a streetwalker. Which, to be fair, she was, but this was a girl-and-girl picture, and those worked better if it seemed to be two virgin innocents succumbing to the temptations of Sappho, and not a couple of hardworn veterans of the sidewalk groping one another for the benefit of a movie camera. Not that either of them was particularly old, or looked it, but there was a hardness to Trudy’s features, and she turned resentful when told the next shot called for her to place her index finger between the other girl’s labia.

‘Play like it’s fun, Trudy,’ he said.

‘Go fuck yourself, Grady, you can pay me to do this dyke business but you can’t make me like it.’ The afternoon had grown hotter than anyone had expected, even under the mildewed rooftop canvas. The sun was at a low angle and the white reflectors shone straight at the performers, shiny with sweat.

‘I like it fine,’ the other one said. Victoria was her name. She was hopped up and game for anything, not really pretty but passably attractive, and happy enough that she did exude a sort of innocence.

‘Never mind which it’s about two hundred goddamn degrees on this fucking roof.’

‘Can’t be helped. Anyway you’re in your birthday suit.’

‘I like the rooftop,’ Victoria said. ‘Reminds me of getting a tan at the beach.’

‘Roll,’ Grady called again, without much...