SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Left of Eden by Dennis Broe
Assured fiction debut lifts the lid on Hollywood corruption in the McCarthy period
DRAWING ON HIS KNOWLEDGE BANK: Dennis Broe
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
AUTHOR Dennis Broe is an international expert on film noir and an acclaimed socialist writer, as his dialectical and highly readable contributions to the website Culture Matters and his reviews for the Morning Star evidence.
In his first novel Left of Eden, his expansive knowledge informs his homage to past crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and to the US film workers and socialists who faced the purges of the McCarthy years of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Eschewing a self-mocking pastiche, Broe toys with the hardboiled American crime-thriller genre in the novel and, within the firmly established canon of a smart but wonderfully compromised private detective, various troubled clients, a cohort of devious criminals and plodding FBI muscle, he expands upon the political corruption at the heart of the US.
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