MARIA DUARTE, JAMES WALSH and ANDY HEDGECOCK review The Invite, My Father’s Island, Nirvanna: the Band, the Show, the Movie, and Oh My Goodness!
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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
PAUL DONOVAN is chilled by the contemporary resonance of Harper Lee’s coming of age tale amidst racism and white supremacy in this excellent production
GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends the unashamedly light-hearted escapism on offer in this stage version of the 1963 film
Full of mysterious religious references and radical sound design, the Scottish duo’s new offering is candidate for album of the year, suggests SIMON DUFF
MARY CONWAY revels in a powerful reminder that human lives are not defined by physical perfection
PAUL DONOVAN recommends the fine performances in this account of the pre-war meeting between the US president and the British king
TECLYN AROD relishes an intimate celebration of jazz improvisation that mixes local and national musicians
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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