The title and cover art of Scott Phillips’ new novel, “The Devil Raises His Own,” suggest that the reader is about to embark on another Phillips noir novel. At the bottom of the scene on the cover is a smoking pistol belching a black miasma that envelops a night-time view of a large, perhaps crime-ridden city neighborhood. But by the time we arrive at chapter two, barely six pages in, we suspect that the cover artist and the novelist are playing tricks on us.
Though the beginning of the prologue reads a lot like that noir novel we are expecting, something soon feels amiss. Flavia Purcell, nee Ogden, who lives in Wichita, Kansas in the year 1915, is angry at her husband for coming home late again, drunk as usual. She lets him know that she is talking to a divorce lawyer. He slaps her viciously and then apologizes. That doesn’t work for Flavia. He immediately goes into the bedroom, pulls out his revolver, and aims it directly at her. She then grabs a baseball bat that was a gift from her father and smashes hubby in the head with it; blood splatters all over everything, and he is dead. Looks and feels and smells like noir all right. Yet the tone of the the narration and the dialogue is almost light. Funny. Flavia is found innocent of any crime because it becomes obvious that she acted in self-defense. She’s a free woman, but she’s lost her job as a Latin teacher and probably also has lost any friends she has, since they all figure to be deathly afraid of her. So she writes to her grandfather in Los Angeles (she has no living parents) that she’s leaving her home and would like him to take her in and teach her his occupation and his art — photography.
Now the action moves swiftly forward in chapter one and begins the process of introducing the main characters. We realize quickly that those characters are as important to the story as Flavia. In fact, as the novel progresses, we are introduced to a huge cast of main characters, and we learn that the novel has no single protagonist.
And that’s not the only unusual feature of Phillips’ book. We’ll return to the character descriptions below, but first, I must insert my recommendation: Yes, I enthusiastically recommend “The Devil Raises His Own,” especially for fans of the noir genre. It’s humorous; it’s action-packed; it “boasts” much violence and many deaths; its narrative technique is superb; its dialogue is witty, and it somehow projects an extraordinarily accurate feeling of and for its time. As I read, I felt that had I been an aspiring movie star or executive in 1915, I would have exhibited the same language characteristics, the same vocabulary items, the same kinds of phrases and memes; and the same remarkably expressive linguistic sensibilities as the characters in the novel. The entire set of sounds and pictures jumping off the pages made me feel amazingly as if I were living in that time and place and observing in person the wonderfully crazy characters who people the novel.
Yet there’s a big “BUT” here. Enthusiastic recommendation notwithstanding, I must issue a reservation. Actually, a warning. If a given reader is offended by “dirty” language, by downright smutty sexual descriptions and behaviors, by frank and explicit discussions and descriptions of sexual acts of virtually every variety — common, uncommon, strange, controversial, certainly disgusting to some folks but funny to others, uncomfortable to many, male-male, female-female, “self-abuse” (the novel’s term), and addictions to porn photos along with obsessions with primitive porn films portraying all those varieties — pass on this novel. As a matter of fact, you might want to skip the rest of this review because there’s no way you’ll get past the first few pages of the book without feeling that you’d like to censor it or burn it and maybe deport the author to some faraway land.
If you’re not “turned off” by all those elements of the novel, however, you’ll love it.
And so we arrive at our detailed but abbreviated descriptions of some of the major characters and their respective, but certainly not respectable, stories, presented in more-or-less chronological order as they appear in the novel.
(1) Flavia, already described above, who is introduced first and remains important right to the very end.
(2) Bill, Flavia’s skirt-chasing grandfather, with whom she lives in L.A. after her escape from Wichita. Bill, a big-hearted and generous old guy, is a superb photographer whose clientele ranges from rich old dowagers to producers of porn movies.
(3) Purity Dove, silent screen name for wannabe film heroine, actual name Myrna, whose budding movie career is stymied by terrible teeth and a misshapen jaw. Bill takes her photos gratis and sends her for free dental work to a shady but competent dentist who owes Bill money. She is soon on her way to becoming a B-list movie starlet.
(4) Jack Strong, movie name for Myrna’s ex-boyfriend, a real no-good-nik. He rapes a girl and spends the rest of the novel in jail.
(5) Grady, a porn film producer and director whose movies are beyond shameless and very very naked.
(6) Victoria, sweetheart porn sort-of-actress who is bubbly, talkative, and sincerely affectionate. She somehow projects true innocence despite her unusually smutty occupation.
(7) Trudy, Victoria’s lover both in the movies and eventually in real life. She’s smart and strong, and she radiates porn movie beauty.
(8) Henry, a bright, young, relatively innocent guy who rides the roof of a boxcar to get to California, is hired by Bill to learn and practice the photographic arts and turns out to be the perfect lover for Flavia.
(9) Ezra, the baddest of the novel’s many bad guys, who had abandoned Trudy while she was giving birth to a baby who did not survive. They had two other children whom Ezra, of course, had also abandoned, ostensibly to find a way to make more money to support the family. (Incidentally, the two children become important characters toward the end of the novel.) But many months go by, and he does not return, so Trudy takes the children to live in L.A., and Ezra is determined to find them. Since leaving his family, his habits have included robbing whomever he can, brutally murdering anyone who disagrees with him about anything, and beating or killing anyone he considers unlikeable. Ezra, like all the important characters, will live in L.A., a particularly excellent place to attack people with his claw-end hammer. He eventually finds Trudy, and that spells trouble. For everyone. Ezra, however, has performed one heroic deed. He had joined Henry on top of the boxcar, and when they reached Bakersfield and exited the train, an old, drunken hobo had caught Henry from behind, sliced a cut in the back of the kid’s neck, and demanded Henry’s rucksack with all his possessions in it. Ezra saw the event unfolding and attacked the hobo with his brutal hammer. Then he slit the drunk’s neck from ear to ear. A true hero. And that serves as our introduction to Ezra.
(10) The Buntnagles, George and Irene, a wealthy couple who buy out Grady’s company, though he continues to produce and direct porn films for his new employers while they move on to making comedies with second-rate casts. George is a charming and handsome gay man who is adept at latching on to almost anyone he wishes to “catch,” and Irene is a brilliant, sophisticated matron who is the primary figure in the company’s business dealings.
(11) Tommy Gill, obnoxious and arrogant second-rate comic actor who is entirely amoral but gains more fame than he deserves by becoming the unwilling victim of screen beatings administered hilariously by Trudy’s two small children. He hates them on screen and in real life.
(12) (And finally) Melvin, a postman, thief and blackmailer who spends most of his spare time in an Indiana house of ill repute, wherein, if he can’t procure a lady on a given night, he watches porn movies made by Grady. He robs the post office at which he works, tries to blackmail the Buntnagles because high society folks should not be involved even indirectly in pornography, and takes a train to L.A., where he tries to consummate both his blackmail plan and his incredible attraction to Trudy, with whom he has fallen in love after viewing her, all of her, in the porn films while he feverishly works on “pleasuring himself.”
All characters aside for a moment, this review would be less than complete without mention (fittingly) of the climax — because at that point, almost all the separate characters and plots do, in fact, come together(!). More specifically, they crash and smash together in a riotous event billed as a rally to raise funds for the U.S. entry into World War I. The Buntnagles decide the rally would be a magnificent way to demonstrate their support for the war effort as well as to pick up some nice publicity for their film-making enterprises. So they gather up all their B-movie pseudo-superstars to perform at the event and persuade many of the novel’s other characters to assist in the effort. Great idea. Terrible execution. When Ezra spots Trudy, the wife whom he had abandoned, his mind explodes because he is certain that Tommy Gill has become her not-so-secret lover. He rushes the stage, and all hell (appropriately) breaks loose while a full-scale riot ensues. The audience scrambles wildly to escape the unfolding maelstrom, while murder and chaos and the devil’s own doings infect and ruin the event and the entire scene.
But the end result of that climax is a cleverly constructed denouement conceived by this extraordinarily clever author, in which we find the nicest people in the novel in fine shape and spirits while the ugliest souls receive their just desserts, not very tasty ones at that.
We have now accomplished the reviewer’s task of describing the protagonists’ strengths and flaws, and we’ve offered abbreviated plot lines for each of them. So you, dear reader, may wish to take on this wild, filthy, sexy, very witty novel. Or, of course, you may not wish to do so. But if the latter option — to skip the whole darn daring escapade — is your choice, I must point out that you will deny yourself a helluva wild ride, marvelous literary entertainment and excitement of all kinds, and an opportunity to read, enjoy, and absorb a terrific piece of work by a supremely talented author. And once again, despite his noir reputation, this novel, “The Devil Raises His Own,” is indeed a devil of a novel — in all of the funniest, filthiest, and most devilish respects.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.
REVIEW BY JACK KRAMER