Marilyn Monroe famously said, "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." Soulless or not, the actors are paid to do a lot more than kiss in Scott Phillips's The Devil Raises His Own, a smart, witty, and fleetingly obscene noir set in early Hollywood's blue movie world.
Phillips (The Adjustment) depicts Hollywood of the mid 1910s as a Wild West of dreamers, porn purveyors, and everyday people running from their pasts. Among the novel's dozen-odd principal characters are Trudy Crombie, who acts in blue movies to support herself and her two children following her odious husband's desertion; pornographer Clyde B. Grady, who wants to make "a better dirty flicker"; and George Buntnagel, a gay director who presents Grady with the idea to make high-end porn with all-male casts.
Phillips plays everyone's self-interest and survival tactics for comedy as they navigate adultery, blackmail, murder, and (somehow) more. There are a few saints swimming in the sea of sleaze, but readers who approach the novel betting that they won't find themselves rooting for the pornographers will likely lose a mint. While the setting is largely seedy, there's grace in Phillips's dialogue, which hews to the style of early screwball comedies. The Devil Raises His Own is a slow-build novel whose separate strands finally come together at a star-studded war bond rally that gives attendees (and readers) the promised spectacle--just not the kind that was advertised in the newspaper. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer