Scott Phillips refuses to be categorized. The author of nine previous books of fiction, he is widely regarded as a crime writer with a particularly dark sensibility, on evidence in his first, and best-known, novel, The Ice Harvest (2000), as well as in The Adjustment (2011), which remains my favorite among his books. These works—and a third, 2002’s The Walkaway—take place in Wichita, Kansas, where Phillips was raised; together, they form a not-quite-trilogy, sharing certain characters and themes. The result is a midwestern noir as unforgiving as the weather, defined by the brutality and bleakness (just ask Willa Cather) of the plains.
Yet Phillips has also written in other registers. His 2013 novel, Rake, is an Elmore Leonard–esque parody of the French film industry. (He lived and worked in France for many years.) “I didn’t want to be rehashing new versions of The Ice Harvest over and over again for the rest of my life,” Phillips told me during a 2013 email interview, and that restlessness also informs his new novel, The Devil Raises His Own. Set in Hollywood during the silent movie era, it represents both a departure and a homecoming. As to the former, it is a sprawling effort, at nearly 400 pages almost twice as long as The Adjustment. As to the latter, it brings back Bill Ogden, protagonist of two previous Phillips novels: Cottonwood, which opens in 1872 in a small Kansas outpost, and Hop Alley, set six years later, which follows the character to Denver, where he has become the proprietor of a photographic studio.
Bill is a photographer in The Devil Raises His Own, too, although now he’s at the other end of the lens; decades have passed since we last saw him, and he is in his 70s. He shares a home and workspace in downtown Los Angeles with his granddaughter Flavia, who decamped from Wichita to California after taking a baseball bat to the head of her husband, Albert—he did not survive—during a domestic dispute. And yet, Bill is still a spry old codger, or perhaps it’s more accurate to call him a charming libertine. He likes to drink and he likes women, traits that also marked him as a younger man. “When the picture-making was done,” Phillips describes one such encounter, “they had repaired to Bill’s bedroom, and once they were finished with what they did there she pointed her right leg at the ceiling, toes en pointe.”
There’s a touch of restraint to such a moment; Phillips means not only to write of the early years of the 20th century but also to channel something of their sensibility. The strategy is compelling, if not always consistently applied. One of the novel’s subplots—and there are many—involves the production of dirty movies, and in those scenes, the language often slips, becoming too graphic, too contemporary. There’s an argument to be made that this highlights the degradations of the industry, but it can be jarring in the context of the book. More effective are the moments when the pornographers speak in the manner of their era, as when a producer and investor named George Buntnagel explains: “I’m well familiar with the market. Now if we can come up with something that was at once erotic and esthetically pleasing, we could corner it.”
For Phillips, such a tension is essential; at the heart of The Devil Raises His Own is the idea of Hollywood as apotheosis of a certain kind of American ingenuity or gumption, the Southern California booster myth writ large. Every character, even those who have been on the wrong side of the law, is a striver, looking for opportunity in a place defined by promises and come-ons. Take Flavia, for instance, who escapes her past to become the moral center of the novel. Others are damaged by their ambitions or their histories. I think of Tommy Gill, a film comedian drinking his way out of Hollywood. Or Trudy Crombie, whose two children become Tommy’s on-screen sidekicks, leaving her desperate to conceal her past, which includes performing in the films George’s money helps to fund.
Then, there’s Ezra, Trudy’s estranged husband, who drifts through these pages like a human manifestation of the id. Within a few pages of being introduced, he commits a murder; subsequently, he functions as an agent of chaos, a hulking presence in the book. Add a blackmailer from Indianapolis and an array of grifters, starlets, and up-and-comers, and we are smack in the middle of a panoramic urban landscape once described by Aldous Huxley as “the City of Dreadful Joy.”
This, of course, has long been the knock on Hollywood—that it is a shallow place, a bad place, in which corruption is a defining attitude. Yet if all that can be true, Phillips is too acute to leave it there. In a scene about two-thirds of the way through the book, George, whose day job is directing Tommy’s comedic two-reelers, meets a producer who wants to bring him to New York.
“And we still have the real artists, the theater actors and crews,” the producer says. “These people out here don’t know what they’re doing.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea about the place,” George responds.
It’s a small moment but a vivid one, and it has other echoes in the novel, notably a scene in which Bill reads, in Greek, a passage from the New Testament and notices a typo. “It gave him a warm feeling,” Phillips writes, “to know that his Greek had not deteriorated as badly as he’d feared.”
The line recalls Charles Willeford, whose 1953 debut, High Priest of California, features a sociopathic used-car dealer who in his spare time decodes James Joyce.
What both Willeford and Phillips are suggesting is that we are not known by our surfaces—or not completely. This is true of places as well as human beings. A lot goes on in The Devil Raises His Own: not only the machinations of its characters but also America’s burgeoning involvement in World War I. In that sense, it is a book about the loss of innocence, about the move from the pre-industrial society of the rural 19th century to the emerging mass culture that was to come. At times, it feels like too much—too many characters, too many plotlines, too many threads intercut too quickly. But this, perhaps, is as it should be: that in the shift to modernity, everything accelerates, leaving us with no choice but to make, yes, a departure, to invent a new way of being, an entirely different set of rules.•
