“Keeping the Flame Alive: Dan Bronson’s Shout at the Devil” by WIlliam Blick

A return to these origins is refreshing, as compared to many of the contributions to the current state of the crime novel….

We need more writers like Dan Bronson. His latest novel Shout at the Devil (BearManor Media), featuring Hollywood tough guy, stuntman, and showbiz gun-for-hire of sorts Jack Shannon, reignites the flame which many of the writers from an era long gone started with classic antiheroes. Devil pays homage to the iconic characters that were created to help shape genre fiction and cinema today. Bronson’s influences recall works of Ross McDonald, Charles Willeford, and of course, David Goodis, with his characters’ endearing hard-luck qualities. The clever plotting and old-school narrative devices set the reader up for a hardboiled-straight-no-chaser read.

Shout at the Devil features the signature staccato dialogue and narration of Bronson’s other works. It demonstrates the influence of all the great aspects that readers have come to expect from noir fiction. The setting of the novel is in the seedy, underbelly of Hollywood, a tumultuous era wherein the studios controlled people like marionettes on a string. This was also long before indies became fashionable, and when the stars of Hollywood shined the brightest. It was a time wherein scandals rocked Hollywood, and many dark deeds were buried deep within the vaults of the studios.

Shannon is a wounded war vet, hobo, and dilletante in the shadows who plies one of his many trades as a “fixer,” hired to suppress bad “publicity” for Titanic Studio. Enter Karen Scott, a Hollywood starlet going through hard times and being blackmailed for $50,000. Shannon agrees to help her as he is sympathetic to her plight, needing the quick cash salary she offers, but he soon finds himself embroiled in a murder wrap. Many little people eeked out an existence within the cracks of those old, gilded streets of stars of Hollywood. Shannon is one of those souls who finds himself in a marginalized existence and discovers what he sees as a chance of redemption in the troubled Karen. No spoilers here, but this is one helluva ride!

While Bronson is short on prose description and heavy on getting the grit going, this reader appreciated the break-neck pace. Bronson’s Shannon speaks with an authentic, straight-forward, plain-speak, street-slang somewhere between Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. The author features a crackling first-person narration from Shannon and brings us gem phrases to describe himself such as, “A muscle-bound Poverty Row stuntman and extra with a bayonet scar across the side of his face. A truant self-educated in the school library while serving time for misbehavior in class. A bindlestiff who served another kind of time on a chain gang in a part of the South where poverty was a crime.”

The clever plotting and old-school narrative devices set the reader up for a hardboiled-straight-no-chaser read.

Bronson’s tinsel-town Hollywood has underpinnings of the broken dreams in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939) meets Dorothy Hughes’ dystopic vision of Hollywood in In a Lonely Place (1950) with all the hardcore hardboiled noir of the early to mid-20th century. The novel comes complete with a strong protagonist in Shannon, with shades of Bogart, Mitchum, and Glen Ford and the literary personas that served as the model for them.    

The genre tropes in Bronson’s work are familiar and tried-and-true. They are also throwbacks from a time long gone by. However, this reader found a return to these origins refreshing, as compared to many of the contributions to the current state of the crime novel. Bronson reminds the audience of the rich literary tradition of the crime novel and he continues its legacy, keeping the flame alive.

William Blick is a literary/crime fiction and film critic; a librarian; and an academic scholar. He has published work in Senses of Cinema, Film Threat, Cinema Retro, Cineaction, and is a frequent contributor to Film International. He is contributing editor to Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon. He is also an Associate Professor/Librarian for Queensborough Community College of CUNY.