This video is from a talk at the Casa del Mexicano in Boyle Heights, a community center first established in the early 1930s
“The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was–not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring”–Crime Time
Dennis Broe’s The Precinct With The Golden Arm, the third in the Harry Palmer LA Mystery Trilogy, takes place in 1949 and is set in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles in the post-Zoot Suit Rebellion Era. This is a moment when the heights, previously a mixed working-class neighborhood, is now becoming predominantly Mexican American.
The book details the tensions between a community which is just beginning to assert itself, with the election of the first Mexican American city council representative Edward Roybal, and an often-violent LAPD, a hotbed of corruption, which patrols the neighborhood. Precinct tracks an infestation of heroin onto these streets at the same time as the Big Pharma laboratories are switching over from fighting infection to “curing pain.”
Ex-homicide detective Palmer and his partner Crystal are hired to contest what the mother of an aspiring actress in the Mexican Cinema says is a false arrest as the trail leads Harry into a miasma of sex and drugs as well as a confrontation with his own checkered past on the force. Along the way, they encounter a number of LA’s famous and infamous including Dragnet’s Jack Webb, future police chief William Parker and future Dodgers outfielder Willie Davis.
This video is from a talk at the Casa del Mexicano in Boyle Heights, a community center first established in the early 1930s which now houses a dance company and is decorated with murals depicting heroes of Mexican Independence and Revolution.
The talk features a description of all three books in the trilogy, the first of which is Left of Eden about the Hollywood blacklist and the second is A Hello To Arms, about the postwar rearming of the U.S. in a time of peace. It also previews the upcoming next trilogy which begins with The House That Buff Built about the 1950 housing dispossessions that set the stage for today’s housing crisis.
