Praise for The Devil Raises His Own
A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery Book of 2024
A Parade Best Mystery and Thriller Book of 2024
CrimeReads Best Historical Fiction of 2024
“Phillips always adopts a wonderfully deadpan air, but beneath his black humor is a steely emotional core. The Devil Raises His Own is a romp, but it’s also a poignant exploration of chosen families, broken homes and desperate dreams.”
—Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Book Review
“Outrageously vivid . . . The book is by turns raunchy, hard-boiled and comical, with a faint beam of humane sentiment peeping through the darkness . . . Punctuated by brutality and peppered with louche patois, The Devil Raises His Own is a guilty pleasure if ever there was one.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Phillips delivers a dark-stained noir . . . But while it frequently avails of the opportunities for violence and mayhem that the sprawling, anonymous Los Angeles boomtown creates, Phillips roots his story in superb characters whose concerns are the stuff of tragedy . . . Tough and brutal, but also poignant and tender, The Devil Raises His Own is a novel to rank alongside Phillips’s excellent The Ice Harvest.”
—The Irish Times
“Scott Phillips scored big with his Western noir debut The Ice Harvest. He may be back on top with [The Devil Raises His Own] . . . [Bill and Flavia] become tangled up in a series of grisly murders and must make like Bogie and Bacall long before The Big Sleep if they want to survive Tinseltown.”
—Parade
“Alongside the sex, the novel packs in a bumper crop of violent murders . . . Author Phillips has a nice touch with words.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The Devil Raises His Own weaves a tapestry that is ribald, affectionate, brutal, and relentlessly smutty. Scott Phillips, master of the historical American noir, offers a fictional but not implausible account of how the blue movie business developed in the shadowy margins of early Hollywood. Prudes be warned—Phillips relishes debunking the innocence of the ‘good old days’; the tin-type and silver nitrate imagery he evokes is splattered with all types of bodily fluids.”
—Eddie Muller, author of Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir
“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 . . . 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.”
—Alta
“A true California cocktail.”
—Angie Coiro, KALW’s Crosscurrents
“The Devil Raises His Own reunites the reader with Phillips’ most famous character, Bill Ogden, who has set up a photography studio. Surrounded by men and women of dubious reputation, Ogden becomes embroiled in a series of gruesome murders . . . Phillips’ thriller uses comedic flourishes to break up the angst.”
—St. Louis Magazine
“The Devil Raises His Own offers readers a fresh, uncommon world in which hard, occasionally cruel events rub up cozily with big-hearted optimism: a giant bed of roses — thorns and all.”
—The Shout
“Phillips captures the spirit and culture of 1916, from the growing infatuation with Hollywood to the interest in the war in Europe . . . The Devil Raises His Own steadily moves through the characters’ struggles in a business that was still uncharted in 1916. Phillips even manages a Hollywood-esque ending — noir style.”
—Oline Cogdill, South Florida Sun Sentinel
“This novel is so damn charming, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its salacious historical setting—early Hollywood’s burgeoning scene of blue movies. In The Devil Raises His Own, the denizens of Los Angeles just before WWI intersect and part ways in a thousand different combinations for a kaleidoscopic portrait of an entire city at the precipice of extraordinary cultural significance. Phillips has crafted a picaresque tale of winners and losers, lovers and cheaters, suckers and con artists, rising starlets and drunken has-beens, dirty old men and even dirtier married women: in short, a truly American novel of epic proportions.”
—CrimeReads
“Gritty and visceral . . . An absorbing read that will appeal to those who like their crime hard-hitting and lascivious.”
—Historical Novels Review
“Phillips’ work maintains a dark, wry sense of humor and his prose crackles in a manner akin to reading an early tabloid with a literary bent.”
—Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon
“The men and women who reside in the world created by Scott Phillips are a mixed bag of good, venal, and amoral. Scott Phillips’ literary strength resides in generating sympathy for each character’s narrative and their direction . . . An edgy, thrilling, and humor-tinged noir that doesn’t disappoint.”
—Manhattan Book Review
“The characters are entertaining . . . They range from rough villains straight out of noir fiction to a naïve woman with incredulous tones, a movie star with an air of entitlement, and a drunken woman who delivers gravelly utterances.”
—AudioFile Magazine
“In The Ice Harvest, Phillips showed he was a whiz at blending action and comedy in one unputdownable package. With this book, he succeeds brilliantly again . . . A knockout comedy of manners about sex, violence, and making blue movies in early 20th-century La La Land.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“In rich, vividly realized vignettes, Phillips follows each cast member as a series of brutal murders sets the City of Angels on edge, leading Bill and Flavia to question their involvement in the sex industry. Phillips brilliantly marries cheeky comedy and noirish grit, taking the series in a wholly unexpected direction. James Ellroy fans will be thrilled.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A smart, witty, and fleetingly obscene noir set in early Hollywood’s blue movie world . . . Phillips plays everyone’s self-interest and survival tactics for comedy as they navigate adultery, blackmail, murder, and (somehow) more . . . While the setting is largely seedy, there’s grace in Phillips’s dialogue, which hews to the style of early screwball comedies.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Phillips weaves these people and their stories together, much like a classic Robert Altman movie. Every character is fully formed and interesting, often funny, defined more by their flaws than virtues. They all collide toward a violent and wild night for a huge climax.”
—The Hard Word
“Phillips does such a fine job of evoking early-Hollywood L.A. that we really feel like we’re visiting the place. Noir fans will be in seventh heaven, fans of novels about the early days of Hollywood will swoon, and readers who enjoy a good, solid, satisfying mystery will be delighted.”
—Booklist
“Bawdy, raunchy . . . and laugh out loud outrageous . . . A thriller marked with surprises and a rare happy ending for a few of the denizens.”
—BookTrib
“Phillips’s noir novel offers a bawdy, violent, funny, and affectionate fictional take on how the ‘blue movie’ industry developed in the shadow of a budding Hollywood.”
—First Clue Reviews
“A richly teeming historical canvas.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A bawdy, humorous delight unlike anything else.”
—Crime Fiction Lover
Praise for Scott Phillips
“If you’re going to write about seedy underbellies and strange subcultures, then follow the road map created by Scott Phillips: Make it funny, make it ribald, make it memorable.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Taut and vicious . . . The essence of noir.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Phillips is dark, dangerous, and important . . . Crime fiction at its best.”
—Michael Connelly
“The unparalleled master of the noir anti-hero.”
—Megan Abbott
“Phillips’s skillful use of real historical events will resonate with fans of George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman series.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Phillips mixes real events, period turns of phrase, a noirish sensibility, and a cast of murderous women, madmen, drunks, grifters, and fools into a wildly entertaining, perhaps sui generis, slumgullion that might well be closer to reality than readers would imagine.”
—Booklist
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