4 New Crime Novels Thrumming With Menace

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. That’s what Phillips has been doing ever since his lauded 2000 debut, “The Ice Harvest.”

THE DEVIL RAISES HIS OWN (Soho Crime, 368 pp., $27.95) is his latest novel to feature the photographer Bill Ogden, who was first seen in “Cottonwood,” set on the Kansas frontier in 1872.

Now, more than four decades removed from his “Cottonwood”shenanigans, he’s living in Los Angeles, still able to work (and score), albeit more slowly. His granddaughter, Flavia, fresh off killing her husband back in Kansas (“I recently collapsed Albert’s cranial vault,” she says), has taken on partner/successor duties at his photography studio. Both are pulled into the orbit of the “blue movie” industry — milder in 1916, to be sure, but still prone to violence — where they encounter a vivid, pungent cast of scoundrels and flimflam artists, from a film star named Magnolia Sweetspire to a mousy postal inspector named Melvin de Kamp.

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.