When is a novel a piece of history? The question seems particularly appropriate in regard to Gary Phillips’s debut, Violent Spring, which appeared in 1994. Set a year after the Los Angeles uprising of 1992, the book recalls a city in upheaval, caught between the conflagration of the Rodney King protests and the disruptions yet to come. I’m reminded that in April 1993—the very month in which Phillips opens his story—Time published a cover story titled “Los Angeles: Is the City of Angels Going to Hell?”
Phillips understands the territory: Born in South Los Angeles, he spent many years in Mid-City, and much of the action toggles between them, beginning with a groundbreaking ceremony at the flash-point intersection of Florence and Normandie, where the body of a Korean merchant is discovered with three bullets in his head. This sets the scene for a mystery that is about not only the murder but also the often fraught interplay between the Black, Korean, and Latino communities as they try to accommodate the rifts the insurrection has laid bare. “We have been through a difficult period these past months,” a city council member named Tina Chalmers cautions. “It seemed at times that each ethnic group was willing to be pitted against one another in an attempt to devour what little meat remains on the bone.”
The politics of scarcity, in other words.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Political fiction can be a mixed bag; there’s always the risk that the social issues will overwhelm the narrative. Phillips, however, lets his characters emerge via their affiliations and aspirations, which is, of course, the way of life. We are all political beings, looking out for common good or for self-interest—or, more accurately, a bit of both. Phillips’s detective hero Ivan Monk has worked, like the author, as a community organizer; he knows the city at the level of its streets. Among the most exhilarating facets of Violent Spring is how it brings Los Angeles to life, especially Mid-City. Phillips gets the neighborhood, its daily existence and hidden histories, not least the role played by Pico Boulevard as an invisible dividing line between the streets north of it, which have long been more upscale, and the sprawling, gritty territory to the south.
This, as Phillips recognizes, is the power of crime fiction. The detective can traverse the entire city, from the wealthiest communities to the most marginalized. A Black man, Monk confronts racism and epithets as the divisions between communities re-entrench themselves. He becomes a figure in the middle, leaving everyone displeased. That this is how it would have happened only adds to the verisimilitude, making Violent Spring an essential piece of Los Angeles noir, a key way station on the road from Walter Mosley (whose detective Easy Rawlins lives and works in Mid-City) to Steph Cha, whose 2019 novel, Your House Will Pay, addresses many of the same concerns and issues across a dividing line of nearly three decades.•
