November’s California Book Club selection, Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring, is classic Los Angeles noir, full of highway drives, police and political corruption, and danger lurking around every corner. It’s also a snapshot of L.A. history, propelled by a period of the city’s past when tensions rose significantly and everyday citizens contended with how to make a place for themselves in the violent storm that was brewing. A poignant moment of this history was 1992, during the civil unrest that followed the trial of Rodney King’s assailants—where Phillips’s novel begins.
Los Angeles, at the time, was reeling from two events: the beating of King and subsequent acquittal of the police who attacked him, and the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean American convenience store clerk who was later sentenced to probation. The 1965 Watts riots were still front of mind for many residents, and the city erupted in a similar chaos. California Book Club selection panelist Lynell George, a reporter in the city at that time, commented that “with the Rodney King beating, it was the first time other people were able to witness, on tape, something that Black people, in particular, had talked about all the time but for which there was no evidence, so to speak.” Weeks after the turmoil seized hold of South Central Los Angeles in 1992, Phillips started drafting Violent Spring.
This month marks the third time that the California Book Club has returned to this era of Los Angeles and the themes that accompany narratives about it, specifically the tensions between the Asian American community and the Black community. The first occasion on which we featured it was in 2021 with Nina Revoyr’s novel Southland, about an Asian American woman who uncovers four murders tied to her family’s convenience store during the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Jumping through time periods in the 20th century, Southland brings two families together to solve the murders and confront their family secrets. Next, in 2022, the CBC read Your House Will Pay, a novel about a young Korean American woman in 2019 who discovers that her mother has been harboring a dark secret about the 1991 murder of a Black teenage girl. Violent Spring, meanwhile, kicks off with the shocking decision of a jury not to convict officers of using excessive force on King, despite video evidence of brutal beatings. The novel centers on Ivan Monk, a Black PI investigating the death of a Korean man whose body was found during a ground-breaking ceremony, intended to be healing, at one of the flashpoints of the riots.
Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay, met Phillips and read Violent Spring around the same time that she began writing her book. She knew as she wrote that she would be preserving a kind of history with her writing, reopening the door to 1991 even as she wrote from and seeded insights that speak to the present day. And she knew that the narrative as she presented it could be a reader’s first—and possibly only—exposure to this history. “There’s something about literature that preserves a certain immediacy. And I think that can be pretty valuable,” she tells me.
The California Book Club is mindful about returning to this historical material. In 2022, I wrote about echoes to this period in Southland and Your House Will Pay when the CBC was reading the latter. In preparation for this month’s selection, I asked George why literary and crime fiction circle this period of Los Angeles history—and why she includes these books in her suggestions for the club.
“When I’m recommending something, a lot of it comes down to, Does it help us to better understand a moment, a relationship, what sense of place means here, what it means to be an Angeleno or Californian?” George says. Noting the complexity of Los Angeles, which, she had personally observed, was a powder keg at the time of the riots, George explains that one of the joys of living there is being adjacent to other cultures—that being around many different people and languages teaches so much. “Books that reflect that [understanding], even in the tension—they’re important to me,” she says.
For Cha, writing about Los Angeles as it existed in the 1990s was an opportunity to dive into these tensions and also find a larger conversation about California in the process. “That kind of intersection of and collision of communities, I just find that to be pretty fertile territory,” Cha tells me. “These stories go to this question of, How do we share California? How do we live in this state, like live in a city like Los Angeles, or how do we interact with our neighbors?”
A different, bleaker vision of a tense Los Angeles is at the center of Violent Spring, in which Monk is prepared for the city to go down in flames—but hopeful it won’t. “LA might very well be lurching toward a Balkanized future, each ethnic group carving out its larger or smaller fiefdom. It might make a lie of the theory of multiculturalism, American history having long since made a lie of the great melting pot. The city might indeed become a low-rent Blade Runner, too beat and too broke to pay for the special effects,” Phillips writes. “But it could also be the example, the last possible chance for sanity in a world where the law of the pack…had to be halted.”
Lurching toward pandemonium or fighting for commonality and peace—these are themes the CBC has often considered, not only in these novels but also in other books, like Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, Michael Connelly’s The Dark Hours, and Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans. Often, Los Angeles is the ground out of which these conversations grow. As Phillips wrote in a 2002 essay reprinted in the deluxe edition of Violent Spring, “Los Angeles is still the sexy beast you can’t help but look in the eye now and then and write about.”
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read an early scene from Violent Spring. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed last Thursday’s conversation about This Boy’s Life, read the recap or watch the video. —Alta
GREEN YEARS
Read CBC host John Freeman’s insightful essay on the mythologies of boyhood and a westward journey in This Boy’s Life. —Alta
OLIVE DAYS
Read Alta associate editor Jessica Blough’s review of Jessica Elisheva Emerson’s vivid debut novel, Olive Days, in which an Orthodox Jewish mother pursues liberation in an affair. —Alta
MY CANINE TEACHER
Alta books editor David L. Ulin writes a moving essay about the loss of his dog, Milo. —Alta
POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF ART
Past CBC author Rabih Alameddine recently published a brief, passionate book, Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art, delivered as a lecture. Read his essay, similarly adapted—and the book. —Harpers
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