The first thing I notice on Gary Phillips’s living room wall during our conversation over Zoom in late September is a framed photograph of Muhammad Ali. At first, I think it’s the one considered the greatest sports photograph of all time, taken in 1965 by Neil Leifer and depicting Ali after he’d knocked out Sonny Liston just 1 minute and 44 seconds into the fight. But Phillips later corrects me: it’s a different photograph of the May 1965 bout where Ali used a “phantom punch to knock Liston out.”
It makes perfect sense to see it when we’re about to discuss Phillips’s 1994 debut novel, Violent Spring, a book that felt like a punch to crime fiction’s solar plexus, so indisputably contemporary was it in its juxtaposition of the private-detective genre and social justice in the wake of the Rodney King riots two years prior.
Phillips, who turns 70 next year, is famously a big man with a gentle heart and a booming laugh, a welcome presence at crime-fiction conventions (I first met him at the 2002 Bouchercon in Austin). Deeply knowledgeable about the genre, he is as steeped in classic crime fiction—Chester Himes is a particular favorite and influence—as he is in the books of pulp publishers like Holloway House, which published Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and other forerunners of so-called urban fiction or street lit.
The author’s own books include four Ivan Monk novels (and a short story collection, Monkology), two books featuring Las Vegas mob courier Martha Chainey, several stand-alones (most notably, The Jook), a number of graphic novels, and a newer, 1960s-set series starring photographer Harry Ingram. But nothing in Phillips’s crime-writing career would have been possible without Violent Spring, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and still feels frightfully resonant today.
As Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins private-detective series, wrote in his introduction to the 2023 reissue, Violent Spring “brings all the lost tribes of Los Angeles together in order to hide the truth. Not who killed but why they killed and how that reason is inextricably intertwined with our hungers and a kind of self-generated blindness that can never be excused.”
Phillips specifically wanted to write a crime novel that grew out of the city he knew and loved, the Los Angeles you didn’t see depicted by the Raymond Chandlers and the Ross Macdonalds. “Ever since I was a teenager,” he tells me, “I always knew that is the stuff that I want to write, that within that framework, within that genre of crime fiction, of the mystery novel, you can tell any kind of story you wanted to tell.” Still, we wouldn’t have an Ivan Monk, the doughnut-shop owner turned PI; his mentor, Dexter Grant; or his partner, Jill Kodama, without the guidance and help of another contemporary L.A. crime writer, Robert Crais, who taught a 10-week UCLA Extension class that Phillips took while between jobs.
Phillips was supposed to write only 50 pages for the class, but he ended up finishing the entire manuscript of The Body on the Beach. It didn’t sell, but the characters stayed with him as he took on the role of outreach director at the Liberty Hill Foundation, which funds community-organizing efforts for social change. The job became more urgent after the four LAPD cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted in April 1992, leading to the riots—property destroyed and people killed because of collected anguish within and outside Black communities.
From Phillips’s listening tours through these communities grew the seeds of Violent Spring, which would begin with the discovery of the body of a Korean shop owner during a ribbon cutting for a new shopping center. Phillips took the container of a hard-boiled story, wrapped it around contemporary racial and socioeconomic struggle, and seasoned it with prose stylings like “Black men, women and children stood frozen next to the baked stucco walls of the complex, Edward Hopper renditions writ large in the grim fresco of urban drama.”
He took about a year to write Violent Spring, but this book, too, had trouble selling, with some publishers suggesting that he rid the novel of its political focus. That was clearly a nonstarter. Eventually, Phillips joined up with several writers who had founded the Pacific Northwest–based small press West Coast Crime and published Violent Spring through it.
The novel was well received, as was the 1995 follow-up, Perdition, U.S.A., but the series wouldn’t find a major audience until Phillips followed his fellow West Coast Crime authors John Shannon and Ed Goldberg to Penguin imprint Berkley Prime Crime, which would publish the next two Ivan Monk novels, Bad Night Is Falling (1998) and Only the Wicked (2000). But then Berkley dropped Phillips—a fate befalling so many crime writers at that time—and he moved on to other projects, other series, and other publishers.
Phillips has a third Harry Ingram novel in the works and a heist novel out with Soho Crime next year. But he’d still like to write one more Ivan Monk novel. It would have to be set in the 1990s, not long after the end of the previous book. “When I started writing Monk, he and I were roughly the same age,” Phillips tells me. “So when I finally start writing that fifth novel, it has to be set then, partly because I want to keep [Monk’s] age right kind of where that’s at and also because, frankly, I really need to have Dexter Grant in that novel. There’s maybe a handful of World War II vets left now, but I can’t have Dexter just laying around, too damn old to do anything.”
When he writes the fifth novel, Phillips will be writing historical fiction—a mind-boggling concept for those who lived through the 1990s and remember it with still-vivid freshness. I wondered how it will feel to write Monk from a distance, rather than with the immediacy of the original quartet. “I find it somewhat freeing,” Phillips replies. “Maybe I’ll be less concerned with the plot and more concerned with just who the characters are.”
Thirty years on, would Phillips write Violent Spring differently? He takes a beat to ponder the question. “Oh, the burden of retrospection and looking back and it’s just, Oh my gosh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s too heavy, you know what I mean?” It’s a burden crime-fiction fans remain glad he took up all those years ago as he continues to shape his corner of the genre in his own inimitable style.•
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 conversationhere.
