Here’s a tip for the normies from all us mystery nerds: If you want to get to know a place, there’s no better guide in literature than a good detective. While everyone else tends to their gardens, the detective knocks on doors and asks questions. With money in his pocket and an inexorable drive to go after the truth, he can cross a city in a matter of paragraphs, cutting through neighborhoods and social strata with knife-through-hot-butter narrative ease. He might catch a beating or two along the way, but that’s just part of the fun.

Or as Ivan Monk puts it, as he and his sweetheart, Jill Kodama, lie low in a South Central Los Angeles boxing gym, hiding from a host of potential antagonists (political operators, warring street gangs, and the FBI, just to name a few): “It was times like this that reminded Monk how odd his profession was, to one minute be riding around with an accomplished car thief, and the next eating dinner with his girlfriend the judge.”

I first read Gary Phillips’s debut novel, Violent Spring, in 2015, over 20 years after it was first released. I was just starting to work on Your House Will Pay, a novel with roots in early-’90s Los Angeles—a time and place I technically inhabited, but only as a small child. Violent Spring was written in the stunned, chaotic aftermath of the L.A. uprising, when “the rubble and rhetoric piled high.” It gave me something I have yet to find anywhere else: an immediate, contemporaneous recording of the city’s atmosphere, presented with the clarifying tools of fiction.

Do those include exaggerated storylines, perhaps an improbable number of dead bodies in strange places? Sure thing, and thanks be. Those bright colors don’t obscure reality; they dress it up so it’s easier to see. Raymond Chandler conjured an eternal doorway to the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, with Philip Marlowe on the other side. For Los Angeles post-1992, hurt and healing after “[t]he city raged red with blood and fury,” I looked to Phillips and Monk.

Violent Spring is not a thesis on the state of Black-Korean relations in the wake of civil unrest. At one point in the novel, an eager reporter (one of the book’s few white characters) “continued for several minutes with questions whose purpose seemed to be to get Monk to pontificate on the state of the cops, the Koreans, black folks or the universe in general,” and Monk finds himself “getting edgy with boredom.” Phillips doesn’t avoid these topics, but his approach is much more engaging and, in its own way, naturalistic.

He buries the body of a Korean liquor-store owner at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where truck driver Reginald Denny had been attacked in one of the most infamous episodes of the uprising. The dead man is discovered during a ground-breaking ceremony for a new shopping center, a capitalist prayer for a revitalized Los Angeles. Suspicion falls on two Black men in the victim’s orbit, and Monk is hired to find the killer by the Korean American Merchants Group. All parties understand the political value of putting a Black investigator on this particular job.

Everything unfolds from this rich setup, with Monk following leads through a metropolitan minefield, too busy sleuthing and surviving to hold forth on the big themes. The novel is dense with incident, the plot deliciously heightened with conspiracy and violence. But it’s also a grounded, convincing snapshot of a unique moment in the history of Los Angeles, one that connects directly with our own.

Colorful characters and vibrant settings fill every single page, evoking the noise and textured grain of a big, multicultural city. In one brief scene, Monk talks to a young Korean American man who wears “knee-length baggy shorts” and answers questions on behalf of his aunt, who speaks less than fluent English. “Well, homey, that’s beyond me,” he tells Monk. “I just work here part time to help the folks out and shit.” The second-generation Korean dude who wears huge shorts and adopts the rhythms and vocabulary of Black vernacular—I knew that guy in the ’90s, but this might be the only time I’ve seen him in a book.

Phillips didn’t know where L.A. was headed when he wrote his first novel. Monk muses that it “might very well be lurching toward a Balkanized future, each ethnic group carving out its larger or smaller fiefdom.… The city might indeed become a low-rent Blade Runner, too beat and too broke to pay for the special effects.” Plenty has changed in the past 30 years, but Violent Spring still rings true, and this noir vision still holds sway. So, too, does Monk’s attendant optimism. If there’s salvation for Los Angeles, he’s “convinced it resided with her everyday people.... It had to.”•

Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Naomi Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.