What struck me as I read Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring and his three other Ivan Monk books was the central love story. We don’t necessarily expect depth and social awareness in a love story in hard-boiled detective fiction. Often, this genre features stories that look at the darkness of people’s souls through an unsentimental lens. There are early examples of female characters who redefined gender norms within the broader mystery genre: Dashiell Hammett, for instance, wrote the lighthearted novel The Thin Man—later a witty movie—which features Nick and Nora, upper-class detectives married to each other. And across the pond, Agatha Christie wrote Tommy and Tuppence books that are entertaining partly because of the banter between detectives in love. In more-recent television history, there has been Moonlighting and Castle. But when it comes to fear, gravity, and the real social and political implications of murder, literary history has provided few examples of couples trying to uncover the motivations for and the consequences of crimes that rip at the social fabric.
With Black private investigator Monk and Japanese American judge Jill Kodama in Violent Spring, the California Book Club’s November selection, Phillips reinterprets traditional tropes of hard-boiled crime fiction by introducing a couple who banter but also face everyday, organic differences, which they deal with in realistic ways. While Monk tries to solve mysteries by working alongside those at the margins of society as well as a range of other community interests, Kodama works from within the system itself. Their relationship across this first novel and the subsequent ones in the series, Perdition, U.S.A., Bad Night Is Falling, and Only the Wicked, is not all about their shared but separately executed interests in crime (or sex, though there is that, too). It’s also about ordinary relationship things like grabbing a bite together, what it means to live together, how to stay committed in a monogamous relationship, how to protect and shelter each other in a dangerous world. Across the four Ivan Monk books, the relationship progresses in much the way other committed relationships progress, with many of the same kinds of wrinkles that arise in connection with what the two halves of the couple want for their futures.
In Violent Spring, Monk and Kodama are introduced to us as people who love each other, and the communities, sometimes separate ones, in which they’re enmeshed are thoughtfully presented. As they would in real life, each person’s extended personal and family histories in South Central Los Angeles influence their decisions and the curves of the mystery. Monk periodically entertains thoughts of other women, like his old flame Tina Chalmers, who represents the district where his mother lives. That district includes the location where a murdered Korean merchant was buried and is then unearthed during a ground-breaking ceremony—the central mystery of this novel. When Monk is asked to work on the case, it’s again because of deep ties to the place and its people; a Korean American lawyer suggests him to the Korean American Merchants Group, because Kodama has mentioned her Black private investigator boyfriend to the lawyer.
Meanwhile, Kodama, who is also a painter, maintains a complex life of her own as she upholds a system that she understands to be deeply flawed. When Monk asks her about her day in the “world of adjudication,” she responds with what could be construed as banter: “Compared to kicking the ass of half of LA’s population, nothing, dear.” But Phillips fleshes her out as a character, rather than leaving her as a banter buddy or a prop girlfriend or twisting things to make her a femme fatale. She goes on to say, “The governor’s cutting the hell out of the budget. These kids who should be going to youth camps where they can at least get some counseling, wind up being sent into prisons with hardcore bastards who only abuse and maim their minds and bodies until they can’t help but be a stone gangster.” When Monk wants to move in together, she prefers not to because she doesn’t want to succumb to thinking of their shared place as one where they merely sleep and shower.
Later in the series, relationship complexities introduced in the first book continue and progress over dinners with family and decisions about children. Simultaneously, Monk investigates action-packed mysteries that feature hustlers, white supremacists, a family killed by firebombing, former baseball players dying. He makes trips to places other than South Central, but Phillips, with an eye toward what is realistic rather than pulpy or escapist or merely entertaining, savvily depicts the dynamics of those places as well. In the pages of the books, we are treated to the author’s astute awareness of violence, the forces of history, the wrangling of politics, the flawed system, and the concerns of the marginalized—as well as the multiplicity of experiences with which each of us navigates our world as an individual, whether we’re in South Central Los Angeles or elsewhere. These are novels that understand the importance of nurturing our communities and one another through despair; they suggest that even in the midst of profoundly disturbing circumstances, we can find, too, the everyday solaces of love and friendship.•
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and Naomi Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
METROPOLITAN MINEFIELD
Read prior CBC author Steph Cha’s essay on Violent Spring. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Read author Gary Phillips on getting the words right. He says, “The comics and the community: this would be the transmutable clay out of which I’d later mold my novels.” —Alta
THAT OLD STORY
Read critic Anna E. Clark on The Ancients, by John Larison, set “after a climate apocalypse and its ensuing chaos have effectively reset the clock on civilization.” —Alta
RESIST THE STORM
Following last week’s election, past CBC author Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell) writes about authoritarianism, resistance, and love. “There will be heroes in the crises to come; look for them. Maybe you’ll be one.” —Guardian
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