We’re delighted to welcome back past California Book Club author Naomi Hirahara as a special guest to discuss Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring with the author and host John Freeman.
Hirahara has multiple detective series; her detectives include Mas Arai, Leilani Santiago, and Officer Ellie Rush. She is also a former journalist with the Rafu Shimpo and this year published A Child’s Introduction to Asian American and Pacific Islander History: The Heroes, the Stories, and the Cultures That Helped to Build America.
Hirahara’s historical mystery Clark and Division, which won a Mary Higgins Clark Award, was the California Book Club’s August 2023 selection. It tells the story of a Japanese American family’s relocation to Chicago after time spent in an internment camp, only to find that the oldest daughter of the family has been murdered. That month, critic Anna E. Clark described for us protagonist Aki Ito’s journey in Clark and Division, writing, “Though she does find answers, and even a modicum of satisfaction by the novel’s end, these achievements come only through discovering the potential for allyship in people she’d previously dismissed: a ne’er-do-well zoot-suiter reveals surprising loyalty; a bubbly friend from work becomes a spy strong enough to sneak into a back-alley abortion clinic; a surrogate aunt steps in with advice at just the right moment.”
Hirahara’s second book about Aki is 2023’s Evergreen. In that novel, the family has returned from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1946 to find that their old home has been irrevocably changed with businesses taken over by the state and that Little Tokyo has been transformed into Bronzeville, a Black enclave. Aki is a nurse’s aide whose soldier husband has returned home. As an aide, she treats an old man who may have been beaten by his son, her husband’s best friend, and later, the old man is shot, while the son goes missing. By novel’s end, Aki further awakens to how the law structures lives and deaths. She realizes, “The two killings of the Watanabe men had transformed me—not only personally, but also in a larger way. I realized that fundamental pursuits of happiness—receiving a fair share of the fruits of our labor, living wherever we wanted, and getting married to whomever we loved—could be thwarted and taken away from us at any time.”
Many American crime stories emphasize the lone-wolf qualities of detectives. Noir film, in particular, relies on its gumshoe protagonist’s independence in a world of more shadows than light. Relying on their wits and connections and brute strength rather than official authority, private investigators straddle and cross multiple worlds and act in legally flexible ways to achieve their ends. They might answer to no one, or only to a morally dubious client. The noir landscape is typically corrupt, even irredeemable. But Phillips and Hirahara also work within a contemporary social justice tradition. They both write mystery novels set in multiracial environments, novels that imply a faith in the ability of people to connect, even when crimes and wrongdoing scissor away at society. Phillips’s Ivan Monk crime novels and Hirahara’s Japantown mysteries take care to attend to cultural and historical details, but those details do not fully determine the detectives’ solves. Solidarity, in the visions of both series, feels predicated on ideals about justice rather than traditional noir cynicism and extends beyond the kinds of alliances that depend only on shared identity.
Thursday’s event will gather gifted storytellers—along with our wonderful host, John Freeman—dedicated to L.A. crime fiction to talk about Violent Spring. Join us!•
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host Freeman and special guest Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
PUZZLING OUT LOS ANGELES
Read CBC host John Freeman’s brilliant essay on the agent of justice in Violent Spring. And preorder his latest, Sacramento Noir. —Alta
CHAI DAIQUIRI
Make Lindsay Merbaum’s delicious November “booktail” for Phillips’s crime novel in the lead-up to Thursday’s Zoom gathering. —Alta
ENCOUNTERS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Read author and artist Lisa Teasley’s powerful essay on remembering the Rodney King riots and the years since in L.A. in the wake of the recent election results. —Alta
MORE THAN A WIT
Chris Daley reviews Gail Crowther’s Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. “Crowther emphasizes that [Parker] was a lifelong activist, and Hollywood allowed her to come into her own in ways that truly mattered to her.” —Alta
OUTSIDERS’ ART
L.A. novelist Lisa Locascio Nighthawk writes about the exhibit Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, which closes on Saturday. —Alta
LOVE SONG FOR THE PHILIPPINES
Read poet and essayist Patrick Rosal’s introduction to past CBC author Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters, a new edition of which was published by Penguin Classics. Rosal writes that it “deftly and gorgeously invokes the tectonic and psychic potency of our dream life.” —Literary Hub
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free and you also will receive four custom-designed bookplates.
