Time isn’t necessarily the agent of justice. One hopes it will be, but so often with time come other things. While some mourn, other forces regroup. Protect their power. Produce new distractions. How Americans live in time, and who is asked to wait—and for how long—for justice, for comfort, for life and happiness, is one of the great untold stories of this country. Asked once about the Los Angeles uprising of 1992, Toni Morrison commented: “What struck me most about the people who were burning down shops and stealing was how long they waited—the restraint not the spontaneity, the restraint. The moment to be anarchic…was when we first saw those tapes…. They waited for justice for almost a year, and it didn’t come. No one talks about [that].”
Gary Phillips does. In Violent Spring, the book that kicked off his Ivan Monk detective series, he begins in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots with city power brokers already congratulating themselves on how much they’d come together to heal the city. In real life, one of those efforts was Rebuild L.A., an organization whose stated goal was to steer corporate dollars to South Central Los Angeles. It would fail within five years. On the opening pages of Phillips’s novel, a similar alliance begins breaking ground on a new building on the storied corner of Florence and Normandie Avenues, where the riots broke out in 1992. The bulldozer doesn’t dig down very far before city officials posing for photographs with shovels find a body.
Watching the ground-breaking ceremony beside his sister and mother is Monk, Phillips’s intensely likable private eye. An ex–merchant seaman with a reading habit and a few dozen miles on his own odometer, Monk is exactly what you want a knight-errant to be. He’s skeptical, known to many, good-natured until pushed, and more than a bit haunted by some things he has done in the past. Time turns inside him like a strange loop. Sometimes this expresses itself in a matter of taste, like the 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 Monk drives. Other times, it’s a sentiment, like regret, apparent when Monk polishes the gun passed down to his father and then to him.
It’s not long before Monk finds himself at the center of a murder case involving the body, an investigation where a puzzle of overlapping interests meet. Phillips has a background in community activism and it shows. Has there been a crime novel so deeply saturated in the brokerage of group interests as Violent Spring? Not long after we begin, the Korean American Merchants Group hires Monk to investigate what is clearly a murder, eager to get to the bottom of what happened to the Korean merchant who was a former member. Monk’s immediate question is, why former—and why is the license for the victim’s liquor store in the name of a shady conglomerate? Who doesn’t want to be known?
Monk isn’t the only one who senses that someone is trying to make a profit from the city’s pain. A Latino organizer and the executive director of a Black self-help group want their rightful share, too. They’re smart men, and they know that the city is moving fast. Meanwhile, everyone seems a little too keen for swift justice for Monk’s taste. The merchants group is fingering a former store clerk; the police and FBI are ramping up their campaign against street gangs; and the development corporation at the heart of rebuilding the neighborhood hires Monk to boot, because the story its telling—that small businesses were vulnerable to crime—means that a synergy of forces is pointing at young Black men.
As a Black man in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, Monk has to be several people at once. He can be strong but not angry, as one run-in with a racist security guard reminds. To Black colleagues he is a fellow traveler, but he must simultaneously demonstrate his fairness to his Korean and white employers. Otherwise, they will second-guess his detective work (and Monk is pretty sure one of them is following him). These constant demands and projections don’t jostle Monk, in part because he carries himself from a deep interior core, which Phillips shows us he erects every day. He rises at dawn, makes breakfast, reads the paper, dresses just so. Sometimes going to a fighters’ gym to do a circuit of weights and calisthenics. When things bug him, he goes to bed early. He does things in his own time and way, as if he knows that each day will challenge that core.
The car is part of this—the 1964 Ford Galaxie 500. One of the most gorgeous cars ever made by Detroit. A clinic in restrained elegance. Following Monk as he pilots this beautiful boat through a maze of locales and cultures and political demands is about as dazzling a tour through Los Angeles in the 1990s as you can find in the pages of a book. The whole city is here, or so it seems. We stop at the sleek Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood, where Monk gets a room with his brilliant judge girlfriend, Jill Kodama, and in Sugar Hill Craftsman homes, where Monk takes meetings with men who might represent gangbangers on the lam.
Moving at the speed of a big-block V-8, Monk journeys north, south, east, and west. Crossing neighborhoods and describing what he sees with expert precision, Monk remembers who used to live there and why they don’t anymore. He notices the racial demarcations, like when he’s brought to South Central and clearly the neighborhood has its own roving intelligence patrol to clock outsiders. He recalls how the industry left and why. It’s no accident that the best cars in this book, save a Saab 900, all come from the era when Van Nuys had a huge auto plant. A Buick Electra 225, a Cadillac Eldorado.
As good as he is on the move, Phillips truly excels when Monk stops, gets out of his car, and talks to people. What a range of people this novel contains. A car thief who just loves cars so much he can’t stop; the chippy nephew of a Korean American store owner; the mascara-slathered manager at a down-on-its-luck apartment building. Monk is an expert interlocutor, and Phillips shows how, despite the differences the news likes to play up, there are people of all types in Los Angeles, and many of them have an innate sense of fairness.
That includes Monk and his girlfriend, Jill, who present a refreshing break in the gender roles of traditional noir. She earns more money and isn’t keen on cohabitation, at least not yet. Monk admires her power and at the end of a day confides in her his worries and vulnerabilities. Each night they spend together, they break the spell of the city’s fugue over violence with a meal and sometimes a tumble on the couch. The only time they skip a beat as a couple is when Monk briefly starts to apply the language he’s been peppered with all around him to them as a couple: Can they transcend their divisions?
Quietly, movingly, this novel prizes apart flattening notions of people and the groups they supposedly represent from the city itself. Some of that comes from identifying the mythmakers themselves; sometimes it’s exposing the myths. The powers that be in Los Angeles, where Monk operates, like to tell two competing stories. One is about how impossible it is for everyone to get along; the other is about how desperately people need to heal. Neither one is quite right, as Monk discovers in his investigations. People he speaks to have needed succor for a long time. And groups that are presented as being at war, such as the city’s gangs, are trying to move past violence.
What if it’s in the city’s interest not to let them? This is the most frightening question Violent Spring asks. More than any novel of this period, Phillips provides a brilliant counternarrative to such zero-sum thinking. He dreams up a city that is by no stretch a utopia but much better than that question. A city where one can get two hot dogs wrapped in a tortilla, where doughnut shops linger on many corners. A city in which even in the grimiest corner you can sometimes smell the sea. Where people would be happy if they were allowed a little bit of dignity and not asked to wait for it.•
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.
