Event Recap: Gary Phillips and ‘Violent Spring’

Gary Phillips is “one of the most essential writers to understanding the topography of Los Angeles and the imaginaries it produces,” said host John Freeman to begin the 50th episode of the California Book Club, which focused on the November selection, Violent Spring. Freeman described Ivan Monk, the first-person narrator, as the “incredibly likable, intelligent ex–bounty hunter hero of this book.”

Explaining the origins of Violent Spring, Phillips said that prior to writing it, he’d written a book with Monk and his significant other, Jill Kodama, that didn’t sell. When the Los Angeles events of ’92, including the Rodney King verdict, happened, he was the outreach director for an organization called the Liberty Hill Foundation, a job that had taken him all over the city. He knew the key players in what had transpired, and he knew people who were going to become part of Rebuild L.A., a project aimed at rebuilding the city after the destruction from the L.A. riots. He considered writing a new novel about those characters, not set “smack-dab in the middle of the uprising” but rather a year out, as things were cooling down and economic efforts were made to rebuild.

Freeman commented that one of the strengths of the novel’s opening scene is that Monk is standing with his mother and sister: “He’s the opposite of the sort of typical noir cutoff character. He’s immediately situated and enmeshed among his family, among his community.” At the heart of the book, Freeman pointed out, are powerful women like Kodama and Monk’s ex-girlfriend Tina Chalmers. He asked Phillips how deliberate these choices were. Phillips responded that the lineage of the fictional private eye is that he is a loner, divorced, alcoholic, or semi-alcoholic. But feeling that that had already been done, Phillips searched instead for what differentiated Monk, a young man in the 1990s who wasn’t an activist but who had been affected by the crack epidemic and Reagan.

“I wanted to situate Monk so that he would have a family, a kind of extended family, and he would have some sense of a community. He wasn’t just the lone wolf operating against this sea of troubles, but in fact, he had those folks who he could talk with or who he could rely on,” Phillips said. Monk had a “nest of people as opposed to being alone and adrift,” as he might have been in older noir novels.

Freeman pointed out that labor is saturated throughout the book: “What people do for a living and how they identify as having a vocation is never overlooked. Where things were made, and how they were made, and who gathered as groups and unions to do it.” Phillips shared that his dad, to whom the novel was dedicated, was a poor boy from a little town in Texas and that he and his brothers couldn’t wait to get out of town. They went to fight in World War II, and when they returned home, there were jobs waiting for them. Phillips noted that his father had a union job, as did his mother, as a city librarian. “This was part of that Black migration that came west, trying to find something better,” Phillips said. “And it wasn’t paradise on earth, but, by degrees, it was certainly better than the conditions they left behind.”

Prior CBC author and crime novelist Naomi Hirahara, an old friend of Phillips’s and his wife’s, joined the conversation and kicked off with a question she’d wanted to ask but never had: “Gary, who is Jill Kodama based on?” Phillips chuckled but wouldn’t say. Hirahara commented that she read Violent Spring in 1994 and believes it is his riskiest, partly because he writes so many Korean characters. Phillips commented that the book was rejected many times for “too much politics.” At the time, a change was occurring. The old guard of the mystery community was still in place, but more women were publishing, and the civil rights movement was affecting the characters being written. Phillips believed he could weave into his novel the sociopolitical backdrop of those times.

Hirahara pointed out that the L.A. uprising happened in ’92 and the book came out in ’94, and that it took guts and perhaps naïveté to bring out the book so soon after. Phillips suggested that now he might let those events simmer or play out. “It’s just the hubris of youth,” he said. “Of course I can write this, right? Of course I can tell this story.... I’ll make an amalgam of some of these folks, but I’ll just tell the story.”

Inquiring about Phillips’s shift in work from organizing to writing, Hirahara said, “There’s so many merits to community organizing, being an activist, right? And so what does writing bring to you? Do you feel that, in some ways, you’re changing people’s minds about certain topics, or you’re pretty much concentrating on entertaining people?”

Phillips said, “These things are cumulative, and as you know, you try to imbue these mysteries, these thrillers, these crime fictions with a kind of gravity, a kind of gravitas, a verisimilitude, and hopefully that resonates.” He does think that reading helps give readers a broader perspective. “But in the end, yes, I am entertaining,” he said. “I am telling you a story. I am taking you through the paces. But in the context of that, hopefully I’ve given you characters that will stay with you once the book is done.”•

Join us on December 12 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Rachel Khong will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Goodbye, Vitamin. Register for the Zoom conversation here.