SHOTGUN BLAST FROM THE PAST: GARY PHILLIP'S VIOLENT SPRING

I once went to a screening of John Ford's Three Bad Men at L.A..'s Silent Movie Theater. Before the main show, Ford biographer Scott Eyeman introduced a piece from an even earlier work that had just been discovered and instructed us to look at the exterior shots. Watching it, I thought to myself, the S.O.B. had it all along. That's the same way i felt when i reread Gary Phillips debut Violent Spring.

He picks the perfect case to introduce readers to his South Central private eye, Ivan Monk, as well as himself as a writer. A couple years after The L.A. riots from the Rodney KIng verdict, the city's business and political leaders gather for a groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center, believed to help revitalize the community at Florence and Normandie, an intersection where a more infamous moment of the riots occurred. When the digging begins, the body of a Korean liquor store owner, Kim Bong-Suh is discovered. For political reasons, a group of Korean businessmen hire Monk to look into it. With the help of his mentor, retired LAPD Dexter grant, he dives into a quagmire of race, commerce, and old wounds that could ignite the city once again.

I've had the pleasure of hanging out with Gary and he is one of the most knowledgeable people I know about genre fiction. Violent Spring feels like he pulled all the craftsmanship he admired from all of the detective authors and books he admired The action passages and descriptions have the feel of the paperback masters. The writing style contains Hammett's punch and immediacy with Ross Macdonald's description as well as his psychological and social perspective of his hero, yet he never mimics them. Like many writers entering the genre waters, he attempts to pack everything from it into the the book with gangs (instead of gangsters), shootouts, crooked businessmen and political players, and even th P.I. getting roughed up and knocked out, yet it does not feel overstuffed.

Most of this is due to Gary knowing the story he wants to tell. You feel the craft of those past greats, but you you never blatantly see them. Phillips has his own voice, one of working class muscle that pushes heavy themes across a labyrinth plot line.

I've commented in my writing on his latest series hero,"One Shot" Harry Ingraham, a photographer and process server in sixties South Central, how he deals with the idea of community. I now realize, he has been working with that theme since book one,. It could be argued he has strengthened that theme as he has gained experience or it could be that the South Central of Violent Spring is more frayed and distressed where those in the underground may prove to be the best hope.

Gary's knowledge of history and politics, particularly dealing with race and L.A., is either or equal to or exceeds his literary knowledge. His day job, while writing the book, was for The Liberty Hill Foundation that helped fund groups for social organizing. He was apart of the community during the the riots, as well as the lead up and fall out. He delivers a piece of that experience filtered through an entertaining hard boiled novel. He took the classic template and both updated and personalized it.

Last year SOHO Press released a a deluxe edition reprint that has an intro from Walter Mosley, a timeline of historic events that lead up to Violent Spring, putting the story in context for those who didn't live through them or could use a refresher, and an easy the author wrote on the tenth anniversary of the uprising. There is also an introduction from gary where he mentions that he wrote an earlier,unpublished Monk novel, The Body On The Beach. I would love to read that book, but I can't think of a clearer way to introduce both the hero and and his creator than in Violent Spring.