INTRODUCTION
by Walter Mosley
From the very beginning of his writing career, Gary Phillips brought a few new twists and turns to the term noir. He gave the word a collar, a color, a class, a political stripe or two, and a set of purposes that included the struggle against unrelenting oppression. He never worried about the world-weary tropes of a literary crime genre that sought balance (the status quo), resolution (the rock-solid knowledge of who was guilty), or justice (in the sense of the so-called good guys winning out over the bad). He wanted to see past the comforting, if somewhat rough, language that spouted the metaphors couched in a hard-boiled poetry that rarely challenged our awareness of a world gone rotten. That is to say, Mr. Phillips wanted to infuse what we read with what we actually experience, taking that knowledge into the drudgery of the everyday lives of most Americans, and therefore making it at least possible to effect change through our imaginations.
Gary’s heroes are much like the writer himself: big, loud, inordinately powerful, and willing to put their shoulders to the wheel day or night, night and day. Where most modern-day genre detectives take on cases that are possible to solve, Mr. Phillips’s crime fighters are often doomed even when they win. You might be able to see and hear most of the shamuses that grace the pages of this great genre, but you can literally smell the sour sweat, the hint of bad whiskey, and even the faded cologne of Phillips’s heroes. These are men and women that you rub shoulders with on the Number 7 Bus, that you fear walking behind you on an empty street, that you might even want to touch in order to feel what it is to be that alive.
The mystery in Mr. Phillips’s work is not what the reader can’t see clearly but what she, or he, steadfastly refuses to believe. Gary’s work is like the cell-phone camera revealing Cop on Black crime, the belated truth about our justified war on Vietnam. In this book, Violent Spring, and the many others that come after, we find the DNA that exonerates those we have hated, abandoned, and imprisoned—thirty years too late.
And the crime? The crime is most often murder. This is true throughout the many books that define the many crime genres. But, quite often, blood comes hand in hand with theft. People kill for an inheritance, a life policy, while committing a robbery, when they want to take over or get back. Most of the time we accept the concept of theft because we know what it’s like to be without. We’ve been taught since childhood to fight for our property, or to obtain said property.
These truths are self-evident until you come across Gary Phillips’s crime novels. Gary knows that property is theft, that ownership is at least in part a felonious enterprise. Crime in his world is defined by the hunger to own more than is needed.
And the beginning of this fairly new branch of crime novel was Violent Spring, a book that brings all the lost tribes of Los Angeles together in order to hide the truth. Not who killed but why they killed and how that reason is inextricably intertwined with our hungers and a kind of self-generated blindness that can never be excused.
RETROSPECTIVE
by Gary Phillips
Long ago and far away, I’d written my first book, The Body on the Beach. This came about when I took a ten-week extension class at UCLA on how to write a mystery novel taught by Robert Crais. At that time, Bob was transitioning from TV writer to novelist. His first in a long line of Elvis Cole books, The Monkey’s Raincoat, was just coming out. In class, we examined Robert Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript.
We were tasked with creating our own set of characters and writing the first fifty pages of an original novel. I came up with my donut-shop-owning private eye Ivan Monk; his mentor, retired LAPD cop Dexter Grant; Lt. Marasco Seguin (named for the town in Texas where my dad was from); and his partner, his old lady—as was the term once upon a time—Superior Court Judge Jill Kodama. After grinding out those initial pages and finishing the class, I kept going and completed the manuscript.
That book never sold. I kept my day job. But my gig as the outreach director for the Liberty Hill Foundation was fulfilling. The Foundation then, as now, funds community organizing efforts toward social change. My role involved meeting with various grassroots groups throughout the city, from sit-downs with former gang members in the housing projects in Watts, listening to grandmothers in a church in Boyle Heights, and talking with the Black-Korean Alliance in South Central, to strategy sessions with other funders in downtown high-rises. Then April 1992 happened. The four Los Angeles Police Department officers facing criminal charges for the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King were found not guilty in a courtroom outside the city.
Prescient of today and police abuse captured on smartphones, their actions along with the actions of other law enforcement personnel had been taped by plumber George Holliday. Local station KTLA Channel 5 was the first to play the footage the following evening. The police showed up to the station and confiscated the recording. There was a copy. The impact was monumental. Soon, the first viral video was being replayed on television sets across the country and the world. It was the grainy black-and-white proof of what many had claimed for decades about how policing was conducted if you were Black or Brown.
When the verdict came down, the Rodney King Riots . . . the civil unrest . . . Saigu, the Korean term for those troubling, turbulent days and nights, jumped off. More than sixty people perished, and more than a billion dollars of property was destroyed. L.A.’s populace sought to rebuild and revitalize its communities and reform the police.
Having gotten to know all sorts of people in L.A.’s numerous enclaves, including those working to make a difference: What if I wrote a mystery set a year or so after the unrest? One laced with the fraught sociopolitical reverberations of a city trying to figure out how to move forward. Violent Spring was the result. The book begins at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new shopping center where the riots started, the cross streets of Florence and Normandie in the ’hood.
My then agent sent the manuscript out, earning a round of rejections from New York publishers. Some editors said get rid of the political backdrop. But that was the heart of the book. I couldn’t change that. Eventually Violent Spring was published by a small press I was part of, along with friend and fellow crime fiction writer John Shannon—West Coast Crime, headquartered in the Pacific Northwest. This was in the days before
print-on-demand. We put in money and sweat equity. We printed and warehoused and obtained distribution. If memory serves, we initially published four books, including John’s The Concrete River and Served Cold by Ed Goldberg, which would win a Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. We paid Ed $500. Our books got on shelves, even in Costcos.
The rise and fall of West Coast Crime has been chronicled elsewhere. As well as how Violent Spring got optioned by HBO, my first of several forays in the Land of Celluloid Dreams. At any rate, by then, John, me, and Ed had been picked up by the same New York publisher. I would go on to write four Ivan Monk novels and several short stories featuring the PI. But Violent Spring is my entrée to the hardboiled genre, a moment in time, reflections on my city of tarnished angels.
Now here we are, thirty years after its first publication. While there has been significant change, too many of the underlying factors setting off the unrest in ’92 remain. Yet I’m so pleased Soho Crime has brought out this thirtieth anniversary edition and will be reissuing the other three Ivan Monk novels, too.
Who knows, I might well finally write the fifth and last Monk novel one of these days.
—Gary Phillips, Los Angeles
ANATOMY OF AN UNREST
A Timeline of the Los Angeles Riots
•March 3, 1991
Just after midnight, motorist Rodney King is stopped by the California Highway Patrol for speeding after a pursuit on the 210 Freeway in the San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles Police Department is also on scene. Across the way, plumber George Holliday is awakened by the commotion. He retrieves his recently acquired Sony camcorder. From the balcony of his apartment, he videotapes the scene below as some numerous baton blows, kicks, and repeated shocks from a stun gun are leveled on King. The video is first broadcast on local KTLA Channel 5 during their 10 P.M. newscast the next night, then goes nationwide.
•March 16, 1991
Fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins is shot in the back of the head and killed by Soon Ja Du, whose family owns the Empire Liquor Market in South Central. Du accuses Latasha of stealing a small bottle of orange juice. She hadn’t.
•July 9, 1991
The scathing Christopher Commission report is released. Formally known as the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, the Christopher Commission, headed by lawyer Warren Christopher, was founded in the wake of the King beating to examine the causes and suggest remedies to the LAPD’s history of problematic conduct. Among its findings, the report states that, “There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the department regarding force. The failure to control these officers is a management issue that is at the heart of the problem.”
Those recommendations in mind, the Los Angeles City Council puts forward a ballot measure termed Proposition F. In addition to other matters, it seeks to remove the police chief ’s civil service protection and strengthen the already existing Police Commission.
Amid this, embattled Chief of Police Daryl Gates, staunch defender of the police department, suggests he’ll resign.
•November 15, 1991
Soon Ja Du is convicted of voluntary manslaughter by a jury. Judge Joyce Karlin sentences Du to probation instead of prison and a fine of $500. A recall is mounted against Karlin. The recall fails.
•March 5, 1992
After a change of venue to the predominantly white and conservative suburb of Simi Valley, the state trial of Stacey C. Koon, Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno, and
Timothy E. Wind—the four LAPD officers indicted for the beating of Rodney King—begins at the East Ventura County Courthouse.
•April 28, 1992
A peace treaty is devised and signed between the Crips and Bloods at a mosque in the Watts area of town. The leaders of the gang truce also author a “Proposal for L.A.’s Face-Lift” setting out broad initiatives to better conditions in South Central.
•April 29, 1992
Ten not guilty verdicts are delivered by a nearly all-white jury in Simi Valley. The single conviction for excessive force against one of the officers is declared a mistrial by Judge Stanley Weisberg. The announcement of the verdict comes over the airwaves several minutes past 3 P.M.
•Evening. Within hours, the intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Central erupts in rage. Inexplicably, the LAPD is initially ordered to pull back. Live feed from news helicopters captures the brutal beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny, who is pulled from his rig as he attempts to drive through the intersection. Nearby, four Black folks—Bobby Green Jr., Lei Yuille, Titus Murphy, and Terri Barnett—come to the scene after seeing it unfold on the news. Green, also a truck driver, with Murphy’s help, drives Denny’s truck and the injured man to the hospital.
Altercations break out between protestors and the police in front of the LAPD’s Parker Center, their central headquarters in downtown L.A. Anti-police abuse organizer Michael Zinzun admonishes the gathered to keep cool, to not give the police the excuse to bust heads.
Soon after, Mayor Tom Bradley and other political and religious leaders address an overflow crowd at a “Pray for Peace” rally at the First A.M.E. Church in the West Adams District.
Elsewhere as a mini-mart burns on Vermont Avenue in South Central, across the street Chester Murray stands guard in front of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and
and Research (SCL), a repository of left, labor and peoples’ history housed in a former two-story appliance store. Chester is SCL’s building manager and lives in the neighborhood. He talks to the crowds, cajoling them not to burn the building. Along with friends of his and even a local gang member, he would return for the next three days to keep watch. SCL is still in operation today.
•April 29-30, 1992
Rebuild L.A.is formed by Mayor Bradley and Governor Pete Wilson, among others. Its board is a who’s who of the city’s movers and shakers, though lacks representatives from grassroots level organizations. Rebuild is touted as a public-private partnership to spur economic revitalization in the inner city. Bradley appoints Peter Ueberroth (who oversaw the ’84 Olympics in L.A., the only profitable Olympics to date) to head the effort. Over the months to come, the organization will be criticized for making grand announcements as opposed to grand accomplishments.
•April 30, 1992
At 12:15 A.M., the mayor imposes a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
•May 1, 1992
The National Guard rolls in including the 40th Infantry Division (mechanized). Some 6,000 will be deployed along with 3,000–4,000 army troops and marines as well as 1,000 riot-trained federal law officers.
•May 4, 1992
After six days of unrest, order is restored and the curfew is lifted.
Sixty-three people are dead, more than 2,000 injured. According to the Rand Corporation, 36 percent of those arrested are African Americans and 51 percent Latinx. There is approximately $1 billion worth of property damage or destruction.
•May 7, 1992
President George W. Bush leads a delegation through the devastation. He denounces the participants in the rioting as “purely criminal.” The upshot is not much in the way of federal aid will be forthcoming toward recovery.
Carlton Jenkins, managing director of the largest Black-owned bank in the city, states, “They [banks and lending institutions] are walking on the fence and can go either way. Now is the
time to step up and put your money where your mouth is.” The three Black banks in the city will form an effort to facilitate loans to damaged businesses.
•June 2, 1992
Worries of law-and-order backlash by voters dissipate and Proposition F passes, changing city code to establish civilian oversight of the police department.
•June 26, 1992
Police chief Daryl Gates resigns. At the same time, Amnesty International releases a report that concludes members of the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department routinely resort to excessive force, particularly against Blacks and Hispanics.
In the ensuing months, the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment emerges on the frontlines to help ease tensions among Blacks and Koreans, working to not simply rebuild liquor stores, but also to seek resources to convert them into full-service markets in the South Central food desert. Its founder, former physician’s assistant Karen Bass, is later elected to congress, then as mayor of Los Angeles in 2022.
•April 20, 1994
Rodney King wins his civil suit against the LAPD.
ONE
Ivan Monk wondered if he was the only one who got the joke. Standing next to his mother and sister at the groundbreaking of the future shopping complex at the corner of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles, the private eye remembered the maelstrom this intersection had been not so long ago.
It was one of those significant moments in time, forever etched in the deep cells of his brain. Like the day and the hour he heard this father had died or when he was in grade school and a tearful Mrs. Rogers came in and told the class that President Kennedy had just been shot.
Wednesday afternoon, April 29, 1992 was one such moment. All of Los Angeles had its collective ear glued to radios a few minutes past three as the sixty-five-year-old forewoman of the jury on the live broadcast read the not guilty verdict.
The incredible decision was delivered by a jury of ten whites, one Latina and one Filipina who supported the claim of the LAPD officers on trial for use of excessive force against Black motorist, Rodney King. The four cops were captured in a hazy and brutal cinema verite as they beat the living shit out of King on a Lake View Terrace street in the San Fernando Valley.
Monk stared open-jawed at the radio, his secretary Delilah gripping his arm, hard, in disbelief. Soon they both got that look on their faces one got from being Black in America. That look that said, Yeah, we been given the short end again, so what’s new.
The city raged red with blood and fury. Reginald Denny, a white working-class guy, a union truck driver, was pulled from his cab at Florence and Normandie and senselessly beaten and shotgunned in the leg by young Black men venting their anger in frustrated and futile fashion. And four other Black people got him to safety.
But having no established avenue of redress—indeed what had the incredible verdict delivered from the white suburb of Ventura’s Simi Valley said to them?—the fellaheen sought justice in the streets. Subsequently, in the federal trial of the cops, two of the four were found guilty. And a city short on money and hope was momentarily spared another conflagration.
But the fact that now Monk stood at Florence and Normandie at a groundbreaking site, a symbolic gesture of rebuilding at one of the flashpoints for the riots that ripped his hometown, was not what he considered the joke.
“Isn’t that Tina over there next to the mayor, Ivan?” his mother said, disrupting his reverie.
Monk glanced at the dais. The mayor adjusted a sheaf of papers held in his thick hands as he stood at the portable podium. On either side of the solid built man in the blue serge suit were folding chairs. Various city officials, business people and some community leaders sat in them or milled about. Councilwoman Tina Chalmers, an African American woman who represented this district his mother lived in, and Monk’s old flame, sat on the stage talking to an older white man in an expensive-looking gray and black-flecked double-breasted suit.
“Yeah, that’s her, Mom.” Monk studied the man Tina talked with.
He’d only seen him on television and in news photos previously, but you’d have to have been in orbit on a space station not to have seen or heard of Maxfield O’Day. After the uprising, as the rubble and rhetoric piled high, O’Day emerged as the silver-haired man on the white charger. Lawyer, businessman, developer, political insider. A Los Angeles mover and shaker of the first order who played an active role in the election of one of his boardroom peers as the current mayor of Los Angeles.
Maxfield O’Day was appointed, some wags say anointed, by the mayor and the City Council to head the official rebuilding efforts of the city. His task was to pull a consortium of city and business people together in an effort to infuse South Central and Pico Union with new business ventures. “To massage capital, to give it confidence in doing business in the inner city,” O’Day was fond of saying. Particularly when there was a reporter around. Of course, Monk concluded, if that meant being lax on things like environmental laws, undercutting the minimum wage, and gutting California’s workers’ comp program, well, big money was so insecure.
“I thought Jill was coming today,” Odessa, Monk’s sister, ...
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