Customer Reviews

Violent Spring

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Gary Phillips' _Violent Spring_ introduces readers to his detective, Ivan Monk, a great new hardboiled private eye for the 90s.

Monk is hired by two seemingly disparate groups, a Korean Merchants' group and SOMA, Save Our Material Assets, a group interested in rebuilding downtown LA, following the riots of 1992, to look into the murder of a Korean businessman, whose body is uncovered during a ground-breaking ceremony. Monk gets involved in a politically-charged, racially diverse investigation that threatens to spark more violence, the closer he gets to the truth.

I'll be honest--this book did take a while to get going. The first hundred or so pages didn't really grab me. But as I stuck with it, Monk and his group of friends and relatives really began to grow on me, enough so that I immediately started into Phillips' second book in this series, _Perdition USA_. Monk is very reminiscent of Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlins and part of a growing renaissance of African-American detectives in the 90s (see also Gar Anthony Haywood and Robert Greer, among others).

Based on what I've read, Phillips and Ivan have a great career ahead of them.

'Violent Spring' was published in 1994, and centers around the murder of a Korean store owner sometime after the LA riots that occurred 2 years before.

Ivan Monk is a Private Eye who is hired to find the murderer; he has a strong-willed Japanese-American judge named Jill Kadama to assist him professionally and personally. Moreover, Monk meets many characters who have their own positives and negatives. That aspect of many characters lead to the issues I had with the book: Too many characters that show up, which makes it confusing to keep up with them. For example: There are two or three groups of gangs that appear in the novel, but they are not really given any aspects that set them apart.

Other issues: Many transitions that occur between dialogue or locations aren't smooth, so I found myself going back to see who is talking...or where a certain character is. Furthermore, there seemed to be a copy-editing issue since certain grammatical 'things' turn up frequently.

With all that said, I stayed up all night to finish the book and find out what the plan of the murderer was. Even though the plan wasn't exactly clear, the book still whetted my appetite for this author's other works.

After being fired from his job as a union organizer in 1989, Gary Phillips took a writing class with Robert Crais (author of the Elvis Cole series) on how to write a mystery novel. Crais taught the class how to structure a book by dissecting Robert Parker's first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf Manuscript (see Orrin's review of A Savage Place). Phillips eventually found a way to incorporate his own liberal social beliefs, the elements of the classic hard-boiled private eye genre and the backdrop of post-riot Los Angeles into his first Ivan Monk mystery, Violent Spring. Then he and John Shannon (see review of Concrete River) put together their own publishing outfit and printed the book. As a result of their success, the Monk books have been reprinted by Berkley and are now readily available.

There has always been a weird dichotomy in detective fiction. The private eye is in a certain sense something of a bleeding heart--trying to protect innocents from the corrupt system, trying to heal the pain of their clients, often protecting wrongdoers whom they feel should not be punished, and so on. But on the other hand, they are fundamentally conservative--adhering to rigid moral codes, fighting evil, completely alienated from bureaucracy and government in general. So there is nothing really new in what Phillips is trying to do here.

Ivan Monk is a former Merchant Marine, former bail bondsman, now absentee owner of a donut shop and full time private eye. When the body of a Korean merchant is found at the groundbreaking for a new business development in South LA, both the Korean Merchants association and the white developers hire Monk to look into the murder. It is assumed that Monk, because he is black, will be able to investigate the seeming gang related nature of the killing without ruffling feathers in the Hood. But Monk finds himself ensnared in a vicious web of politics and ends up caught in the middle of a turf battle between black street gangs, white developers, Asian merchants and Latino community activists. As Phillips says, modern LA most resembles the Balkans, with the different ethnic groups all struggling for their piece of the pie and mostly willing to do whatever they have to do in order to get it.

Phillips does try to inject some liberal cant into his tale, but it is mostly too formulaic or downright ridiculous to take seriously:

Not that Monk laid the entire blame for gangsterism at the feet of men like Reagan and Bush. Still, he had to admit that they had set a fine example as the biggest gangbangers of all with their violent escapades in Grenada, Libya, Panama and Iraq--all while the cities went to hell and the young folk emulated their elders.

Uh huh, I can see the though process of that young hoodlum now: "I was going to finish high school and get a job at Go-Go Mart while I went to Community College, but now that we've bombed Qaddafi, I'm going to deal crack instead." You betcha.

But if you can gnaw your way through these brief servings of tripe, he does serve up an action packed mystery set in a milieu that is unfamiliar, fascinating and frightening. The tribal politics make for a classically tangled web and Monk is an affable guide through the thickets.

GRADE: B+