Violent Spring (Ivan Monk Mysteries) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This rough, strong, very political mystery marks the debut of a new kind of Los Angeles private detective--an Easy Rawlins for the '90s and beyond. Ivan Monk is hired by a group of Korean merchants to find out who killed one of their members for the specific reason that Monk is an African American, and the Koreans see him as a public relations asset. Monk sees himself more as a street cleaner or avenging angel, and on his journey of discovery he finds villains of every race and shade. Violent Spring catches the racial and social tensions of Los Angeles in a completely original way.

From Booklist

In the wake of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riots, Los Angeles is a racial tinderbox. When the body of a murdered Korean shop owner is discovered during the groundbreaking ceremony of what's intended to be part of the city's healing process, private eye Ivan Monk gets involved in the case. Given the atmosphere, everyone assumes a racial motive, but as Monk probes ever deeper into the case, greed rears its omnipresent head. Monk meets resistance from the Korean Merchants Association, the FBI, the LAPD, and an assortment of street gangs. As a hard-boiled mystery, this is routine. As an examination of L.A.'s racial strife, it's really quite enlightening. So many of the ethnic groups outside the power structure are interdependent, yet they resent the others' presence. Banding together would provide strength, but it's to the empowered's advantage to keep the groups squabbling among themselves. This is the milieu in which Monk works. Depending upon whom he is questioning, he's perceived as either an Uncle Tom or a troublemaking black agitator. But he perseveres to a bloody conclusion in which the only color that really matters is the green of cold, hard cash. Wes Lukowsky --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Berkley (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425156257
• ISBN-13: 978-0425156254
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,527,091 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great new detective series begins here!, April 2, 1998

By	Craig Larson (Maple Grove, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Monk is an affable guide through the thickets, November 22, 2000

By	Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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+