Violent Spring

Thoughts on the first Ivan Monk novel

Hi there! As many of you know, I write crime novels in addition to humor. I call my brand of crime Slacker Noir because it draws on two genres—noir and slacker comedies. If you’re a fan of The Big Lebowski or Inherent Vice, you’re swimming in Slacker Noir waters. To keep swimming in those waters, check out my novel Not Safe for Work on Amazon, or all the other book places.

Is this a typical Situation Normal post?

Nope.

Here’s the deal:

I enjoy writing crime fiction, but I also want to write more *about* crime fiction (books, films & TV). So that’s what this new section of my newsletter is all about. If it’s not your thing, no worries! You can unsubscribe from the “Doing Crimes” section and you’ll still continue to receive the regular Situation Normal posts every Sunday. (Simply unsubscribe FROM THE SECTION, not the whole schbang).

And now, I’m really happy to kickoff this new project with some thoughts about an excellent and truly underrated novel, Violent Spring by Gary Phillips.

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Violent Spring by Gary Phillips

It’s fashionable to critique capitalism at the moment. Leftists of all stripes do it. Capitalists do it too. The critique is in the air. Or maybe it’s just on social media—the frenetic digital air that oxygenates a culture obsessed with take-downs, purity tests, and re-litigating the past ad nauseam ad absurdum. But reading Violent Spring, a socially conscious novel about a Black private investigator hired to solve the murder of a Korean store owner in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots Uprising, I was reminded of just how marginal the critique of capitalism was in the early 1990s.

I was fourteen or fifteen when the events depicted in Violent Spring took place. I remember seeing the video tape of LAPD officers beating Rodney King. I remember Black friends saying things like, “now you see what we’ve been saying, now it’s on tape, now there’s no denying police brutality.” I remember white Angelenos who were horrified and outraged by what they saw on the local news. I also remember plenty of white Angelenos explaining away police brutality by pointing out that King was intoxicated, as if the usual penalty for a DUI is to be beaten to within an inch of your life. And I remember white Angelenos who were primarily embarrassed by the tape—as if the real problem was what such a tape would mean for LA’s reputation as a world class city.

I remember the verdict, too. All four officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. Most of my classmates, the white ones anyway, were surprised. Wasn’t it obvious? How could someone look at that tape and say that what happened wasn’t a crime? But maybe those were naive questions—the kinds of things only privileged white kids would ask. I don’t remember my Black friends being surprised. Hurt, yes. Surprised, no. And I don’t remember white adults asking the same questions after the verdict, either. I remember that the adults around me knew only one thing: fear.

I remember what came next. The riots—a description I heard constantly at the time. The uprising—a term that would take decades to work its way into my consciousness. I remember the smell of smoke. I remember the TV images of fires, looting, and shooting. I remember helicopter footage of a Black crowd dragging a white truck driver out of his rig and beating him. I remember police and soldiers guarding Ventura Boulevard—a fashionable strip of shops and restaurants just down the hill from the house where I was raised—while the television broadcast images of armed Korean store owners fending for themselves. I remember a feeling that something had spun out of control, that society was at war with itself. And I remember Rodney King asking, “Can’t we all just get along?”

I have other memories of that time, but the thing that binds them together into a narrative is race. To some, the conversation was black and white. For others, there was a little more nuance: the conversation was black, white, brown, and yellow. But the consensus was, and maybe still is, that race was at the beating heart of the conflagration that nearly destroyed Los Angeles.

What I don’t remember was any discussion of capitalism. If there was an economic critique of a moment in Los Angeles history that resulted in 63 deaths, 2,383 injuries, 12,111 arrests, and roughly $1 billion in damage, it didn’t make its way into the mind of the average citizen. If it came at all, the economic critique came in the coded language of “jobs” and “opportunity” and “loans.” To the extent that we talked about capitalism’s role in what happened, it was to point out that Black Angelenos were often—perhaps systematically, although I don’t recall that word coming up a lot—excluded from the benefits of capitalism. In other words, there was nothing wrong with capitalism that a little more capitalism couldn’t fix. And so the conversation largely ignored the nature of the elephant in the room in favor of endless talk about the color of the elephant’s skin.

In a lot of ways, Violent Spring sets the record straight. But what’s so remarkable is that Phillips got it right at the time. He published Violent Spring in 1994, two years after Los Angeles exploded. He nailed the way Los Angeles talked about race in those days. He nailed the acrimony and the distrust, the yearning to heal, and skepticism that such a wound could be healed. But he also dug deep to unearth the stuff we weren’t talking about. The novel was ahead of its time.

Here’s how Booklist describes the novel:

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.

But there’s another remarkable aspect to Violent Spring. The book is a gas! Ivan Monk isn’t a wonky leftist who spends his time stroking his goatee and critiquing capitalism between espressos. He’s a cross between Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op and Shaft. He carries a gun (sometimes). He drinks (too much). He fights (when he has to). He loves a Japanese-American civil rights lawyer who was recently appointed to the bench. He owns a donut shop, and spends just as much time in Silver Lake as South LA—marking him as something closer to petite bourgeoisie than working class. And yet, capitalism and economic justice are foremost on his mind—not as abstract theories, but as the inescapable context for Blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos in Los Angeles. He is complex, and yet he lives by a simple code. He is a noir detective through and through. Above all, Ivan Monk is a flawed hero who can take us into the heart of uncomfortable truths and make the journey feel like a joy ride.

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Some fun facts

• After Gary Phillips lost his job as a union organizer, he took a creative writing class at UCLA. His teacher was Robert Crais.

• Many of the characters in Violent Spring, including Ivan Monk, came out of a manuscript Phillips worked on while studying with Crais. That book wasn’t published, but Phillips put them into the novel that would become his first book, Violent Spring.

• HBO optioned Violent Spring at one point. We’re still waiting for a show!

• The first edition of Violent Spring was put out by a small publisher called West Coast Crime, a collective Phillips helped create. In effect, Violent Spring began life as a self-published novel. Today, it’s widely regarded as a classic of the genre.

• If hearing about Violent Spring gives you Walter Mosley vibes, you’re on the right track. Mosley was heavily influenced by Phillips. Mosley also wrote the introduction to the deluxe edition of Violent Spring. Get the the deluxe edition!

I want to know what you think!

• Have you read Violent Spring?

• Are you an Ivan Monk fan?

• Is there a socially conscious crime novel you’re fond of?

Thanks for reading!

I’ll be back at the usual time on Sunday with another serving of slice of life humor. In the meantime, please Share / Restack this so I can find more crime fans🕵️‍♂️🚬🥃🔫

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