Crazy it’s now three decades after the publication of Violent Spring featuring my PI Ivan Monk. In those days of the early ‘90s, changes were happening in the mystery field. In 1988 my friend Gar Anthony Haywood had published Fear of the Dark. It was not the first novel to feature a Black private eye. There had been for instance the Shaft series of books by Earnest Tidyman and the Richard Abraham Spade, aka Superspade paperback originals by Joe Greene writing as B.B. Johnson. But Gar’s novel signaled a new generation of writers of color coming on the scene and bringing different sensibilities to the genre—be they writing about PIs, police or something else.
For me that meant when I decided to write Violent Spring set in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots of 1992, I would draw on the hardboiled tradition as well as my experiences to define Monk’s Los Angeles. I’d been a community organizer and a union rep. The gig I had when saigu happened, the Korean word for the ’92 civil unrest, was as the outreach director for the Liberty Hill Foundation. It’s a philanthropic undertaking which still today 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 in East L.A., to strategy sessions with other funders in downtown high-rises.
This was rich source material to draw on, providing a way to distinguish Monk from other such protagonists as he navigated the various neighborhoods and enclaves of his city and the greater Southland. His cases couldn’t be excuses to be preachy. Yet from my perspective matters of how the police policed the ‘hood and barrio, the shifting demographics of South Central from majority Black to Latinx, and the hidden histories of Los Angeles, those would be the underlying factors threading their way through Monk’s stories.
A lot has changed from thirty years ago and a lot, it seems, has not. Advances tend to foster backlashes. After the Civil War, the Radical Republicans pushed and prodded into being a period known as Reconstruction. A time when among others occurrences, Black folk got elected to office. The pushback was the rise of the Klan, and the establishment of Black Codes and Jim Crow.
On the local level, in June of 1992 despite the civil unrest being fresh in the minds of the voters, Proposition F passed. The measure clarified L.A. city code; there would be civilian oversight of the police department. Not long afterward, embattled and in some quarters infamous Chief of Police Daryl Gates resigned. These events along with other matters helped to inform not just the further outings of Monk, but the other mystery novels which first bloomed in the 90s set in SoCal.
More recently in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the protests of activists such as Black Lives Matter, a number of mystery writers offered their views of how his killing affected what they wrote. As Ausma Zehanat Khan noted here on CrimeReads, it was a moment to deglamorize policing in crime fiction. Not sure if nowadays there’s a bunch of novels extoling police brutality, but certainly the attack on Critical Race Theory as the all-purpose boogeyman and the “Don’t Say Gay” in Florida public schools edict, (recently modified due to a suit settlement) if not outright fueling what we as mystery novelists of various stripes put on the page, nonetheless lingers in the background of our tales, overtly or covertly. Our task remains to do what genre writers have always done. To do our best to create compelling characters and situations, pay attention to pace and settings, heighten the suspense, provide reveals and the twists and turns, and don’t bump into the furniture.
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