Perdition, U.S.A.

Ivan Monk #2

by Gary Phillips

Three men are shot a few blocks apart, and Ivan Monk looks for a connection
Scatterboy Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in the dives of Pacific City, a port just south of Los Angeles. He has $250 in his pocket the night a stranger guns him down in the street. The next victim is Ronny Aaron, a crack pusher who’s shot to death on his way out of the liquor store. The third is Jimmy Henderson, a college student whose fighting instincts keep him from succumbing to two bullet wounds. They have nothing in common besides the neighborhood where they were shot and the color of their skin. When the police let Scatterboy’s murder fall through the cracks, his girlfriend hires private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like an ordinary squabble between thieves turns out to be a racist conspiracy with the potential to upend life all along the West Coast.

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

GARY PHILLIPS has been a community activist, labor organizer and delivered dog cages. He’s published various novels, comics, short stories and edited several anthologies including South Central Noir and the Anthony award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Violent Spring, first published in 1994 was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He was also a writer/co-producer on FX’s Snowfall (streaming on Hulu), about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. Recent novels include One-Shot Harry and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem. He lives with his family in the wilds of Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve written it in other reviews and I know it can come off as pandering so forgive me but one of racism’s many sins is that the Ivan Monk series isn’t more widely available.

Yes it does have a certain niche following among those of us who peruse mysteries. But good God, I go to a mystery section at my local Barnes and Noble and there’s so…much…dreck (and Agatha Christie reprints which — to be clear — is not dreck but that estate really doesn’t need more money). So many mediocre rogue detective or alcoholic PI books. So many cutesy clever Benoit Blanc wannabe whodunnits. The vast majority of them written by white writers.

I’ve sung praises to Phillips’ work in other spaces but this might be his best yet, a firecracker of a novel that touches on the hot points of racism. And it was written in 1995, a time when people assured me the political climate was calmer than it is now (which…hmmm). Tracking the seemingly unconnected murder of three Black men to a white supremacist group that is making waves on the west coast, Phillips’ writing is clear and his Ivan Monk feels human in all the best ways. No Gary Sue PI moves, no brilliant deductions, just shoeleather detective work and navigating the dynamics of the situation as a Black man the best he can.

I wish I had read this after Charlottesville because the parallels here are eerie. Many believe that Trump built a monster but he merely gave it power. This book is a mystery wrapped in a parable. And I wish it was more widely available.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking forward to reading more by Phillips.