Gary Phillips

Image rights: PM Press

The Jook isbn: 9781604861730 (EPUB) 9781604861723 (MOBI) formats: epub mobi published: 03/2009 pages: 256 price: 9.00 euros

Gary Phillips’ community activism in Los Angeles over a quarter century -- on issues ranging from affordable housing to gang intervention to neighborhood empowerment -- served him well when he began writing crime novels.
Phillips was born in Los Angeles in 1955, the son of a mechanic and a librarian. Early on he discovered the writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, Ross Macdonald, Richard Wright, Rod Serling, comic book artist Jack Kirby, Zora Neale Hurston, Donald Goines, Joyce Carol Oates, and pulp writers Kenneth Robeson ( creator of Doc Savage) Walter Gibson (creator of the Shadow). He attended San Francisco State University from 1972 to 1973 and earned a bachelor of arts degree from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1978. He has worked as a union organizer, political campaign coordinator, radio talk show host and teacher. He has written op-ed pieces for the L.A. Times Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and other newspapers. He has served as co-director of the MultiCultural Collaborative.

While he had long dabbled in writing and comic book drawing, it was only when let go from a job with the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees that he took a class in how to structure a mystery novel with writer Robert Crais (Elvis Cole series). Students were required to write fifty pages of a proposed mystery, which Phillips did. The course ended, but Phillips wasn’t satisfied. He completed the manuscript. It found no takers among publishers. Then rioting in Los Angeles followed the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. Phillips wrote a new book, Violent Spring, and set the action against the true-life backdrop of the riots. Thus was launched his Ivan Monk private detective series. Reviewers often slotted this and subsequent Monk books as more "whydunits" than "whodunits," because they involved social, racial and class issues.

The first two Monk titles were published through a co-operative, West Coast Crime, in which Phillips was a financial and sweat-equity participant. Berkley Prime Crime picked up the series and printed the earlier as well as later books.

The author further stretched mystery novel traditions with another series character, a black woman, Martha Chainey in High Hand, a retired showgirl now running money for a Las Vegas mobster. She has to recover the $7 million which has been stolen from her. "An air of heightened tension marks this novel from the outset," said reviewer Rex E. Klett.

Not all of Phillips’ books are series. The Perpetrators is about Marley, a self-appointed expeditor who agrees to escort a key witness to a major drug trial in Los Angeles (reviewer Ted Fitzgerald called it a "larger-than-life hoot"). Bangers is a violent depiction of an elite Los Angeles anti-gang police team which runs afoul of a woman assistant district attorney when a gang leader is killed while in custody. (reviewer Klett found it strong on "down-in-the-dirt descriptions, complicated plotting, and frequent bursts of graphic violence.")

Gary is also an editor of PM’s Switchblade imprint.