Ash Dark as Night

Starred review from February 12, 2024
The times, they are a-changing in Phillips’s outstanding sequel to One-Shot Harry. It’s August 1965: Vietnam is heating up; the civil rights movement is marching forward. Escalating tensions between the police and Black Americans have boiled over most recently in the Watts Riots. Black photographer Harry Ingram is in Los Angeles to document the unrest and winds up capturing the police shooting of unarmed activist Faraday Zinum. The widely reproduced photo brings Harry newfound fame, as well as the unwelcome attention of LAPD chief William Parker and his intelligence division. Meanwhile, an acquaintance hires Harry to look into the disappearance of her business associate Moses Tolbert, who ran a building company in the Watts neighborhood and vanished during the riots. As Harry investigates, stumbling into citywide conspiracies along the way, he finds that he has a natural aptitude for the work, and ponders the possibility of becoming a private detective full-time. Phillips folds real historical figures, including TV journalist Louis Lomax, and events into a complex narrative of shifting alliances that captures the urgency and volatility of the mid-’60s. The results rank with the best of Walter Mosley in the canon of Los Angeles noir. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management.

February 15, 2024
The 1965 Watts riots kick off a new series of puzzles and dangers for freelance news photographer Harry Ingram. When LAPD officers, meeting the violent tide of protests with violence of their own, beat Black activist Faraday Zinum to death, one of the horrified spectators just happens to be Harry, who captures the moment in a photo that gets widely reprinted in both Black- and white-owned newspapers. For his trouble, he's beaten and arrested, his camera is snatched from him, he's invited onto Louis E. Lomax's TV show, and white preservationist Betty Payton hires him to look for her missing friend Mose Tolbert, owner of Restoration Building Supply. Mose's parlous finances lead Harry to focus on Gavin Rickler, the investor/gambler who owns the upscale Emerald Room but sometimes provides cash to ordinary people, as he evidently did to Mose at the suggestion of Albert Domergue, whose sister, Arlene, keeps the books at Restoration. It's not giving too much away to say that Harry's search for Mose is almost totally eclipsed by the criminal malfeasance he unearths along the way. A willingness to break every law in sight unites Robin Hood figures like Harry's lover, Anita Claire--a field deputy to Councilman Tom Bradley, who together with her parents robs from the rich and donates to organizations that serve the poor--and members of the LAPD, who play a pivotal role in the real-life MacGuffin Harry eventually discovers. Like Walter Mosley, his obvious model, Phillips is less interested in telling a story than evoking a world--and what a world!

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March 1, 2024
Phillips' One-Shot Harry (2022) introduced Harry Ingram, a Black Korean War vet turned photographer. This follow-up opens in Los Angeles in 1965 as Harry risks his life to document police brutality during the riots in the Watts neighborhood. Harry witnesses the brutal murder of a young Black activist by police, but as soon as he captures the fatal gunshot on film, the police zero in on him, ripping his camera from his hands and brutally beating him before arresting him. Harry calls on his girlfriend, Anita Claire, to retrieve the film he managed to hide during the chaos. The publication of Harry's photographs brings him both fame and the unwanted attention of the LAPD, and Harry soon has his hands full with a missing-person investigation after a friend of Anita's mother hires him to find a business associate who disappeared during the rioting. The historical details about the riots and police violence are more vividly realized than is Harry's investigation, but this is a rewarding read for fans of Harry's first outing, unusual investigators, and L.A. crime fiction.

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March 29, 2024

Freelance press photographer Harry Ingram first appeared in Phillips's One-Shot Harry, set in 1963. It's 1965 now, and the Watts riots have erupted. On the first day, with stores on fire and looting rampant, people crowd the streets. The police retaliate violently and indiscriminately. Harry is one of only two Black people photographing the scene and snaps a photo of a white cop gunning down an unarmed Black person. The cops see Harry and arrest him. He ends up in the hospital, his trusty Speed Graphic camera confiscated. How can he get it back to prove what happened? Enter his firecracker girlfriend Anita, who works by day for a mayoral hopeful but robs banks at night with her leftist parents to finance the revolution. She's up for anything. By the time the novel is over, the menu has expanded to include a missing man, burglary rings, bank robberies, and city-wide conspiracies. There's also a coded journal that incriminates cops and pols. The bad guys think Harry has it, and his newfound fame after the recovered photo is published puts him in the spotlight, not a comfortable place at all to be. VERDICT Hardboiled, gritty, and fresh, Phillips's latest is for fans of action/detective stories.--David Keymer

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