One of the great things about reading fiction is the ability to experience other worlds and lives, to maybe find out a few things along the way. Reading can be an empathy engine. Legendary authors like Val McDermid and Dennis Lehane believe crime fiction, in particular, can be ‘the modern social novel’, exploring key issues.

Longstanding African American crime writer Gary Phillips certainly leans into that. Since the 1990s he’s been blending pulp elements and keen insights into injustice into his stirring novels. His latest, Ash Dark as Night, opens in 1965 amid the chaos of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Photographer Harry Ingram, the star of Phillips’ earlier novel One-Shot Harry, ends up badly beaten and hospitalised after LAPD officers don’t appreciate him capturing their shooting of an unarmed activist on film. But thanks to his resourceful girlfriend, Anita Claire, Harry’s photo is recovered, and makes front-page news. While recovering, Harry is approached by a friend of his girlfriend’s mother, who wants him to find her business associate who vanished during the riots. Harry doesn’t know it, but it’s an invite to step into a snake pit of crime.

Phillips expertly soaks readers in the fizzing atmosphere of mid-century Los Angeles, blending in real-life history-shapers like TV journalist Louis Lomax, councilman (and future LA mayor) Tom Bradley, and ‘unambiguously racist’ LAPD chief, William Parker. This book is a very good read that’s about far more than its central mystery.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

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