Book Review: Off the Bookshelf

Only the Wicked

Write Way Publishing, 352 pp., $24.95

Gary Phillips is the creator of one of the few great modern literary private eye characters, Ivan Monk, an African-American donut shop operator and private detective in South Central post-Rodney King Los Angeles. Phillips himself has family ties in the rural Texas Hill Country and, like Monk, drives a restored classic Sixties lead sled, has always admired the work of Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby, always seeks a deeper, broader meaning to crimes and injustices and other events in his community, and works toward finding a solution that might make his street and maybe even the world beyond a better place to live in. Phillips proves that crime novels with a social conscience can be as entertaining as the stuff his formulaic, mainstream contemporaries are writing, though Phillips turns out classics of the form that are provocative and effective. The fourth Ivan Monk novel, Only the Wicked, begins with the death of a local barber and the secret that he was once a star for the Negro Baseball Leagues playing alongside Monk's cousin, who has long been ostracized by the family because his testimony sent a prominent activist reformer to a Southern prison. Phillips' latest, High Hand, published by Kensington this month, is about an ex-show girl turned courier for the corporate mob in Las Vegas.