In South Central Noir, Gary Phillips showcases 14 takes on Los Angeles.

By David L. Ulin
FROM: Alta Online

It’s telling just how often the 1992 Los Angeles insurrection comes up in South Central Noir. That makes sense, since this anthology—part of the Akashic Noir Series—is edited by Gary Phillips, whose first novel, Violent Spring, published in January 1994, takes place in the wake of that upheaval. Phillips is a key figure in contemporary Southern California crime fiction, but equally important, he is a lifelong Angeleno, a former union and political organizer, whose fiction has long featured an element of social commentary. He understands that unlike Watts, which has been addressed in countless books and government reports, the eruption that occurred after four white LAPD officers were acquitted in the beating of motorist Rodney King has never quite received the same level of reckoning. For this reason, perhaps, it lingers in the city’s psyche, infusing works that include Anna Deavere Smith’s astonishing performance piece Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and novels such as Ryan Gattis’s All Involved and Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay.

Cha is among the writers who appear in South Central Noir; her story, “All Luck,” opens the book and helps set the tone. Taking place in 1992, as the city burns, it portrays a Korean liquor store owner suspended between responsibility and chance. “He hated this place,” Cha writes. “He hated that it was supposed to make him proud, all his toil and sacrifice so his kids could have good lives.…The work was hard, and after eight years running the store, he had worse than nothing to show for it.” Here, we see the sort of conflict that drives so much noir: an individual with no good choices, caught up in circumstances that cannot be controlled. Read Rest of the Review Here