Darktown: A Novel (The Darktown Series)
A historical crime novel centered on some of Atlanta's first Black police officers after World War II. An investigation into a young woman's death exposes violence and silence in a city shaped by segregation.
Work Information
Crime investigation and the history of segregation collide at the same scene.
The first book in Thomas Mullen's Darktown series, published in the United States in hardcover, paperback, and digital formats.
Review Summaries
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The book is praised for combining the drive of crime fiction with the weight of its historical setting. The tense investigation sharply reveals broader social injustice.
Book Information
- Publisher
- 37 Ink
- Published
- 2017-06-06
- Pages
- 386 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.49 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781501133879
- ISBN-10
- 150113387X
- Price
- 3425 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Black & African American
“One incendiary image ignites the next in this highly combustible procedural…written with a ferocious passion that’ll knock the wind out of you.” — The New York Times Book Review “Fine Southern storytelling meets hard-boiled crime in a tale that connects an overlooked chapter of history to our own continuing struggles with race today.” —Charles Frazier, bestselling author of Cold Mountain “This page-turner reads like the best of James Ellroy.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review “In the way the story is told coupled with its heightened racial context, Darktown reminded me of Walter Mosley or a George Pelecanos novel.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “High-quality…crime fiction with a nimble sense of history…quick on its feet and vividly drawn.” — Dallas Morning News “Some books educate, some books entertain, Thomas Mullen’s Darktown is the rare book that does both.” — Huffington Post Award-winning author Thomas Mullen is a “wonderful architect of intersecting plotlines and unexpected answers”( The Washington Post ) in this timely and provocative mystery and brilliant exploration of race, law enforcement, and justice in 1940s Atlanta. Responding to orders from on high, the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first black officers, including war veterans Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith. The newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers; they aren’t allowed to arrest white suspects, drive squad cars, or set foot in the police headquarters. When a woman who was last seen in a car driven by a white man turns up dead, Boggs and Smith suspect white cops are behind it. Their investigation sets them up against a brutal cop, Dunlow, who has long run the neighborhood as his own, and his partner, Rakestraw, a young progressive who may or may not be willing to make allies across color lines. Among shady moonshiners, duplicitous madams, crooked lawmen, and the constant restrictions of Jim Crow, Boggs and Smith will risk their new jobs, and their lives, while navigating a dangerous world—a world on the cusp of great change. A vivid, smart, intricately plotted crime saga that explores the timely issues of race, law enforcement, and the uneven scales of justice.
Thomas Mullen is the author of The Lightning Men , Darktown , and The Last Town on Earth , which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA TODAY . He was also awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction for The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers and The Revisionists . His works have been named to Year’s Best lists by The Chicago Tribune and USA TODAY , among others. His stories and essays have been published in Grantland , Paste , and the Huffington Post , and his Atlanta Magazine true crime story about a novelist/con man won the City and Regional Magazine Award for Best Feature. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and sons.
Reviews
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Are Boggs & smith, the new easy rawlins & mouse?
Darktown is set in a unique era & centred around the first black police officers in Atlanta in 1948. The plot has a huge promise of an enjoyable, yet educational read and it doesn't disappoint. All the characters have exceptional depth and realistic and believable and I felt a huge urge of hope for the 2 central police officers smith & Boggs. Coming fro different walks of life themselves, the relationship is often unpredictable but they compliment each others personality's very well. Throughout the case they have their backs against the wall, facing prejudice at every turn, but they finally emerge to form 2 links within the police that allows them to investigate further. The story feels slower than modern crime writing but I think that is due to the writer embellishing the era, setting, racism and characters so it actually works incredibly well in this novel. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that it continues as a series. The author has an exceptional talent, much similar to the 'legend of this genre' Walter Mosley!
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Police procedural with a difference
The scene is Atlanta, 1948, and the city has hired eight black police officers for the first time. Their powers are very limited, however, and there are a good many folks who’d like to see them fail. Officers Boggs and Smith see a white man in a car hit his passenger, a young coloured woman. She runs off, and is later found dead of a bullet wound, buried under rubbish on an abandoned lot. What follows is an extraordinary tale of racism so extreme and corruption so rife that at times it’s hard to bear reading it, yet such was life in that era. It’s easy to despise the corrupt white cops and their casual cruelty, and we feel for new (white) cop Rakestraw, a returned war hero, as he navigates his new reality, paired as he is with the bully Dunlow. It’s a tough world of moonshine, brothels, gambling, poor share-croppers and bribes. Thomas Mullen does a terrific job of bringing this era to life and endows his lead characters with complex and convincing psychologies. His next book, The Lightening Men follows the same characters two years later. An eye-opener.
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Bin voll und ganz zufrieden. 😁
Sehr schönes Buch 📙, leider kann nicht so gut Englisch lesen. Sodas ich es zurück schicken musste. Der Service und Kontakt ist sehr gut.
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Chocante
A primeira vez que li em um romance uma justificativa plausível para ação "vigilante" - merecida. E executada por policiais. Mas, sobretudo, dá para perceber as dificuldades enfrentadas pela população negra nos estados do sul dos EUA, e depois da II Guerra.
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Grim times
Set in the late 1940s in the still dormant, old-ways Southern city, Atlanta, GA, this book is a penetrating, at times excruciating, examination of race relations in that era and the vigilante-like efforts of the white police force to suppress blacks, all the while often engaging in all manner of criminal activities. Atlanta, from some minimal do-gooder instinct, has just hired eight black policemen, all WWII vets, to patrol black neighborhoods. Of course, the prejudice remains: they cannot enter the main police station, cannot drive a patrol car, cannot make an arrest, cannot investigate a crime, cannot wear the uniform outside exact hours of the shift, etc. And the entire police force is overtly hostile towards them. That is the environment in which new officers Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith must operate. When they observe a middle-aged white man hit a utility pole, in so-called “darktown,” furthermore with a black girl as a passenger who seems to have been assaulted, all they can do is call in a white team. As happens all too often, they can do nothing when the man is allowed to go free and the female flees from the car. Days later when the girl is found shot dead and hidden in a garbage heap, Boggs and Smith make it their mission find justice for her. The hurdles and dangers that they face as they dig up information while attempting to fly under the radar would deter most anyone. The run afoul of an underground, ex-cop dirty works group. When their quest takes them outside of Atlanta, matters become even more harrowing. It’s an okay mystery, but it’s even better sociology. There are any number of episodes, some incidental, that the author touches upon that make startling clear the immense difficulty of being black in a racist society. The author is not on soap-box – he doesn’t have to be.