Book Review - Thomas Mullen - Darktown

You can check out my review of the upcoming (published Sept. 13th, 2016) Thomas Mullen novel "Darktown" via this link.

Or just read it below:

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Thomas Mullen

Darktown

37 Ink / Atria Books – September 13, 2016

http://www.thomasmullen.net

Reviewed by Jay Roberts

Set in 1948 Atlanta, where the civil right movement is still a ways off and Jim Crow laws restrict pretty much everything, Thomas Mullen’s Darktown weaves history with mystery to tell the compelling tale that serves as both a lesson from the past and could be taken as something from the present day.

Darktown was not an easy read for me. It took me a month to finish this book due to the uneasy back and forth between a well done police procedural story and the infuriating madness of said story that at times made me want to throw the book against the wall.

The hiring of the first 8 black officers on the Atlanta Police Department isn’t exactly received with enthusiasm by parties on all sides. The white cops are furious and looking for any manner in which to get rid of them. The black community sees the cops as an oppressive force already and they don’t take kindly to members of their own community joining the department.

Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are the main characters in the story, two cops trying to do right but hampered on all sides. They can’t arrest white suspects, can’t drive police cars and aren’t even allowed in police headquarters.

Those are just a few of the reasons that end up hampering the two officers and their off the books investigation when they find the body of black woman who was last seen in the company of a white man. No one seems to care about finding her murderer or even questioning the details of everything prior to her body being found.

Boggs and Smith have to deal with their corrupt police brethren, criminals being protected by police and even leaders of the black community trying to use them for their own purposes all while trying to not just lose their jobs but potentially their lives in the pursuit of justice for the victim.

When you stand the story on its own, it is a well done detective story. Perhaps Boggs and Smith were a bit too well versed in the art of crime detection given they were basically rookie police officers, but common sense goes a long way in figuring things out and they had that a-plenty.

Mullen does a far too accurate and chilling job in portraying the racism of the times. This book would never survive vetting for those institutions demanding trigger warnings and intellectual safe spaces these days.

The racism conveyed by the characters and the stuffy repressive atmosphere that hangs over the story is so palpable, it is almost a “character” unto itself. Also, having visited the state of Georgia twice myself, the descriptions of the Southern summer heat is quite on the mark. The weather feels alive when Mullen writes about it.

The introduction of a certain character, for those paying attention to the narrative, gives the inkling of “whodunit”, so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise by the kind of Southern Gothic reveal.

The resolution to the story was an interesting mix of needing to wrap up the story yet being unable (due to the setting) to give a “happy” ending or even a totally satisfying one.

The characterizations of many of the characters were well drawn. Boggs and Smith, if they were set in a contemporary mystery, would have me craving for more in a series of stories. Trapped by circumstance and expectations, they are still determined to do their job to the best of their abilities regardless of the roadblocks thrown up in their way.

Denny Rakestraw was also a character that interested me. A product of his times, his tentative reaching out to investigate the murder, showed the doubts and consequences of his actions. Smartly though, the author didn’t make him a paragon of out of time virtue either.

This is the second book I’ve read, the first being Karin Slaughter’s Coptown, that centers on a story set in the past of the Atlanta P.D. Much like that first book, Darktown manages to be an entertaining mystery read while at the same time gets a rise out of you when you think about how humanity could be so out and out despicable to each other. The latter doesn’t necessarily overpower the former, but it did make for a harder read for this reviewer.

But that difficulty ultimately makes Thomas Mullen’s Darktown that much more a rewarding experience.

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