Darktown: A Novel (The Darktown Series)

Reposted with permission from Reviewing the Evidence.

In 1948, the mayor of Atlanta decided to hire eight "Negro" police officers to patrol the black neighborhoods. They were expected to maintain order and were authorized to wear a sidearm and give out tickets, but couldn't make arrests or investigate crimes. Thomas Mullen uses this historical moment to remind us of our past in an effective and engrossing police procedural.

Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith have accepted the challenge of policing their own people within the confines of the Jim Crow south. Boggs, the son of a prominent preacher, raised in an intellectual and refined household, feels the burden of representing his race; Smith, who served in a tank battalion during World War II, show more feels a different burden: the restrictions he had left behind that now seem suffocating. When they stop a white man who has knocked down a lamppost with his car, they are troubled to see a black woman beside him with a bruised face, but they can't stop the man from driving off without so much as a ticket. When the woman later turns up dead in a pile of trash, they know her murder won't be investigated – not unless they do it. They face steep odds. Not only are they unauthorized to investigate crimes, they are despised by the white police force, and asking questions even of their own neighbors could get them fired or worse. Taking those questions into white Atlanta or into the surrounding countryside could get them killed.

Two white officers who frequently drive their squad car into Darktown, as the black neighborhood is known, provide another angle on the difficulty Boggs and Smith face. Denny Rakestraw, like Smith, is adjusting to life after the war, and he's not happy to be paired with Lionel Dunlow, who knows his way around the city but is a loutish, violent, and corrupt officer who hates seeing black men in uniform. Rakestraw finds Dunlow's brutality disgusting, but his innate decency is inhibited by racist attitudes that make it hard to see Boggs and Smith as equals.

Though some reviews have compared Mullen's novel to the work of Dennis Lehane or James Ellroy, Mullen's narrative style is quite different, somewhat old-fashioned in its flavor, evocative but not lushly descriptive. Rather, Mullen lets the times speak for themselves in the words people used in 1948 (and still use, despite claims that "political correctness" has constrained freedom of speech). It's unsettling to spend time experiencing oppression with Boggs and Smith, even more unsettling at times to see the sympathetic Rakestraw give voice to ingrained racism, but it makes the book unforgettable. At times, the day-to-day experience of blacks and whites living in the Jim Crow south seen through this fictional lens seems like bulletins from a distant past, something long gone and half-forgotten, shocking in its strangeness. At other times it reads like tomorrow's headlines. show less

I finished Darktown by Thomas Mullen over a week ago and at the time thought it was a well-written, well researched and well-plotted novel. But it's been growing on me since I read it; I keep thinking about one of the characters and how Mullen did a masterful job in writing about him.

Set in 1948, when the first eight African American police officers donned uniforms and began patrolling the black neighborhoods of Atlanta, Darktown is, on its surface, an excellently plotted crime novel that is full of details about Atlanta, Georgia at a specific point in time. Boggs, the son of a prominent minister and Smith, who spent WWII in a tank, are patrolling the African American district of Sweet Auburn on foot when they see a car crash into a show more streetlight. The car is being driven by a belligerent white man who knows that Boggs and Smith have no authority over anyone white and there is a young black woman in the passenger seat. When the car drives off, they see the man punch the woman and see her flee the car. In following the man and finding a call box to summon white officers they lose sight of the woman. When she is later found murdered, the two officers work to solve the crime, despite ample obstruction from their white peers.

Meanwhile, Dunlow and Rakestraw speak with the man in the car. Dunlow is one of the few white officers who will set foot in black neighborhoods, but he does so more to administer beatings and shakedowns than to do any actual police work. One of the reasons the African American community fought for having African American officers was to stop this behavior from the white cops, and Dunlow is not having it. Sweet Auburn, known as Darktown to white officers, is his personal fiefdom. Rakestraw is his rookie partner, a man wary of risking his job or his safety to take any action, but who is deeply uneasy with the actions and attitudes of Dunlow and his fellow officers. Rakestraw also recognizes the dead woman and begins investigating the crime on his own, keeping his activities secret from his partner.

The murder plot and it's dual investigations, is gripping and well-plotted and at the most basic level, this is an excellent historical thriller. But the strength of this book lies in how well researched it is. [Darktown] is full of details of what it was like to live in that time and place, described vividly. And his characterizations are marvelous. Boggs is a member of the elite, a college-educated man whose family is prominent in both the social life of their community and its political life. Smith comes from a much more hard-scrabble background and the two men work well together, both being fully aware of the risks to their lives they are taking. They aren't even allowed into the police headquarters, their own headquarters being the basement of a YMCA, where a janitor's cupboard had to be turned into a bathroom for their white supervisor.

Rakestraw is the character who is the most interesting. While Boggs plays a more prominent role, and is the most understandable character for the reader, Rakestraw's ambivalence and slow conviction that he has to take action or be complicit in the corruption and racism of the police force is wonderfully depicted. Rakestraw isn't someone the reader can admire and while his views are progressive for that time and place, they certainly would not be regarded as progressive today. Rakestraw isn't a modern man sent back in time, but one firmly rooted in his era. My personal pet peeve with many historical novels is that the heroes are all really just modern people dressed up in old timey clothes. Mullen doesn't do this. His characters are firmly of their time.

Thomas Mullen is one of my favorite authors and with Darktown he has cemented his place in my literary heart. show less

Dark, indeed. This is a police procedural quite unlike any others you may have read. The protagonists are Tom Smith and Lucius Boggs, two of the first black cops on Atlanta's municipal police force. It's 1950, and neither their white colleagues nor the black community they are policing are happy about their existence. They wear the uniform and badge, and carry guns, but don't have cars, and must call for white back-up if they arrest anyone. They are forbidden to enter police headquarters, working out of the drippy dim basement of a YMCA in a poor black neighborhood. They are subject to humiliation, harassment, and false charges. They watch white cops taking pay-offs from brothels and forcing confessions from suspects to close cases show more regardless of facts. They witness white-on-black brutality occur routinely without consequence. They are not allowed to investigate anything. But when a black girl from the country ends up shot to death and tossed on a garbage dump shortly after Officers Smith and Boggs saw her running away from a white man's car, these men decide to risk their careers and their lives, breaking the rules to find out how she got there. Often a very uncomfortable read, but impossible to leave alone. show less

In Darktown, Thomas Mullen takes the reader back to a shameful period in America’s long history of racial inequality: the segregated Jim Crow South—specifically, post-WW2 Atlanta, Georgia. It’s 1948 and the Atlanta Police Department has been pressured into hiring their first black officers. Not surprisingly, the move has galvanized anger and resistance, and drawn pledges to “make things right” from the APD’s white contingent. One summer night, two of the new black officers, Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, are patrolling on foot in a segregated black community when a car being driven erratically knocks over a light pole. The driver is a middle-aged white man, his young female passenger, who appears in some distress, is black. show more As the driver flees the scene the woman jumps from the slow-moving car and disappears into the night. Boggs and Smith have called for some white officers to come and help with the arrest (black officers are not allowed to arrest white people—just one of many ludicrous and demeaning prohibitions placed on their actions). Lionel Dunlow and Dennis “Rake” Rakestraw arrive, and Boggs and Smith watch in disgust and disbelief as Dunlow, the senior officer, chats briefly with the driver before letting him go. But the situation soon turns grave: a few days later the same young woman turns up dead, shot at close range, the body left in a vacant lot where the black community dumps its garbage. To those who care, it’s obvious the last person she was with was the man driving the car. But since white police don’t care about a murdered black woman, solving the mystery of Lily Ellsworth’s death falls to Boggs and Smith, who are forced by the department’s racist policies to sneak around and lie about what they’re up to because if the wrong people find out, they could lose more than just their jobs. Over the next several weeks, during the sweltering summer of 1948, Boggs and Smith risk their necks in the pursuit of justice for Lily, in the process confronting corrupt cops with secrets to hide, unhelpful bureaucrats and a notorious “madam,” just to name a few. Their investigation is dangerous and labyrinthine, and the solution to the mystery exposes the moral rot of Atlanta society and reaches into the upper echelons of white power. But truth is only part of the answer, and for Boggs and Smith the justice they seek proves to be somewhat more elusive. Thomas Mullen’s narrative comes spiced with the explicit language and repulsive attitudes one would expect to encounter in Jim-Crow era Atlanta. But there is no point writing about that period if you’re not going to strive for authenticity, which Mullen has done with great success. Darktown, a complex novel but a quick read, is gripping from the first page and provides a salient lesson on the racial tensions that continue to afflict North American society. show less

I'm choosing to abandon what is probably a four star book, but I just can't stomach reading this right now.

Thomas Mullen is a great writer. I really enjoyed [book:The Last Town on Earth|76336] and [book:The Revisionists|10789142]. In this one he tackles a little known part of Atlanta's history -- the 1948 instatement of eight black police officers, who were supposed to police black neighborhoods, but weren't allowed to arrest white people, to use a squad car (and so had to use the nearest call box to contact the precinct), to even set foot in the police headquarters (meeting in the basement of a YMCA instead), or to wear their uniform when they were off duty. Mullen didn't make any of this up and I'm sure the endemic racism and terrible show more treatment from other officers and judges is also historically accurate.

In the 88 pages that I was able to read, the n-word and other racial slurs were used hundreds of times. There's a crooked white officer who "owns" the black neighborhoods and routinely beats residents without provocation. His rookie partner has a conscience, but is afraid of tanking his career if he acts upon it. In one of the final scenes I read, two black officers have handcuffed black men who have been fighting. One has been stabbed by the other, but then threw a bottle at the head of one of the officers who tried to help him. The white officers show up, and instead of calling an ambulance, the crooked older cop kicks the handcuffed man in his stab wound. He refuses to let the black officers or his own partner call an ambulance from the squad car, even driving away without his partner (who does walk to a call box and call for an ambulance, while the two black officers -- one injured -- stay with the suspects). I felt physically ill reading this and other equally horrifying scenes.

That was 1948. How far have we really come? Not far enough. And I think this is a Really Important Book and that people need to see this glimpse of the not-distant-enough past, but I just can't right now. I need books that allow me to momentarily escape our current political clusterfuck. show less

After WWII, officials in Atlanta deigned to allow eight black men to become policemen (beat cops) on the force, a first for the city. Well, under certain conditions that is: they were only allowed to serve in the black areas of the city, they needed to report to a crudely set up station in the Y and were never to set foot in the actual police station which was limited to whites only, and they couldn’t actually investigate any crimes. It is under these conditions that we meet rookie policemen Lucius Boggs and Thomas White when the narrative begins.

It quickly becomes apparent that there is a monumental amount of graft, corruption and outright murder going on among Atlanta’s finest and the upstanding black rookies are disturbed enough show more by the death of a young black woman to ignore the edicts of those in charge and look into the crime in front of them even though that poses an enormous risk to them personally.

I listened to this on audio and the reader, Andre Holland, a black actor, was pitch perfect and lent a dramatic authenticity to the narrative that made it all the more enjoyable. But he had fabulous material to work with. This was an elegant police procedural that highlighted the inherent racism in the city. On the one hand I was outraged and on the other found the story itself immensely compelling and satisfying. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series. Highly recommended. show less

"Darktown" is not serious literature but that's not what it's about anyway. It's an easy but nonetheless excellent read. As the blurbs will tell you it's a tale of newly minted black cops in Atlanta in the post WW-II racial climate. Needless to say it is filled with racism and violence. None of which, however, is gratuitous. The book simply presents a sad but very believable portrait of the race relations of the time.
The only challenge for me was coping with the overt hate and violence that composes racism. This is the very real heritage that the United States is still loathe to acknowledge. In fact that heritage is reflected today in both informal and, sadly, recent official activities. A good but not cheerful read.