One-Shot Harry - Gary Phillips

Set in 1963, One-Shot Harry is about a black photojournalist trying to uncover the truth behind the death of a wartime friend of his.

At least, that's what the book is about some of the time. Phillips spends a lot of pages fleshing out Harry Ingram's life, the day-to-day realities of making a living taking photos of ugly deaths, of dealing with white cops who wouldn't hesitate to hit Harry with a nightstick even if he wasn't taking photographs. Additionally, there's a subplot involving a member of a local councilman's campaign that Harry starts dating. Anita's parents are pretty far to the left politically, and a diary with the names of several of their friends has gone missing.

So Harry's theoretically looking for that, on top of investigating his friend's death, trying to finagle work, dealing with the long-term scars of fighting in the Korean War, dealing with the difficulties of his side-gig as a process server, and questioning his career choices. Looming over all that is a visit to Los Angeles by Martin Luther King.

I'm not sure Phillips manages to keep all threads together. Or the plates spinning, depending on which metaphor your prefer. There's a long stretch of the book after he agrees to search for the diary for Anita where it isn't mentioned at all. And that subplot sort of sputters out at the end. But the mystery of his friend's death doesn't really lead to any real conclusion. Harry knows the death wasn't accidental, and he may have killed the two guys personally responsible, but they're just mooks. The mind behind it remains untouchable.

That part is by design, as Phillips often has Harry's internal monologue focused on just how far he can go, even defending himself, when the people trying to harm him are white. Harry isn't of a mind to go a suicide run for revenge, so there's only so far he can go in the society in which he lives. It might also be that Phillips has further stories starring Harry Ingram in mind, and there's further plot development in mind down the line.

There's a trick to adding history of a place without making it feel too much like an infodump, and Phillips mostly manages it. Having Harry as a photog and process server, where he both has to know his way around town, and know what sorts of neighborhoods he's going into ahead of time, helps. I don't know how historically accurate those parts of the book are, but Phillips writes in such a way that it feels like real history.

The only reason I question it at all is that late in the book, there's a bit about Ingram and a childhood friend having dreams of building their own submarine after reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Ingram says they would have named it the Fantastic, after the Fantastic Four. Except Ingram's a Korean War vet, so his childhood would have been the 1940s, not the 1960s. It's just a little detail, and I was reading an "advance uncopyedited edition" that turned up at a book sale, so maybe that was caught and fixed subsequently.

'There were two nicks from bullets grooved in its casing and Ingram rubbed one of them for luck, as he always did. He'd brought the camera home from the war. Fleeting was the notion of photographing normal people doing normal things. Where was the kick in that? Melancholy moments like the one he'd had last night he invariably washed away with booze.'