Review: Darktown

Darktown by Thomas Mullen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In 1948 the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia hired eight black police officers in a pact to secure votes in black neighbourhoods. The officers, at least one of whom was a veteran of World War II, were restricted to patrolling black areas of the city and could not, under any circumstances, arrest white people. This startling hypocrisy extended to the officers’ squad room, the basement of the local YMCA as segregation meant that they were prohibited from entering the main police headquarters.

Thomas Mullen’s ‘Dark Town’ is an intelligent and literate thriller set in Atlanta just after the city has, controversially, employed these first eight ‘coloured’ police officers. It is a time when “antilynching legislation … kept failing in Washington” and the commanding officer concentrates on “trying to make sure his Negro officers didn’t screw up while also trying to keep the white officers from flat-out attacking his “men.” ”

Lucius Boggs and his partner Tommy Smith witness a white driver crash into a lamppost in ‘Dark Town’, the negro quarter they patrol. The driver, whose young black female passenger appears to have been beaten, refuses to wait while Boggs contacts the ‘real’ police. When the girl later turns up dead Boggs decides to investigate, strictly against the regulations. Meanwhile, Dennis Rakestraw, a white police officer, also a war veteran, becomes increasingly disillusioned by the actions of his openly racist partner, Lionel Dunlow. And, when it becomes apparently that Dunlow has some connection to the car driver and, by extension, the murdered girl, Rake’s and Boggs’ investigations overlap.

Mullen’s characters and setting are incredibly well realised. The Atlanta background feels real and the racism experienced by the black officers, overt and casual, is authentic. The characters, even the worst of them, are rounded with understandable, albeit in many cases disagreeable, motivations. The resentment and suspicion felt by both the white and black communities towards each other, that suspicion extended to the ‘Uncle Tom’ officers by many of their neighbours, the ‘threat’ felt by whites witnessing the expansion of the black middle-class - the author paints all of these vividly. A satisfying and thought provoking historical novel about a period I knew very little about. Highly recommended.

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