With movingly depicted scenes and solid character development, Darktown meets [its] challenge admirably ... The chapters alternate like segregated streets — black cops, then white cops. Reminiscent of Walter Mosely (without Mosely’s ear for black dialogue), racial lives are never as separate as they appear ... Mullen is a wonderful architect of intersecting plotlines and unexpected answers ... [a] compeling work of fiction.
...a fine, unflinching example of the increasingly widespread use of crime fiction to explore social issues; its plot is gripping. Nevertheless some of its scenes of hardboiled violence, and some of the characters, stray into caricature. His tentative exploration of his heroes’ interiority helps to avoid cultural blunders, but limits the book’s depth and impact.
...[a] highly combustible procedural ... Although the dominant theme of his book is rampant police corruption, Mullen touches on fascinating topics like the rise of the Dixiecrats, the war between moonshiners and legitimate distributors, and the business end of local prostitution and gambling rackets. Change is in the wind, but it’ll be a long time coming.
The captivating murder mystery and police procedural is precisely right for this time, when it would do good for many Americans to learn something about the complexity of race relations and policing in the post-World War II South ... Darktown tells the story of two of the first eight black police officers hired, due to political pressure, by the Atlanta Police Department in the sweltering heat of the summer of 1948 ... Mullen's work of historical fiction does what many nonfiction accounts perhaps can't, by getting deep inside the minds of both the black and white cops on the force and chewing away at the central conflicts: the bias and fear and hesitation to do what they know is right ... Mullen brings an insightful perspective to the book that goes beyond the rigid reconstruction that might be found in a nonfiction account ... While true to history and context, the book is a heck of a ride.
Darktown proves to be an uncomfortable read at times. Set in post WWII Atlanta, it unabashedly puts racism front and center in the South ... The mystery surrounding the death of the young black woman makes for a gripping tale with many twists and turns ...novel boldly displays the corruption and power wielded by white cops and politicians ... The author’s writing may make some readers flinch as he describes in vivid detail racist acts and language ...a compelling well-crafted read, and a reminder of how far we have come as a nation from a time when race defined success and opportunity. Or have we?
...pioneer police officers were the inspiration for Mullen's new novel, Darktown, a blend of history, mystery and violence that explores racial tensions in post-World War II Atlanta ... In the beginning of Darktown, a young black woman is killed, and two of the new policemen — against orders and on their own — decide to investigate her death ...some of the tensions described in Darktown — like the ability of white police to injure or kill black citizens with impunity without being charged or punished — sound disturbingly familiar ...a tale about race, policing and corruption that was compelling enough to be snapped up by Hollywood... Moving forward, his heroes in the first novel will retire and be replaced by newer black police recruits in future books, as the story of Atlanta's racial coming-of-age moves into contemporary times.
Mullen retraces the history of Atlanta in 1948 when eight black men were hire to be police officers. On that branch of history Mullen hangs a tale about a murder that occurs in the Negro section of Atlanta and the effect it has on two of the new policemen. It is a story that shocks as well as shames the reader ... Darktown presents the story of this investigation and its outcome. In doing so it highlights the horrors of being a person of color in the 1940’s South ... He [Mullen] brings to the reader the stinging heat, the bitter smells, the glare of the sun and the grime of the red dirt that is natural to this section of the country ...a novel that holds up a mirror to the vestiges of discrimination that remain alive and well today.
A pair of rookie black cops in 1948 Atlanta uncover political corruption and conspiracy when they stumble on to a murder case. What looks like a routine investigation of reckless driving becomes thorny when the driver turns out to be a white former Atlanta cop and the young black woman in the car with him turns up murdered a few nights later ... There's a great subject in this book, not just the history of the first black men hired as cops in Atlanta, but the larger story of postwar America in which some veterans came back victorious only to find they were fighting another kind of fascism on the homefront ...because the characters lack the specificity that would give the reader a stake in them, the various indignities and atrocities read as both unpleasant and familiar things to endure on the way to a foregone conclusion.
Mullen uses the lens of a twisted murder mystery to unsettle readers with his unflinching look at racism in post-WWII Atlanta ... Underhill’s status as a former cop and the low value placed on black lives make the probe into Lily’s death a perilous one, for both Boggs and a white officer who’s uneasy with his department’s violent racism. This page-turner reads like the best of James Ellroy.
