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Gary Phillips' community activism in Los Angeles over a quarter century -- on issues ranging from affordable housing to gang intervention to neighborhood empowerment -- served him well when he began writing crime novels.

Phillips was born in Los Angeles in 1955, the son of a mechanic and a librarian. Early on he discovered the writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, Ross Macdonald, Richard Wright, Rod Serling, comic book artist Jack Kirby, Zora Neale Hurston, Donald Goines, Joyce Carol Oates, and pulp writers Kenneth Robeson ( creator of Doc Savage) Walter Gibson (creator of the Shadow). He attended San Francisco State University from 1972 to 1973 and earned a bachelor of arts degree from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1978. He has worked as a union organizer, political campaign coordinator, radio talk show host and teacher. He has written op-ed pieces for the L.A. Times Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and other newspapers. He has served as co-director of the MultiCultural Collaborative.
 
While he had long dabbled in writing and comic book drawing, it was only when let go from a job with the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees that he took a class in how to structure a mystery novel with writer Robert Crais (Elvis Cole series). Students were required to write fifty pages of a proposed mystery, which Phillips did. The course ended, but Phillips wasn't satisfied. He completed the manuscript. It found no takers among publishers. Then rioting in Los Angeles followed the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. Phillips wrote a new book, Violent Spring, and set the action against the true-life backdrop of the riots. Thus was launched his Ivan Monk private detective series. Reviewers often slotted this and subsequent Monk books as more "whydunits" than "whodunits," because they involved social, racial and class issues.
 
The first two Monk titles were published through a co-operative, West Coast Crime, in which Phillips was a financial  and sweat-equity participant. Berkley Prime Crime picked up the series and printed the earlier as well as later books.

Phillips in an interview for Mystery Guide denied he modeled his detective on himself. "He's certainly a combination of various people, real and imagined. But he is, like all (hopefully good) literary PI figures, searching for something bigger than what his cases are‹although he might not ever consciously be aware of it, or he might not even admit that to anybody. But Monk is certainly somebody who ultimately is an optimist, who is trying to find those good qualities that are in most people."
 
The author further stretched mystery novel traditions with another series character, a black woman, Martha Chainey in High Hand, a retired showgirl now running money for a Las Vegas mobster. She has to recover the $7 million which has been stolen from her. "An air of heightened tension marks this novel from the outset," said reviewer Rex E. Klett.
 
Not all of Phillips' books are series. The Perpetrators is about Marley, a self-appointed expeditor who agrees to escort a key witness to a major drug trial in Los Angeles (reviewer Ted Fitzgerald called it a "larger-than-life hoot"). Bangers is a violent depiction of an elite Los Angeles anti-gang police team which runs afoul of a woman assistant district attorney when a gang leader is killed while in custody. (reviewer Klett found it strong on "down-in-the-dirt descriptions, complicated plotting, and frequent bursts of graphic violence.")

Phillips explained the appeal of the violent hero in an essay for Mystery Scene: "Part of it is the anti-hero is by definition less concerned with nuance and the rules. For them it's about how to traverse the straight line between where they're at and where they want to get."

Phillips in another essay, for The American Prospect, gives an overview of crime and espionage fiction and notes the prescience of authors such as Edward Zwick, whose 1998 novel The Siege depicts Muslim agents smashing an airplane into a skyscraper. Phillips speculates on how the literary world will handle issues of race in light of the 2001 terrorist attacks and suggests prose writers as well as journalists need to "excavate beneath the surface of the official story line for motivation and, subsequently, richer insight" into suicide bombers and street-fighting rebels. He concludes, "Writers who embrace such complexities and whose formulas are accordingly tweaked‹will go beyond recording our reality and actually shape it. Or as the Continental Op says in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, 'Sometimes just stirring things up is all right‹if you're tough enough to survive."