Midnight Atlanta: Layers You Didn't Know Existed

Murder, cops, feds, an investigative reporter, stake-outs, fist fights (baseball bats included) and shoot-outs: Thomas Mullen gives us all those elements for Midnight Atlanta, latest novel in his Darktown series. But the emotional through-line is a love story, as cops black and white in Atlanta, 1956, learn to appreciate and trust each other.

The murder of Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta's black-owned newspaper, sets off an investigation that involves many of the high-profile tensions that roiled the country in the mid-1950s. The editor Bishop had traveled to Montgomery. Was he involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the bus boycott going on then? Bishop had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, as many black leaders had done. At a time of intense Red Scare, was he a blackmailer, or blackmailee? Atlanta's modernization meant destruction of black neighborhoods but also opportunities for the black middle class. Had Bishop fallen afoul of one side or the other in that conflict? Just two years after the notorious acquittal of Emmett Till's killers, has Bishop outraged white supremacists by uncovering love letters from a white woman to the black man she accuses of rape?

Mullen maintains a third-person narrative voice but follows several different characters who are following different threads of the investigation. These are appealing people whose personal development is at least as interesting as the crime story.

Readers of the series will know and love Tommy Smith, the reporter who discovers Bishop's murder. A veteran of World War II and one of Atlanta's first black cops, he hung up his uniform at the end of the previous story, and now he's wondering why. He thinks of his own father home from World War I lynched for wearing his uniform, "an event [Smith] had no memory of, yet it was the defining moment of his life," still "haunting" him (344). He's also having second thoughts about Patrice, a restauranteur who gives him grief when he seems to be seeking a second-night stand. He's getting serious about her at a time that her white clientele are boycotting her for openly supporting desegregation.

Smith's ex-partner Lucius Boggs, upright and uptight, seems to be softening his self-righteousness and hardening his ambitions. Tiny powerhouse Dewey Edwards makes a good new partner for him. When they team up for a potentially dangerous visit to a white private detective in the boonies, Dewey slaps Boggs's shoulder and says, "Oh boy. This gonna be fun" (210). It is!

But Smith's ex-boss Sergeant Joe McInnis has most to learn about his relationships -- to Smith, to the black men he commands, to his family. In the earlier books, we learn that his command of the new black police force was punishment for his uncovering corruption on the all-white police force some years before. Though unhappy with the job, McInnis has been tough but fair. In Midnight Atlanta, he's offered a new position, and, to his own surprise, he asks for time to think about it. The rest of the novel, he's studying his own relationships and beliefs.

We first see him with his teenaged son, trying to explain whether his command of the black force makes him a "n----r-lover." McGinnis responds, "I work with them. We solve problems together"(40). He adds, "They're just folks." In the course of the investigation, McInnis reads Atlanta's black newspaper and reflects

It was like reading dispatches from a different reality.... McInnis had been operating in this other realm for the past seven-plus years, yet to read their perspective on stories he'd heard differenty elsewhere -- or, in most cases, hadn't heard at all -- was a reminder how separate from them he remained. (146)

Meeting people on his beat by lunching at black-owned restaurants, he becomes aware of the "layers" that black people deal with "that he didn't even know existed" (219).

This case puts McInnis on the side of his men against other police and the FBI. When Smith is hospitalized, McInnis brings gruff sympathy and a proposal to work together. He asks Smith to trust him, and is genuinely offended to be doubted (287). Smith points out that McInnis risks retaliation from the department if not from the FBI: "Why bother?"

"For the same reason you're nearly getting yourself killed trying to find out the truth."

Smith wondered if that could be true. Hoped so. Wasn't sure.

[McInnis said], "First the Bureau jerked me around and then they beat up one of my former officers."

Smith doesn't say, "I didn't know you cared," but that's the feeling.

Mullen doesn't make it easy to oppose racism in Atlanta 1956. McInnis's son gets beaten up. A character, Cassie Rakestraw, who has been sympathetic in previous novels, now leads opposition to racial desegregation. McInnis and his wife are ostracized by the PTA. When you fear for the safety of your children, when the value of your dream home plummets if a single black family moves nearby -- can you afford to do what you know is right?

Some other crime novel series have nearly choked on personal miseries and flaws that the authors pile on with the goal of character development. Henning Mankell's Wallander, Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, Ann Cleeves's Perez all became morose, angry, unbearable to read about; sometimes I skipped over Sue Grafton's chapters about Kinsey Millhone's personal life. At least so far, Mullen's characters are developing in ways that make them more appealing and more tightly bonded -- to each other, and to us.

More about Thomas Mullen's Darktown series.

• The first novel in the series had special resonance in the weeks after George Floyd's murder: "It seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction...good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). See "Darktown: Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948" (06/2020)
• "Lightning Men: Dark but not Bleak" (07/2020). The book's title refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods.