By 1988, the year Aaron Gunner made his debut, Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft’s “Kiss my black ass!” defiance had pretty much reached its expiry date. Cathartic in 1971, maybe, but by the 1980s it was starting to sound a little cartoonish. Fortunately, into the breach stepped Gunner. That book, Fear of the Dark (a double-barreled title if there ever was one), was some kind of classic—a finger-pointing, heartfelt blast across the bow of a genre that had been spinning in place since Shaft. Not that righteous anger or racism had disappeared, or were no longer fertile ground for crime fiction, but something had to be said.
Even in his wildest dreams, Gunner was no super stud (you can bet Isaac Hayes wouldn’t be writing any songs about him). He was unapologetically down to earth—just another working stiff from South Central, an all-too-human detective just trying to get by. Sometimes he wondered if he shouldn’t give it all up and go work for his cousin and best friend Del the Electrician.
But it was his creator’s insistence on covering “black” issues ignored by most crime fiction at the time, such as race relations, African American militancy, the crack epidemic, and urban gangs, that really made the series stand out. This wasn’t movie or MTV stuff—this was real. And Gunner’s stand at Fear of the Dark’s conclusion, when Gunner tries to protect a white cop from an angry black mob, made the message vividly clear: we are all in this together.
Haywood wrapped up the series in 1999 after five more books, and then...nada. He moved on to other projects. Which is why Gunner’s reappearance 20 years later feels so miraculous—and welcome.
Gunner is older, arguably wiser, and more prone to introspection, but he’s still endearingly our guy. Life’s still a struggle, but Gunner’s got a good woman now, and you know that can’t be bad. But his world is shattered when good ol’ Del inexplicably shoots himself in the head after allegedly killing his wife and trying to kill their grown daughter, Zina. Gunner declares the official LAPD version “Bullshit!” and sets out to find the truth, while Zina struggles for her life in a hospital bed.
Sick at heart, Gunner digs into the case, even while simultaneously working a paying case, trying to clear Harper Stowe III, a troubled Afghan War vet and PTSD poster child, accused of murdering his boss.
The two cases never quite converge, but the shared themes and the heartbreaking conclusion land like an angry fist on the table. Even with a new batch of racial, cultural, and economic hate and divisiveness coming home to roost, we are still all in this together.
