Critic Oline Cogdill recently reviewed Gary Phillips’ heist novel, The Haul, for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Her timing was perfect because Patrick Millikin just interviewed Phillips’ for The Poisoned Pen. You can watch that interview at the end of this post, after Cogdill’s review of the book. The Pen is almost sold out of signed copies of the book, but Phillips has agreed to sign more if necessary. You can order the book through the Webstore, https://shorturl.at/H6zp1.
Thanks to Oline for the review of The Haul.
Book review: In Gary Phillips’ ‘The Haul,’ the reader is firmly on the criminal’s side
‘The Haul’ by Gary Phillips; Soho Crime; 304 pages; $28.95
Theories abound about why people turn to crime. For the single-named O’Conner, making his return in Gary Phillips’ action-packed “The Haul,” crime was a matter of survival.
“The Haul” works well as a heist tale, an origin story, a look how a community and area businesses deal with crime and loyalty. The author also shows how O’Conner, who is Black, deals with racism as a teenager and as an adult.
Phillips introduces O’Conner when he’s not quite 14 years old, living in a group home after being orphaned, working in a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles. The teenager, known then as OC, learns how to pick locks, how to maneuver street code intricacies, and the value of loyalty. He also self-educates by reading and visiting museums.
OC used his street education to reinvent himself as O’Conner, his real name, and to become a master thief, which became a lucrative career. He poured his stashes of cash into legitimate businesses, off-shore accounts and bank accounts around the country under different aliases. Now retired, he lives with his girlfriend, regularly plays pickleball and enjoys gardening and taking care of his suburban L.A. townhouse. He has no desire to return to crime; “he had to admit he’d gotten used to laying his head on a pillow in his own house at night. Always on the move, always looking back … just didn’t get him energized like before.”
But he’s intrigued when he’s approached with a plan to rob tech billionaire Palmer Van Noy, who has stashed more than $20 million in cash beneath a basketball arena. Although O’Conner has enough money, his cut of the payout is irresistible. Plus, Palmer is a horrible person — in this case, the victim is much more despicable than the thieves.
Phillips doesn’t miss a step as he pits O’Conner against past enemies and a gang of deputies-turned-criminals in the suspenseful “The Haul.”
O’Conner is definitely a criminal, and Phillips never lets us forget that. But the reader is firmly on O’Conner’s side.
Behind the plot: Gary Phillips featured O’Conner in his novel, “The Warlord of Willow Ridge,” but has said he views “The Haul” as a “reset” for the character, not as part of a series. In addition, a museum in “The Haul” features the photography of Harry “One-Shot” Ingram, the subject of two books by Phillips, making the novel “less a series and all a world,” the publisher said in an email.
Phillips talked about The Warlord of Willow Ridge and The Haul in his Poisoned Pen interview. You can watch it here.