{"id":405190,"date":"2026-07-20T12:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/405190\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T12:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:37:10","slug":"the-haul-by-gary-phillips-review-a-south-los-angeles-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/405190\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haul by Gary Phillips Review: A South Los Angeles Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the acknowledgments of Gary Phillips\u2019s new novel, The Haul<\/a>, he name-checks a pair of books by Donald E. Westlake: The Seventh and Deadly Edge. These novels from the late \u201960s and early \u201970s seem like a strange source of inspiration for a contemporary story about ripping off a billionaire tech bro\u2019s secret lair hidden underneath a state-of-the-art basketball arena. Westlake penned these books under the pseudonym Richard Stark, the name the mystery writer used for his hard-boiled stories about a professional thief named Parker: a no-nonsense antihero who meticulously plots his robberies down to the last detail and executes them with ruthless precision.<\/p>\n

The popularity of this character\u2014there are 24 novels and eight screen adaptations\u2014speaks to the timeless appeal of someone who is smart, tireless, and dependable in a world that rewards the stupid, lazy, and corrupt. Everyone from Lee Marvin to Mark Wahlberg has taken a turn playing Parker, including football hero turned actor Jim Brown in a screen adaptation of The Seventh called The Split in 1968.<\/p>\n

No matter how many Parker novels you\u2019ve read, you never learn more about the man than what he allows his criminal associates to know about him. \u201cThere are very few instances where there\u2019s a look into Parker\u2019s psyche and his interior landscape,\u201d Phillips says over Zoom when I ask him about the acknowledgments. \u201cHe\u2019s really very much defined by external actions and what he says or what he doesn\u2019t say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phillips\u2019s The Haul takes a different approach to its main character. The novel opens with a crime witnessed by a teenage boy in foster care in South Los Angeles who goes by the handle OC. When we catch up with him 30 years later, OC has transformed into the master thief O\u2019Conner, making The Haul both an exploration of a contemporary crime and an excavation of his past. O\u2019Conner\u2019s associations from those early days made him who he is, but they also threaten to unravel a caper he has so carefully plotted.<\/p>\n

Driven by a curiosity as to how someone ends up like Parker, Phillips has his protagonist reflect on his past:<\/p>\n

Years later, when he had the wherewithal, he hadn\u2019t tried to find his mother or father. They sure as shit hadn\u2019t looked for him. No going back. He wasn\u2019t going to be anchored by the past. <\/p>\n

You won\u2019t find that kind of depth in a Parker novel. Another difference between O\u2019Conner and Parker is that O\u2019Conner and his gang aren\u2019t young men anymore. When the novel moves to the present, he\u2019s in his late 40s, and his body is no longer the reliable tool it once was. Also, he\u2019s been out of the game for a minute, spending more time on the pickleball court than planning his next score, a choice that adds to his uncertainty. For Phillips, O\u2019Conner is like a boxer who comes out of retirement. \u201cSometimes you come back and you can\u2019t box,\u201d Phillips says. \u201cYou can\u2019t get punched in the head one more time, it\u2019s no good. But sometimes the old man still has a few strokes left, so I think for O\u2019Conner, that was the challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes The Haul so arresting is its mix of old tropes and fresh twists. There are familiar scenes in the category of \u201cgetting the gang back together\u201d as O\u2019Conner recruits former associates for the job, but the \u201cinside man\u201d here is a woman whose work was stolen by her billionaire boss; he paid her a fraction of what she should have gotten. Does O\u2019Conner care that justice is served and the tech bro gets his comeuppance?<\/p>\n

Not really. Money is his motivation. That doesn\u2019t mean he isn\u2019t loyal to his team, though. \u201cIf you\u2019re in the crew,\u201d Phillips explains, \u201che\u2019s gonna stick by you. Now, if you betray him, if you double-cross him, all bets are off. But as long as you do your job and you\u2019ve been a stand-up member of the crew, he\u2019s got your back.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Westlake\u2019s The Seventh, the heist goes smoothly, but trouble arises when it\u2019s time to divvy up the score. Phillips\u2019s plot is similar, but he complicates the situation with rival gangsters, some of whom are members of the L.A. County Sheriff\u2019s Department. There\u2019s no such thing as a perfect crime when there are so many people looking to profit off the work of others.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time O\u2019Conner has appeared in Phillips\u2019s work. He\u2019s the subject of the author\u2019s 2012 novel, The Warlord of Willow Ridge, and several short stories, and he appeared in the crime anthology Culprits: The Heist Was Just the Beginning. So will there be another O\u2019Conner novel in the future?<\/p>\n

Yes, but not right away. \u201cI\u2019ve got some other stuff I got to get to,\u201d Phillips says, likely meaning his popular Ivan Monk series, \u201cbut I can\u2019t stay away from this cat. I gotta get back to him. I like this guy too much. We all dig the antihero now.\u201d\u2022<\/p>\n

THE HAUL, BY GARY PHILLIPS\"<B><i>THE<\/a>THE HAUL, BY GARY PHILLIPSCredit: Soho Crime\"Headshot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the acknowledgments of Gary Phillips\u2019s new novel, The Haul, he name-checks a pair of books by Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[162510,162513,162508,162514,48,52,51,47,50,49,162509,162512,162511],"class_list":["post-405190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-california-crime-literature","tag-contemporary-antihero-fiction","tag-gary-phillips-the-haul","tag-l-a-county-sheriff-crime-story","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-noir-fiction","tag-richard-stark-parker-influence","tag-south-la-heist-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}