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Simple Justice
By John Morgan Wilson
Originally published 1996
ReQueered Tales Edition, September 2020
Five stars

The eeriest thing about John Morgan Wilson’s “Simple Justice” is not that it doesn’t feel dated after all the years since its original publication in 1996, but rather that it seems more relevant than ever in the context of our world as it is right now in 2020. With some careful retooling by the author for this new edition, it stands as a document of a mid-1990s nouveau-noir detective story; but also as a gripping contemporary moral tale set in a world where “moral” is an equivocal concept at best.

Benjamin Justice is a failed journalist who, at thirty-eight, seems to have given up on life. He lives in his late lover’s garage apartment in Los Angeles, going quietly to seed with his lingering grief and in the sodden aftermath of his spectacular fall from Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter to journalistic pariah. When his former boss, Harry Brofsky – whose career was all but destroyed by his association with Justice – shows up proposing that he mentor a hotshot young reporter named Alexandra Templeton, he understandably balks. What finally coaxes him out of his lair of self-defeat is the apparent murder of a pretty young man in the parking lot of a West Hollywood gay bar by a teenaged Chicano boy. Something is off about this supposedly open-and-shut case, and once Harry shows Benjamin the news video, he’s hooked.

This is a rich, deeply layered story. Its complicated plot is not so much Byzantine as kaleidoscopic, the many tumbling fragments gradually filling both Justice’s and the reader’s mind with calculated confusion. Interestingly, the one aspect of LA that doesn’t really figure in this story is Hollywood, and that’s something of a relief. We have class, race, issues of sexual orientation and politics aplenty – more than enough without dragging the movie industry into it. A key pleasure in this book is getting to know Benjamin Justice himself, which takes some doing and is exquisitely handled through Wilson’s skilled narrative. The fragmentary unveiling of Justice’s life, grudgingly revealed at first but ultimately laid bare by his reluctant mentee, left me stunned. Alexandra Templeton is herself a complicated character, but far less damaged than Justice. The author depicts her through Justice’s eyes with clear, concise strokes. I suspect the fact that Templeton never becomes as fully three-dimensional as Justice is part of the author’s plan. Wilson’s greater interest in this book – the first of a series – is in showing how these two wildly different people forge an alliance that neither of them initially wants.

Wilson probes into human frailty and prejudice as he drags Justice deeper into the mystery. Racist assumptions made by white folks about Chicanos are shoved up against Black/Hispanic hostility, racism within the Korean community, and – of course – the constant underlying hostility of everyone in LA toward gay people, especially at a time when AIDS was still front and center in America’s consciousness. No group is innocent, no group is solely the victim. We are dragged into an ugly stew of prejudice and anger, only to be startled by moments of compassion that can be as painful as the hatred.

The mystery is solved, but that’s no spoiler. There is redemption here, but not quite fulfilled. The final moment in the book left me shaken, because it is a last reminder that there is more tragedy here than solving a single murder can heal. Benjamin Justice is like a drowning man at the start of this story. At the end, his head is above water, but he hasn’t made it to shore yet.

I finished “Simple Justice” all but desperate to read the next book in the series. Good job.