Created by Gary Phillips
Can you dig it?
And Phillips let his freak flag fly, pulling out all the stops in “The Blacklight Gizmo Matter,” a what-the-hell? short story mish-mash of everything he holds dear, which popped up in the 2024 collection, Private Dicks and Disco Balls, which offered private eye tales from the “Dyn-O-Mite seventies,” and later was included in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025.”
The story introduced Black private eye NEFRA “NEF” ADAMS (“Soul sister Number One,” as a jazz musician pal tags her) and her big, brawny partner, white (and gay) ex-cop and Korean War vet Brad “Brix” Bradford.
Nedra’s quite the chick. She tools around Los Angeles in a burgundy-colored 1959 Corvette and carries a Walter PPK, is into Eastern philosophies and martial arts, has her own guru and an office overlooking the Sunset Strip, and sports a big-ass afro and favors a “black, form-fitting zippered jumpsuit’ when she’s doing a little nighttime prowling.
Of course she does.
When a friend of hers, janitor and informant Passalong Pete, is murdered, she and Brix decide to look into it, which leads to Brix being shot and ultimately to, yes, an evil scientist with a diabolical machine and nefarious plans.
Along there way, the story is crammed with call-outs to and examples of all sorts of seventies touchstones: the first Super Bowl, Angela Davis, cassette tapes, the SLA, muscle cars, disco-era racism, high-end sound systems, waterbeds and everything else. It’s like ploughing through the pages of an old Playboy from the seventies.
Seems like a one-shot to me, but I’m guessing Gary had so much fun with this that New and Brix may return.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One-man pulp factory Gary Phillips has published novels, comics, novellas, short stories and edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir (2017), while his debut, Violent Spring (1994), which introduced Ivan Monk, was named one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. Other characters he’s created over the years include disgraced football player Zelmont Raines, ex-showgirl turned courier for the mob Martha Chainey, 1960 news photog One-Shot Harry Ingram and black LA eye Nate Hollis who appeared in the comic series Angeltown. He’s also been an L.A.-based activist and community organizer for over two decades, dealing with various community empowerment issues ranging from affordable housing to the narco-industrial complex, and his political and pop culture pieces have run in the L.A. Times, the L.A. Watts Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Black Scholar Journal and Rap Pages Magazine, and he served as a story editor on FX’s Snowfall, which dealt with crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.
STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH
- “When editor Michael Bracken graciously invited me to do a story for Private Dicks and Disco Balls, I figured it should be a homage to Pam Grier, she of those badass roles back then, like Coffy, Foxy Brown, and pertinent to the theme of the anthology, a PI in Sheba, Baby. Also, in keeping with the ’70s, was being influenced by the paperback reprints of ’30s pulp proto superhero Doc Savage. Usually, I’d have one of those adventures (with those slamming James Bama covers) in my back pocket on my way to football practice in high school. Doc went up against quixotic villains who often wielded sci-fi machines that could trigger earthquakes or alter brain waves in nefarious ways. Melding all that became the genesis of my groovy private eye Nefra Adams and “The Blacklight Gizmo Matter.”
— Gary Phillips
SHORT STORIES
- “The Blacklight Gizmo Matter.” (2025, Private Dicks and Disco Balls)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- City of Angels, City of Dicks
Los Angeles Eyes
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
