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In 1974 she was driving by a bank at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and 4th Street at the moment when actors staging a bank robbery for the movie “Darktown Strutters” came bursting out of the doors firing machine guns.

He wore earphones and listened to the novel “Darktown” as he ran.

What real-life tragedies such as Hall’s suggest and novels such as “Darktown” rely on for narrative suspense is the daily terror visited upon black people by whites in the Jim Crow South.

Writing about race in a crime novel involving police brutality in 1948 Georgia, as Mullen does in “Darktown,” confronts the additional challenge of salting wounds freshly made with the killings of today’s black men by today’s police.

He no doubt is aware of a famous police brutality case in another part of Georgia that took place just a few years before the events of “Darktown.”