Gangsta rap has always had a fundamental issue; namely, boasting about doing a lot of illegal stuff. For an audience that isn’t sold by the beats, that’s a tough nut to get around. Either the rapper is so dumb that he’s recording a confession, or he’s telling stories he nicked from movies, and in either case, doing so in a big, lusty voice marks him as the sort of guy that, if this were a movie, would get killed before the final reel.

 

On 2004’s The Truest Shit I Ever Said, C-Murder sounded credible. He rapped into his lawyer’s portable DAT machine from behind bars, and the hushed tone worked wonders, removing the bravado from his performance and leaving tracks that were cold and believable as he meditated on crime and punishment. Death Around the Corner, the novel he wrote while in prison doing time for second degree murder, shares that quality.

 

Death Around the Corner is in many ways a standard crime novel, but it’s set in the Calliope Projects and it’s about gangsta life. Every scene and character rings true, and the psychology throughout reads as discouragingly accurate. The main character, Daquan, recognizes his own rationalizations will lead him down darker paths, but he overvalues reputation, anyway.

 

The end is violent—typical of crime stories—and one character meets a particularly gruesome end, but as sad as it is, you don’t for a moment think C-Murder is making things up. Others have likely suffered similar fates. The epilogue is similarly smart if painful as it suggests that for most of the characters, nothing was learned.

 

C-Murder—Corey Miller—handles sentences and storytelling with infinitely more grace and assurance than most will expect, so the book is a pretty compelling read, with only an occasional too-cute misstep. When he writes himself and brother Master P into the story, it’s hard not to wince. Even that works well enough, though, and Miller is a fairly transparent narrator, creating very little distance between the reader and characters. That allows the drama stand seemingly on its own, and makes Death Around the Corner a seemingly accurate, if depressing, look at project life.