# The West Adams Bullet *A Biography of Marvin Gaye* — Legendary Biographies No. 145 - **Subject:** Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. - **Written by:** Tariah Robinson - **Shelf:** Music / R&B & Soul - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 174 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 174 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-124-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Adrienne Marshall (ISBN 979-8-90623-232-8) - **Content notes:** gun violence; domestic violence; patricide Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/145-the-west-adams-bullet.html ## About this book April 1, 1984, the Gramercy Place house in West Adams, Los Angeles. Marvin Pentz Gay Jr., forty-four, the singer of I Heard It Through the Grapevine and What's Going On and Sexual Healing, is shot twice by his father Marvin Gay Sr. with the .38-caliber revolver Marvin Jr. has given him the previous Christmas for self-defense. The first bullet enters the right side of his chest and stops the heart. The second is fired at point-blank range into the prone body. He dies at California Hospital Medical Center one hour later, one day short of his forty-fifth birthday. The senior Gay is convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to six years probation. Tariah Robinson's biography opens earlier — in Washington, D.C., where Marvin was born in 1939 to a Pentecostal-minister father and a domestic-worker mother — and follows the arc through the Detroit move and the Anna Gordy marriage of 1963, the long Motown years and the Tammi Terrell duets of 1967-70, the 1971 What's Going On that Berry Gordy initially refused to release, the long tax-trouble Ostend exile of 1981-82, the Sexual Healing comeback and the Grammy of 1983, the cocaine-fuelled return to Los Angeles in late 1983, and the morning of April 1, 1984. What emerges is a portrait of the Motown singer whose three decades of work remade what American Black popular music could say — and the patricide on a West Adams floor that the family had been writing since the Pentecostal house in Washington. ## Contents 1. Fairfax Apartments 2. The King in the House 3. Blow Harmony 4. Anna 5. Hampden-Sydney 6. Grapevine 7. Don't Be Ridiculous 8. Janis 9. Diana, Money, the Long Divorce 10. Here, My Dear 11. Maui 12. Ostend 13. Sexual Healing 14. The Bulletproof Vest 15. Gramercy Place 16. The Insurance Letter 17. April 1, 1984 18. The Long Aftermath ## Questions **Who is The West Adams Bullet about?** Marvin Pentz Gay Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The West Adams Bullet — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,563 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 174 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: gun violence; domestic violence; patricide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Born and raised in Detroit, Tariah Robinson began her career writing about the city's rich musical heritage. Her work as an R&B critic for Pitchfork and The Ringer established her as one of the careful chroniclers of late-1990s Black radio, focusing on the cultural impact of the era's production styles. Transitioning to book-length projects, she wrote The Buffalo Funk, The Marsh Harbour Charter, The West Adams Bullet, and The Note She Declined. These biographies examine the intersection of geography, community, and musical innovation across different decades. She lives in Detroit, where she collects vintage soul records and mentors high school journalists.