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| Introduction
to Spooks,
Spies, And Private Eyes |
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WHILE
I AM a voracious reader of African American literature,
I also harbor a secret obsession that not all of my friends
or colleagues understand. My obsession is usually played
out on long plane trips or vacations, where a random search
of my luggage would probably reveal an Agatha Christie,
Sarah Paretsky, or P. D. James novel as often as one by
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Ernest Gaines. These are
admittedly flings, guilty pleasures that seemed for years
to rarely intersect with my first love, African American
fiction.
All that changed however, in 1991, while I was doing research
for my first book, "I, Too, Sing America: The African American
Book Of Days." I came across a citation for the 1934 premiere
of a mystery play by Rudolph Fisher. The source document
indicated the play was adapted from Fisher's novel "The
Conjure-Man Dies" and claimed it was the first mystery
novel written by an African American. A lightbulb went off
in my head. Rudolph Fisher! How had I missed him? My 1960s
and 1970s classes in black literature had included Fisher's
non-mystery short stories, but Chester Himes was always
considered the first African American mystery novelist,
an error reinforced in many minds by the successful screen
adaptation of two Himes novels during the Blaxploitative
'70s. Discovering Fisher started me on a quest to locate
a copy of "The Conjure-Man Dies," one that ended
at UCLA, where I was introduced to his pioneering sleuths,
Dr. John Archer and detective Perry Dart.
Now I was curious. Fisher could not have sprung up without
a single colleague or predecessor in the mystery genre.
And it couldn't be true that there were no black mystery
writers between Fisher, Himes, and Walter Mosley, then just
gaining recognition for his second novel, "A Red Death."
Surely my love and my obsession had to have crossed paths
more frequently than this!
Indeed they had, and much of the result of my search for
those meeting points is contained in the pages of this book.
Not only did I find "The Conjure-Man Dies," and
a later mystery short story by Fisher, but I even found
mysteries, crime stories, and political thrillers written
by George S. Schuyler that were serialized in the "Pittsburgh
Courier" and short stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson,
both contemporaries of Fisher during the Harlem Renaissance.
Furthermore, through the scholarship contained in Frankie
Bailey's landmark "Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters
in Crime and Detective Fiction" (Greenwood Press, 1991),
I learned that Rudolph Fisher was preceded by W. Adolphe
Roberts, a Jamaican-born author of several mysteries, including
the 1926 novel "The Haunting Hand," who went unrecognized
for almost three quarters of a century, perhaps because
his characters were not black. My own research uncovered
even earlier black mystery writers, Pauline E. Hopkins in
1900 and J. E. Bruce in 1907. All of these stories had languished
in African American magazines, were seldom reprinted, and
were certainly not considered within the context of other
mystery fiction. It was this contextual framework that I
was seeking, one that firmly fixed these and other black
writers I identified in the two worlds they rightfully inhabited—the
realms of mystery fiction and African American literature.
The extent of the black presence in mystery fiction has
yet to be "discovered" by many mystery enthusiasts,
regardless of race, or by many mystery scholars. To see
Pauline Hopkins's use of the locked-room mystery device
pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe in "The Murders in the
Rue Morgue" raises tantalizing questions about that
mystery master's influence on early black experimenters
in the genre. Understanding that Roberts, Fisher, Schuyler,
and Dunbar-Nelson wrote mysteries during a period that coincided
with the Golden Age of detective fiction places their characters'
patterns of speech and habits, and even the authors' plots,
in another context, one that gives a more complete picture
of the era's cast of players than heretofore imagined. Reading
the early fiction of Chester Himes, written while he was
incarcerated for armed robbery in the 1930s, adds an additional
dimension to the hard-boiled detective fiction written by
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others during the
period. Knowing that while readers were devouring the latest
Robert Ludlum thriller, John A. Williams and Sam Greenlee
were also writing of CIA "spooks" and government
conspiracies with blacks as central characters gives additional
insight into the concerns of all writers of this mystery
subgenre. Knowing that Sarah Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski
has contemporaries in Eleanor Taylor Bland's suburban Chicago
detective Marti MacAlister and Valerie Wilson Wesley's Newark
detective Tamara Hayle lets readers know that African Americans
are not just the victims or perpetrators of crimes, but
are also those who try to correct the balance that murder
upsets.
But as important as it may be for readers to understand
that black writers have been active, albeit largely unheralded,
participants in the major eras of mystery fiction and its
subgenres, it is equally, if not more important to place
these writers and their fiction within the context of African
American literature and to trace their origins within, and
influences on, black literary and cultural trends.
Building upon the substantial literary legacy of Frederick
Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, William Wells Brown, Frances
E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and other nineteenth
and early twentieth century writers, the first widely recognized
cultural movement involving African American novelists was
the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the most influential American
writers, artists, and intellectuals, including W. E. B.
Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston, rose
to prominence in this decade and a half. Rudolph Fisher,
a handsome young physician, was one of the more popular
figures of the period, known for his essays, award-winning
short stories, and a nongenre novel. However, an equally
important contribution was his 1932 novel "The Conjure-Man
Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem," the first mystery
novel to feature African American characters. While Bailey
has shown that Fisher was not the first black to write a
mystery novel, he was the first to set his story in the
black community and to address issues important to American
Negroes, including their relationship to their African ancestry,
color prejudice, and superstition. George S. Schuyler, a
journalist and author most noted for his satirical novel
"Black No More," also addressed some of the same
issues as Fisher in his serialized stories. Schuyler is
also distinguished for his inclusion of plot elements dealing
with African politics, intrigue, and the struggle for black
equality in the U.S. and Africa in the serialized stories
"The Black Internationale" and "Black Empire,"
making him arguably the first black author of an international
political thriller. Conversely, Alice Dunbar-Nelson,
whose short story "Summer Session" was written
around the same time as Fisher's novel, did not address
such concerns; her work, like Roberts's, did not include
black characters.
For some historians, the end of the Harlem Renaissance is
marked by the 1935 riots in New York City. For African American
writers from the mid-thirties through the 1950s, the years
of riots, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, the Depression, the
shabby treatment of African American soldiers during and
after World War II, all contributed to a worldview that
resulted in the emergence of literary realism. Chester Himes
was perhaps the earliest writer so influenced; in fact,
his incarceration for armed robbery occurred a few years
before the end of the Harlem Renaissance. And while he did
not develop the hard-boiled, crime-fighting detectives of
his "Harlem domestic series" for another twenty
years, the hard-bitten worldview in such early Himes stories
as "His Last Day" not only links him to Hammett
and Chandler but gives a hint of what was in store for Coffin
Ed and Grave Digger Jones on Harlem's mean streets during
the 1950s and 1960s. Hughes Allison's groundbreaking 1948
police procedural "Corollary," the first mystery
story by an African American to be published in "Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine," also reflects a harsher
reality and highlights the role of the detective, Joe Hill,
as an intermediary between black and white cultures.
While later black mystery writers owe much to pioneers like
Himes and Allison, an equal debt is owed to nongenre writers
Richard Wright and Ann Petry, whose powerful depiction of
the impact of racism and hard times on African Americans
in their respective stories "The Man Who Killed a Shadow"
and "On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon" foreshadowed
themes they would revisit in their influential best-selling
novels "Native Son" and "The Street."
All these writers, whether working in the mystery genre
or firmly outside it, have had their influence on black
writers' views on crime, its consequences, and detection.
The social upheaval that began with the Civil Rights era
of the 1950s and continued through the 1970s gave birth
to a second black cultural renaissance, popularly called
the Black Arts Movement. The movement was reflected in the
writings of Imamu Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Ed Bullins,
and Larry Neal, the mystery-influenced fiction of Ishmael
Reed and others, and a subgenre not previously explored
by black writers in novel form—the political thriller. Chester
Himes, whose last novels in the Harlem domestic series,
"Blind Man With a Pistol" (1969) and a novel he
had worked on for over a dozen years, the posthumously published
"Plan B" (English edition, 1993), reflected his
increasingly pessimistic view of the inevitability of urban
violence, whether in the form of a riot or organized revolutionary
action, existed at one end of the spectrum. On the other
end are Himes's literary offspring, John A. Williams and
Sam Greenlee, among others, whose work, excerpted and reprinted
here, created a fictional landscape where organized black
violence and the inevitable societal and governmental response
were seen as the sad but logical result of years of social
and economic inequity.
By the 1980s and 1990s, African American mystery writers
were participating in what is becoming known as a Third
Renaissance of black thought and writing. These writers,
led by such critically acclaimed authors as Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, John Edgar
Widerman, Maya Angelou, and Ernest Gaines, among others,
are presenting a more diverse range than ever before. Perhaps
as an outgrowth of the hunger Americans of all colors have
developed for black writing, African American mystery writers
have also begun to claim the spotlight. Most notable
among them is Walter Mosley, whose Easy Rawlins series of
novels is a unique revisioning of the hard-boiled detective,
recast not as the loner Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but
as a black single father, a racial outsider but cultural
insider, whose knowledge of and connections to the black
community are essential in the police's ability to solve
crimes. Mosely's new protagonist, Paris Minton, of
the short story "Fearless" included here, also
brings this ability to get on the inside to a noir story
set in post-World War II Los Angeles.
In many ways Easy Rawlins, a man of the 1940s to 1960s,
is the fictional godfather of two detectives whose beats
are the streets of modern-day Los Angeles, Gar Anthony Haywood's
Aaron Gunner and Gary Phillips's Ivan Monk. Their exploits,
in novels as well as their new short stories "And Pray
Nobody Sees You" and "Dead Man's Shadow,"
expand the territory of the black mystery, which also includes
the unnamed stand-in for Chicago in veteran mystery writer
Percy Spurlark Parker's "Death and the Point Spread"
and a chilling projection of that same city in Hugh Holton's
law-and-order nightmare "The Thirtieth Amendment."
The Third Renaissance among black mystery writers also reaches
into the diaspora, with France's Njami Simon giving us a
skillful send-up of Himes's classic detectives Coffin Ed
Johnson and Grave Digger Jones in "Coffin & Co."
and Silver Dagger winner Mike Phillips explores the black
immigrant experience in England in "Personal Woman."
The literary inheritors of Pauline Hopkins are equally compelling
as they use the mystery form to explore issues of black
identity, racism, crimes against women, infidelity, color
consciousness, and sexuality. Leading the "Sistuhs
in Crime" is Eleanor Taylor Bland's "The Man Who
Cried I'm Not," its title a literary twist on the John
A. Williams novel also excerpted in this collection. BarbaraNeely,
whose Blanche White series of mystery novels debunks the
stereotype of the stupid black maid while simultaneously
addressing issues of race, color, and class consciousness,
treats us in "Spilled Salt" to an unusual and
powerful account of the impact of crime on not only the
victim but also the family of the criminal. Her sense of
outrage is shared by Charlotte Watson Sherman, whose protagonist
in the nongenre short story "Killing Color" exacts
a mysterious revenge on the perpetrators of violence on
Southern blacks. This section of the book concludes with
mysteries by two newer voices—Aya de Leon, whose "Tell
Me Moore" sets up a funny, suspenseful tension as neophyte
detective Madeline Moore tries to relate the story of her
first solo case to her card-playing girlfriends; and Penny
Mickelbury, whose excerpted novel "Night Songs"
features interracial partners, police lieutenant Gianna
Maglione of the Washington, D.C., Hate Crime Unit and investigative
reporter Mimi Patterson, as they try to solve a series of
murders of black prostitutes, murders often ignored by law
enforcement in fact as well as fiction.
Once upon a time, the only black detective I ever saw was
the bumbling, eye-rolling Birmingham Brown, the Negro sidekick
in Charlie Chan movies. But knowing the wealth of talented
black mystery writers, both past and present, including
those represented in "Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes"
lovers of mystery fiction and black literature can now confidently
proclaim, "Birmingham Brown is dead! Long live the
renaissance of black mystery fiction!" |
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