Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction.

Skinner, Robert E.

Paula L. Woods, ed. Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery. Crime and Suspense Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 1995. 368 pp. $22.95.

Anyone who pays attention to trends in popular fiction cannot help being struck by the appearance and continued success of a substantial number of African American writers working in the crime and suspense genres. The rise of Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, and Hugh Holton is all the more noteworthy when one recognizes that their literary reach crosses racial boundaries. Not even the late, great Chester Himes enjoyed such success in his heyday, although public and critical demand has resulted recently in the posthumous republication of most of his oeuvre, and the first-time publication of newly discovered stories and a novel left incomplete at his death.

The history of the African American crime story is a shadowy one, since many of the early practitioners seldom, if ever, saw their work progress beyond the pages of small-circulation magazines and newspapers published for a relatively small African American audience. Editor Paula Woods has done them, and us, a service by rediscovering and resurrecting a number of those skillfully wrought pieces.

The locked-room mystery "Talma Gordon," by Pauline E. Hopkins is a welcome surprise, and the brief excerpt of Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies leaves us not only thirsting for more, but a bit disappointed to realize that Fisher did not live long enough to write more adventures about detective duo Archer and Dart. George S. Schuyler's "The Shoemaker Murders" is a hard-boiled story that stands comparison with the best that Black Mask has to offer. Chester Himes's "His Last Day" is early Himes at his best, although one wonders why Woods chose this instead of "He Knew," Himes's earliest story featuring black detectives. A story that is rife with dark irony, "He Knew" suggests the origins of Himes's later triumphs and presages the work of modern police proceduralists like McBain and Wambaugh.

The newer crop of black writers is well represented in the book's final section. Walter Mosley's "Fearless" is an entertaining glimpse of what one hopes is a new series character. Hugh Holton's "The Thirtieth Amendment" is an imaginative combination of mystery and science fiction. There are solid performances by Gar Anthony Heywood, Mike Phillips, Gary Phillips, Percy Spurlock Parker, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, Charlotte Watson Sherman, Aya de Leon, and Penny Mickelbury. Also on display is a tantalizing excerpt from Njami Simon's Coffin & Company, which appeared only briefly in this country as a Black Lizard paperback.

Some of Woods's choices are questionable. Although Ann Perry and Richard Wright certainly wrote from the perspective of hard life on the mean streets, it is just not possible to think of them as "suspense" writers. Even more questionable is her inclusion of a fragment of John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am, which she terms a "political thriller." Although the protagonist does discover an international anti-Negro plot, calling this epic African American novel a spy story is like comparing Charles Dickens to Mickey Spillane.

There are nagging problems in some of her scholarship. A "Mystery Chronology," doubtlessly added to place black detection in an historical context with the broader realm, has some unfortunate and easily avoidable mistakes. Woods confuses Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald, giving Ross credit for the creation of both his own Lew Archer and John D.'s Travis McGee. Chester Himes is said to have written nine novels about Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson when in reality he wrote eight; one other crime novel about Harlem, Run Man, Run, does not include the duo. Njami Simon is said to have written a book with Coffin Ed and Grave Digger as characters, when in reality the protagonists are a pair of retired detectives who passionately believe that Himes based his sleuths' adventures on their own careers, and who travel to Europe to convince Himes not to kill them off (which he actually did in Plan B).

Woods barely mentions or neglects entirely the careers of white writers who work within this subgenre. There are implications to this phenomenon--cultural, political, and literary--that seem to call for more than a casual comment on it. At the same time, when one considers the influential nature of this work, such an omission is curious. For example, only brief mention is made of the work of John Ball, Ernest Tidyman, and George Baxt. It is doubtful that there exists in literature a more ringing declaration of a black man's right to be than Virgil Tibbs' exclamation "They call me Mr. Tibbs," in Ball's In the Heat off the Night. By the same token, Ernest Tidyman's John Shaft was the exemplar of the black urban hero in the 1970s. Street-wise and sassy to a fault, he was an heroic symbol to both black and white, and a prototype for an entire genre of film. George Baxt's flamboyantly gay Pharaoh Love is less well known than Tibbs or Shaft, but the mysteries are cleverly written, and Love is important both racially and sexually, since he is one of the earliest gay crime fiction heroes and perhaps the only black gay detective.

Also left unmentioned are Ed Lacy's Toussaint Moore, whose first outing, Room to Swing, won for Lacy the prestigious Edgar Allen Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America, and James Sallis, who has made a more recent mark with his series about New Orleans private eye Lew Griffin. A recent Shamus Award nominee, Sallis's work is influenced by the French existentialists and the work of Chester Himes (who makes a brief appearance in the novel Black Hornet). Although perhaps less accessible to the reader than Mosley's work, Sallis's novels are dark, hard-edged tours de force that deserve to be better known. The persistent appearance of white-created black detectives would seem to offer Woods the opportunity to edit a companion anthology that treats this phenomenon at greater length.

With these reservations noted, Woods's collection must be given the credit it is due. With black detectives so much a part of the modern mystery landscape, we have been long overdue for a collection that points to the beginnings of this increasingly significant subgenre. Woods's anthology will undoubtedly become the springboard for more ambitious studies and further collections of this type.