THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 13, 1995 TAG: 9512130030
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
FOR MANY YEARS, it seemed that the most popular African-American detectives were created by white authors. Octavus Roy Cohen, one of the major writers for The Saturday Evening Post, wrote about Florian Slappey during the 1920s, and Veronica Parker Johns added Webster Flagg in 1953. John Ball's Virgil Tibbs first appeared in ``In the Heat of the Night'' in 1965, and Ernest Tidyman's Shaft solved his first case in ``Shaft'' in 1970.
Black writers have, with justification, argued that none of these characters reflected the black community. ``Creating a black man and coloring him brown,'' writes Aya de Leon, one of the contributors to ``Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction'' (Doubleday, 350 pp., $23.95), ``does not turn him into a black man.''
Probably the white author with the most convincing black detective was Ed Lacy, who created Touissant Moore in 1957. Lacy lived in Harlem and was married to a black woman.
Until the success of Walter Mosley, the most important black author to write about black detectives was the expatriate Chester Himes, whose series about Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, culminating in ``Cotton Comes to Harlem'' (1965), is deservedly admired for its gallows humor and wild scenes, but not for its detective-novel qualities. Other than Himes, African-American suspense authors tended to write about white detectives.
With this background, I approached ``Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes,'' editor Paula L. Woods' anthology of black mystery and crime fiction, with some trepidation. Sadly, the early stories in the book were not rewarding.
An energetic literary sleuth, Woods unearthed a detective story by Pauline E. Hopkins from the 1900 issue of Colored American. Despite Woods' comparing the story to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, it is an average sentimental product of the period. Likewise, the excerpt from Rudolph Fisher's ``The Conjure Man Dies'' (1932), a pioneering novel featuring black sleuths created by a black writer, shows that the author was an unexciting imitator of S.S. Van Dine.
Things improve somewhat with Alice Dunbar-Nelson's ``Summer Session,'' a warmly told story that becomes a detective tale only at the end, and Hughes Allison's ``Corollary,'' a realistic police procedural set in 1940s Harlem, but the relative quality of these tales seems to have been the exception until the past few years.
It's when Woods comes to contemporary mystery writers that ``Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes'' proves its value. Woods commissioned new stories from well-known writers like Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely, and writers who will soon, if there's any justice, become well-known, such as Mike Philips and Eleanor Taylor Bland. Together they produced some of the best work in the short form of the past several years.
Mosley's ``Fearless'' is sad, nostalgic, warm and full of action. Gar Anthony Haywood's ``And Pray Nobody Sees You'' is a fine urban private-eye caper, with an excellent biter-bit conclusion. Caribbean-born Mike Phillips' ``Personal Woman'' is a detective story set in London, with a neat scam worthy of the elaborate plotting of the Agatha Christie generation.
Eleanor Taylor Bland contributes a fine police procedural about an African-American female cop, Marti McAllister. Perhaps the most memorable story of all is Hugh Holton's ``The Thirtieth Amendment'' about a future Newt Gingrich administration that has repealed the Bill of Rights. The story succeeds in both amusing and warning the reader - and it has one of the best final lines in recent mystery fiction.
Woods' anthology does not prove that there are a great number of unjustly forgotten African-American mystery writers, but it does show that some of the best writing in the genre today is by black authors. ILLUSTRATION: [Book Cover]
``Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes,'' a black-writers anthology
by CNB