African American Crime and Detective Fiction Syllabus

Donald Goines

About a month ago I wrote a post entitled "The Short Story and Ernest Gaines Syllabus." Today, I would like to do something similar. However, instead of having the syllabus center around Gaines and his relation to the short story genre, I want to share with you a syllabus I constructed entitled "African American Crime and Detective Fiction." The syllabus below does not contain an exhaustive list of texts that could be included in this course. With that said, in the comments below, tell me what suggestions do you have for texts, critical or otherwise, that could be added to this course.

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African American Crime and Detective Fiction

Course Description:

This course will cover African American crime and detective novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, we will trace a path from Rudolph Fisher to more recent authors such as Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. Primarily focusing on the urban landscape, we will examine how these authors navigate the constricted spaces of the urban environment and how they work to control that environment through various means. As Otto Penzler states in the introduction to Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African American Writers, African American crime literature shows “the detective in a reasonably insular community, trying to solve crimes with black victims and committed, in all likelihood, by black villains.” This course will provide students with the opportunity to explore Penzler’s assertion and to see how that statement has either changed or remained the same throughout the years.  Beginning with Fisher, the course will trace the proliferation of African American crime and detective literature that saw an upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s through the first part of the twenty-first century.

Readings:

• Rudolph Fisher The Conjure Man Dies (1932)
• Chester Himes Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965)
• Iceberg Slim Trick Baby (1967)
• Donald Goines Dopefiend (1971)
• Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
• Vern E. Smith The Jones Men (1975)
• Roland S. Jefferson The School on 103rd Street (1976)
• Ernest J. Gaines A Gathering of Old Men (1983)
• Walter Mosley Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• Sista Souljah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
• Percivel Everret Erasure (2001)
• Attica Locke The Cutting Season (2011)

Secondary Texts:

• Stephen F. Saitos The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (1996)
• Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African American Writers. ed. Otto Penzler (2009)
• Justin Gifford Pimping Fictions: African American Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013)

Assignments: 

• Response papers: These will be in the form of blog posts. I will set up a blog for the class, and you will post your responses there. Each post will require you to provide an answer to my prompt and to respond to other students' responses as well. We will discuss how to do this in a proefssional manner during class. (Teachers, see Shannon Baldino's "The Classroom Blog: Enhancing Critical Thinking, Substantive Discussion, and Appropriate Online Interaction" for a discussion of blogs in the high school classroom.)
• Wiki: Students will be placed into groups of four. Each group will be required to construct a collaborative wiki with ________ components on an author and text that we read in class. 
• Each student must write a paragraph describing the class discussion for that author. For example, if the class discusses narrative voice in Donald Goines, the response should talk about narrative voice and what the class said about it. 
• The group must come up with five questions to think about based off of the class discussion or research. 
• The group must construct an annotated bibliography of six sources. The annotations must be 250-500 words and contain a section stating the source's credibility, a summary of the source, a way to use that source in a research project. 
• The group must construct a list of symbols/allusions/or other references in the stories. The number here will vary, but each entry must provide information about where it comes from (especially for an allusion) and what purpose it serves in the context of the story. 
• The group must construct a review of the short story. The review must be between 500-1000 words. Remember, a review is not a summary. Some summary is necessary, but the thrust of the review should be about the story's meaning and importance. 
• The group must construct a creative page. This page can be anything that you desire. For example, it could be a hand drawn map of the setting. It could be sketch of one of the scenes. It could be a Prezi talking about the author and the themes of the story. It could be a video discussion. This page is open to whatever you want to do.   

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As stated at the beginning of this post, the readings above are not an exhaustive list of texts that could be used for this class. The ones that I chose provide an overview of African American crime and detective fiction drawing from both canonical and popular texts. I chose to do this because, as Justin Gifford says, "If we are truly invested in American and African American literary traditions and their larger relationships to cultural politics, popular movements, and social change, then black crime fiction presents us with a unique opportunity to redraw the very boundaries of what counts as the American canon and even cultural knowledge" (7). Considering canon formation, providing students with a wide swath of texts will give them insight, and allow them to challenge, the idea of canon formation in literature. Essentially, students could ask whether or not texts buy authors such as Goines, Jefferson, and Slim should be included alongside those by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. 

Along with questioning canon formation, two of the texts above (Gaines and Locke) do not center on the urban environment. What do texts like these do to the assumption that crime and detective novels typically take place in urban settings? How does the rural setting disrupt that assumption? With this in mind, I could have added Goines' Swamp Man to the list above. What other African American crime and detective novels take place outside of the urban environment? Could there be an entire course focused on that strand of crime and detective fiction? 

List of previous blog posts that may be of help with the readings in this course:

• Pulp Novels and Ernest Gaines? 
• Attica Locke's "The Cutting Season"
• "No, I won't let them harm my people." 
• Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and the Issue of Class
• In the Background of Chandler's "The Big Sleep"

Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and the Issue of Class

I have arrived, at the hard-boiled tradition, through a rather circuitous manner. Starting with the works of African American novelists such as Chester Himes, Donald Goines, Robert Beck, and Ronald S. Jefferson, I have begun to retrace their steps and to read works by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Recently, I completed Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939). Thinking about the novel, I cannot help but recall Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. On the surface, this comparison may not seem to hold much water. While both novels incorporate the first person narrator, they appeared in different milieus: Gatsby during the Roaring Twenties and The Big Sleep near the end of The Great Depression. Even though on novel arose during an economic upsurge and the other during a downturn, both deal with class differences and the ways that, try as one might, an individual has a hard time moving from one class to another.



Chandler's novel focuses on Philip Marlowe, a private eye, and a case he undertakes for the elderly General Sternwood. The general tasks Marlowe with squashing a blackmail attempt involving Sternwood's daughter Carmen. Marlowe takes the case, only asking for twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. Marlowe does his duties for Sternwood and ends up receiving five hundred dollars, which he did not ask for. Throughout, Marlowe maintains that he tells the truth and that is what he is concerned with, the truth of events. Marlowe appears to be, in a way, the moral compass of the novel, seeking the accurateness of the events that occur during the course of the novel. For my discussion here, I want to focus on what separates the Sternwoods from Marlowe and others in the novel.

The Sternwoods made their money in the oil business, even building their house in Los Angeles on a hill overlooking their investment. As Marlowe leaves the Sternwood mansion after his initial visit, he sees the fields:

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was a public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of welsl pumping five to six barrels a day. (21)

By moving up the hill, the Sternwoods escaped the "smell [of] the stale sump water," while still being able to "see what had made them rich" (21). While the Sternwoods made their money through oil, the fields they owned slowed in production, bringing in less and less money to the family. At the end of the novel, Marlowe and Carmen go down the hill to the desolate fields. Marlowe describes the field as a wasteland of machinery; he even notes that "[t]he wells were no longer pumping" (218). No more money came into the Sternwoods through the fields that made them rich.

Now, we do not know, from the novel, what place in society the Sternwoods held before their oil field endeavors. However, we do know that there is a clear disctinction between them and some of the other characters, like Marlowe, in the novel who occupy a lower social strata. What interests me is this separation. In Gatsby, Nick and Jay both come from lower classes. Jay attempts to rise in order to regain the love and Daisy, and Nick just goes with the flow during his summer with Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom. Jay, even though he amasses a large sum of money through nefarious means, never attains the same social level as Tom and Daisy. Watching Jay's attempts to get Daisy back, Nick becomes nauseus and sick of the way that Tom and Daisy act as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or thei rvast carlessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess thay had made" (187-188).

Gatsby does not allow for any sort of equality between its characters. Tom and Daisy go on with their lives, Jay dies, and Nick leaves. The Big Sleep, on the other hand, concludes with a poetic comment on the equality of mankind. While differences in class may arise during people's lives, death brings everyone together. Marlowe says,

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. (230)   

Chandler's novel ultimately equalizes the charcaters in the end through a discussion of dust to dust. Gatsby, on the other hand, concludes with Nick lamenting the fact that noone comes to Jay's funeral and urging himself on towards the future stating that we all continue to strive for "the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" (189).

At this time, I don't completely know what to make of all of this. As stated earlier, I think that looking at these novels in relation to the periods of prosperity or depression they were written within warrants attention. I did a quick search on Chandler's novel and The Great Depression, but I did not come up with any hits. Has anything been written on this? Next post, I will continue looking at The Big Sleep and The Great Gatsby, examining the charcaters that make up the backdrop of each novel.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1992. Print.