African-American crime-writing

Crime writing is not just detective fiction or murder mysteries — it encompasses true crime, and the complex relations of human beings to criminal actions they suffer, witness, and commit, with varying consequences. And while there was until very recently very little African-American ‘detective fiction’ as such, there is a great deal of African-American crime writing, deeply rooted in the collective experience of slavery and its Jim Crow successors.    

The course begins with one the most famous slave autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Douglass (1817–95) escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, and his bestselling book, starkly insisting on the dehumanising nature of enslavement as a condition and slavery in grim practice, made him an icon for abolitionists.    

The other three works studied are all nominally fiction, but profoundly rooted in personal and familial racial experience. Chester Himes (1909–84) started publishing short stories in the 1930s while imprisoned for armed robbery, and after release worked as a screenwriter. His debut novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is deeply autobiographical, and was acclaimed as protest, but the books of his famous and influential Harlem Cycle (1957–69) were all written as an exile in France.    

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–95) was as much documentary film-maker, teacher, and activist as writer, and her posthumously published Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), edited by Toni Morrison, reflects those concerns. It deals with the Atlanta murders of 1979–81 and their aftermath, racially polarising events exposing prejudices within as well as against African-American communities.    

Walter Mosley (b.1952) created African-American entrepreneur and PI Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), was famously one of President Clinton’s favourite authors, and this year published his 14th Rawlins novel. In one sense a more standard commercial achievement, the series draws as much on Mosley’s father’s life as his own, is subtly intertextual, and has over the years created a history of African-American Los Angeles from the late 1940s into the 1960s.  

NB: The books studied on this course contain representations of slavery, abuse, and violent (including sexual) crime, as well as strong language.  

Learning outcomes

The learning outcomes for this course are:

• To distinguish and contextualise differing conceptions of crime fiction and non-fiction;    
• To root African-American crime writing in the collective experience of slavery and racial prejudice; and    
• To demonstrate the diversity of narrative and documentary strategies in African-American crime writing. 

Classes

1. Contested Histories: Detective Fiction, Crime Writing, and True Crime  
Julian Symons (1912–94) was the first major historian of crime writing, but his Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972) constellates around the ‘Golden Age’ of ‘detective stories’, ignoring or slighting everything pre-nineteenth-century, all verse and drama, US hard-boiled noir, Modernism, and ‘true crime’. But if crime writing is reduced to Agatha Christie — a closed cast and plenty of red herrings in the eternal village Colin Watson dubbed Mayhem Parva — what does it have to do with African-American experiences and interests? The established categories do not help with African-American crime writing, so some ground-clearing is in order and some new thinking needed.    

2. Frederick Douglass: Enslavement and Humanity  
Slavery has historically taken many forms, from bondage in Egypt to indentured servitude, but the chattel slavery of the southern US was peculiarly brutal by any measure, both in the fatality rates of the Middle Passage and in its practices of enslavement. Africans were legally dehumanised, beaten, raped, and murdered ; and the American perpetrators damaged their own claimed values, as with the so-called ‘two-thirds compromise’. Douglass’s Narrative was an important rallying cry for Abolitionists, and offers first-hand testimony of the horrors and of the ways in which personal freedom, however welcome, could not cancel the horror, nor staunch the bleeding.  

3. Chester B. Himes: Prison, Labour, and Protest  
Although Himes is now thought of as primarily a crime writer, seen through the lens of his later and greater ‘Harlem Cycle’, and his debut novel If He Hollers is assimilated (as it partly is here) to that frame, he did not write it as such. Set in wartime Los Angeles, among the mixed-race industrial workforce created by the great internal migration of African-Americans away from the south to the west and north, and by wartime need, it was written and first received mainly as a novel of protest at the racist discrimination and persecution that had in no way ended with slavery. And beyond those crimes large and small, structural and personal, its concern is with the damaging and dangerous desires for violent revenge they induce in those discriminated against, a mutual coarsening of perceptions that diminishes all and blocks civil progress.  

4. Toni Cade Bambara: Race and Justice  
Between July 1979 and May 1981, at least thirty African Americans aged between 7 and 28 were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, most (supposedly) by the same hand. The man convicted in 1982 of two of those murders, and to whom many of the others have been officially attributed, is also African-American, and there are very many people who, with good reason, find the conduct of the trial, the verdict, and the closing of the other cases less than satisfactory or persuasive. In a city with an African-American mayor and police commissioner, an African-American serial killer of African-American children disturbed everything, and everyone — so much so that Bambara, who made documentary films about other racially inflected crimes, was living in Atlanta when the murders and trial occurred, and researched them for years afterwards, found she could only deal with them in fiction.

5. Walter Mosley: Race and Property
t was the great internal migration of African Americans that created the notorious Los Angeles suburb of Watts, where Walter Mosley grew up, but it was largely World War 2 and the ‘G.I. Bill’ of 1944 that made his father. Having served in the segregated U S Army in Europe, Leroy Mosley found he could no longer live in the south, moving to LA, and the ‘G.I. Bill’ made it possible for him (as for tens of thousands of other African-American veterans) to obtain a mortgage — the foundation of a propertied middle class. And Walter Mosley’s irregular PI, Easy Rawlins, is in large part based on his father, finding property and its ownership central to identity, while the first novel in the series, Devil in a Blue Dress, also tips its hat to (African-American) Chester Himes and (White) John D. MacDonald as precursors.

Primary Texts

To get the most out of the course you will need to have read the four primary texts

Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; ed. William L. Andrews & William S. McFeely, 2e, New York & London: Norton, 2017 [Norton Critical Editions]

Himes, Chester, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010. There are many editions; any that is complete and unexpurgated is fine. 

Bambara, Toni Cade, These Bones Are Not My Child (1999; London: Women’s Press, 2000. Any complete and unexpurgated edition is fine. 

Mosley, Walter, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2017. There are many editions; any that is complete and unexpurgated is fine. 

Typical week: Monday to Friday

For each week of study you select a morning (Am) and an afternoon (Pm) course, each course has five sessions, one each day Monday to Friday. The maximum class size is 25 students. Your weekly courses are complemented by a series of two daily plenary lectures, exploring new ideas in a wide range of disciplines. To add to the learning experience, we are also planning additional evening talks and events.

Evaluation and Academic Credit 

If you are seeking to enhance your own study experience, or earn academic credit from your Cambridge Summer Programme studies at your home institution, you can submit written work for assessment for one or more of your courses. 

Essay questions are set and assessed against the University of Cambridge standard by your Course Director, a list of essay questions can be found in the Course Materials. Essays are submitted two weeks after the end of each course, so those studying for multiple weeks need to plan their time accordingly. There is an evaluation fee of £65 per essay.

For more information about writing essays see Evaluation and Academic Credit.

Certificate of attendance

A certificate of attendance will be sent to you electronically within a week of your courses finishing.