Learning outcomes:
This course has been designed to enable you to:
- Distinguish and contextualise differing conceptions of crime fiction and non-fiction;
- Root African-American crime writing in the collective experience of slavery and racial prejudice; and
- Demonstrate the diversity of narrative and documentary strategies in African-American crime writing.
Course sessions:
Please note that the books studied on this course contain representations of slavery, abuse, and violent (including sexual) crime, as well as strong language.
1. Detective Fiction and Crime Writing
1.1 Julian Symons and the contested history of crime writing
1.2 Crime Fiction 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
2.1 Frederick Douglass and the ‘Peculiar Institution’ of Slavery
2.2 The Narrative
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
3.1 The Ironies of Chester Himes
3.2 If He Hollers Let Him Go
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
4.1 Living Through the Atlanta Child Murders
4.2 Those Bones Are Not My Child
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
5.1 Leroy Mosley, the ‘G.I. Bill’, and Growing Up in Watts
5.2 Devil in a Blue Dress
It 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 the Second World War and the ‘G.I. Bill’ of 1944 that made his father. Having served in the segregated US 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.
Non-credit bearing
Please note that our Virtual Summer Festival of Learning courses are non-credit bearing.
Certificate of Participation
A certificate of participation will be sent to you electronically within a week of your Summer Festival course(s) finishing.
