A pioneering anthology of 22 stories and excerpts by, and mainly about, African-American hands. Though there's naturally a heavy dose of recent work—including brand-new stories by Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, Mike Phillips (the lone Brit), Hugh Holton, Gary Phillips, and Percy Spurlark Parker—editor Woods (coeditor, I Hear a Symphony: African Americans Celebrate Love, 1994, etc.) has done an impressive job of unearthing such obscure forebears as Pauline E. Hopkins's locked-room puzzle ``Talma Gordon'' (1900) and Rudolph Fisher's atmospheric The Conjure-Man Dies (1932). The chapter-length excerpts from John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am (1969) and Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) are aptly chosen, but it's the short stories that provide the greatest satisfaction here, revealing both the range and the historical reach of the African-American mystery tradition, from Chester Himes's grim account of a condemned killer's last day to Eleanor Taylor Bland's neatly turned whodunit, from BarbaraNeely's unforgettable portrait of a confessed rapist's mother to Aya de Le¢n's welcome bit of comic relief. The most forceful and unsurprising revelation is the way omnipresent racial tension—the subject of most of the stories on display here—imparts a constant undercurrent of criminal suspense to even the work of mainstream writers like Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Richard Wright. A landmark collection no library of crime should be without.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-48082-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A good detective in an incendiary procedural.
A Yorkshire detective untangles an old murder and new arsons.
DS Adam Tyler, a cold-case investigator for the South Yorkshire Police, is a bit of a loner, but his boss wants him to network more so he lets Sally-Ann, one of his civilian colleagues, talk him into joining a pub evening with the South Yorkshire Police LGBT Support Network. He doesn't plan to stay long, and when he meets a handsome man at the bar—"Sweetheart, he was everyone's type. Even mine," Sally-Ann says—he abandons the group to go home with him. The next morning, when he gets to work, Sally-Ann tells him there's big news: The body of Gerald Cartwright, a local tycoon and shady character who disappeared years ago, has been found in the basement of his own house during a renovation ordered by his 21-year-old son, who'd just inherited it. Tyler manages to get himself assigned to the investigation though the detective who's been working on it since Cartwright's disappearance doesn't want to hand it over to cold cases; he soon discovers the identity of his one-night stand: Oscar Cartwright, son of the deceased and potential suspect, which further complicates his position. Meanwhile, Edna and Lily, elderly Cartwright retainers of various duties, have begun receiving unsettling anonymous letters, and the whole community is rattled by a series of arsons that seem more and more likely to be related to the discovery of Cartwright's body. As Tyler's investigation slowly uncovers a sordid history of manipulation and abuse, the violence increases and he is assaulted several times. The repetitive nature of these assaults is a weakness in the book, but the richness of Tyler's character and the vividness of his negotiation of his own sexuality and the casual bigotry in his community are effective. The subsidiary characters are lively and believable, the arsons are particularly well described, and though the plot sometimes seems gratuitously complex, this is a rewarding entertainment.
A good detective in an incendiary procedural.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54202-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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