Content area
Full Text
The streets were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" 13)
Black narrative writing in America often employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society-as Theodore O. Mason, Jr., points out (182)-yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted few black writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Walter Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins the small cohort of black detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical project to enter the mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At the same time, however, Mosley's often uncritical use of the traditional hardboiled detective formula seems to work against this project by employing a black detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location-black Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's subject and his method, and this tension prompts my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they-with their use of a black narrator, black characters, and black locations-authentically transgressive texts, or are they discursively subsumed under the detective story formula (and especially the L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as constructed by Chandler) and do they come, thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of the hardboiled tradition? In other words, are the novels merely exotic versions of the American detective story, as opposed to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian yes and no. In terms of their use of black characters and locations-and also in terms of their generic "violations" of the hardboiled detective story-Mosley's novels indeed function as texts of difference. Yet when they deploy the Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace the essentially conservative thematics of the L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels mute their subversiveness and reinforce the reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that reflect a fundamental ambivalence about his own intervention into white (detective) discourse.
Two recent essays on black detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in texts like Mosley's L.A. novels. In "Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in the Thrillers of Chester Himes," Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes...