Ask most fans of mystery novels to name a black
mystery writer and chances are the first name mentioned would be
Walter Mosley. Ask fans to name two more
black mystery writers and you might be met with dead silence. Perhaps many of their names aren’t known, but
black mystery writers and the stories they tell date back to the early 20th
Century.
Writer, Paula L. Woods, in an article written for The New Crisis magazine, (September/October
2001 edition) noted that the earliest mystery fiction written by an African
American didn’t appear in book form, but in “colored” periodicals and
newspapers. As early as 1900, a
journalists named Pauline Hopkins wrote the short stories, “The Mystery Within
Us” and “Talma Gordon”, which appeared in issues of the Colored American Magazine. A
writer named John E. Bruce had his mystery “The Black Sleuth” serialized in the
1907-1908 McGirt’s Reader.
It wasn’t until 1926 that the first mystery novel by
a black author was published. A Jamaican
writer named W. Adolphe Roberts wrote a book titled The Haunting Hand. However,
none of the characters in Roberts’ book were black. Because of this it took nearly three quarters
of a century for The Haunting Hand to
be recognized as the first published mystery novel written by a black writer.
According to Woods, it wasn’t unusual in the 1920s
for black characters to be absent from the mystery genre, even from those books
written by black authors. It took twelve
years before a published mystery novel, written by an African American author
actually featured Black characters. The
year was 1932 and the book was The
Conjure Man, written by Rudolph Fisher, who was a physician and a
personality of the Harlem Renaissance. The Conjure Man featured Dr. John Archer,
a physician sleuth, and his sidekick, Perry Dart, a NYPD detective.
Since then, besides Mosley, there have been many other
African American mystery writers, past and present, all of whom continue to
entertain readers—writers such as Chester
Himes, Anthony Heywood, Gary Phillips, Elizabeth Taylor Bland, Chassie West, Valerie
Wilson Wesley, and yours truly, the creators of the Grandmothers, Incorporated
cozy mystery series, L. Barnett Evans and C.V. Rhodes to name only a few.
