Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes - Hardcover

Woods, Paula L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385478275 ISBN 13: 9780385478274

Publisher: Doubleday, 1995

Synopsis

>Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes is "a fascinating guide to black mystery fiction and its subgenres from early in the century to the present" (Emerge magazine). Within these pages Paula L. Woods has gathered an outstanding array of new, long-lost, or never-before-published fiction, ranging from Pauline E. Hopkins's classic locked-room mystery story "Talma Gordon," originally published by Colored American Magazine in 1900, to a new piece of short fiction by bestselling author Walter Mosley.

From the earliest mystery story written by an African American to fiction by modern mainstream authors such as BarbaraNeely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, and Aya de Leon, the pieces in this anthology comprise "a landmark collection no library of crime fiction should be without" (Kirkus Reviews).
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Review:

This anthology, just out in paperback, is the noir side of the famed Harlem Renaissance, a compendium of mostly excellent, almost entirely unheralded mysteries by black writers. Long before Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, such writers as John A. Williams and Eleanor Taylor Bland were using the mystery genre to make serious statements. Editor Paula Woods has done a fine job of tracking down lost or out-of-print gems.

From the Publisher:

Including classic works by writers of the harlem renaissance and stories by contemporary bestsellers like Walter Mosley, this groundbreaking collection will please and surprise mystery fans and students of black fiction alike. Spooks, Spies, And Private Eyes brings together for the first time a collection of the best mystery and crime fiction by black authors from around the world-much of it long out of print, generally unavailable, or not previously published. For years, Charlie Chan's stereotypical sidekick Birmingham Brown, popularized by the 1930s movie series, was the only commonly seen image of the black detective. And yet, by 1932, Rudolph Fisher had already written The Conjure-Man Dies, the first detective novel to feature a black protagonist. In this sequel work, John Archer, a suave Harlem physician, and his detective pal Perry Dart provided a unique twist on the Holmes/Watson team, and foreshadowed Chester Himes's memorable duo, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, who dominated the literary black crime scene for about thirty years-from the 1950s to the 1980s. Ranging from Fisher and Himes to the influential nongenre writers Richard and Ann Petry; from the political thrillers of John A. Williams and Samuel Greenlee to the international perspective of Mike Phillips and Njarni Simon; from the earliest mystery story by an African-American (written in 1900) to modern mainstream authors including Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and Eleanor Taylor Bland, Spooks, Spies, And Private Eyes is an eclectic, rich, and inunensely entertaining compendium that is sure to delight a wide and various audience.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0385478275
• ISBN 13: 9780385478274
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350