I came across a very interesting post this week on an excellent Canadian blog, The Alibi, written by "two girls with a crime addiction", who used to make a TV show in which crime fiction is dissected by "crime professionals" (policemen or bank robbers, I wonder?), asking a fascinating question: why are there so few people of colour in their favourite crime novels.
An excellent question, and one I asked myself immediately, not believing it would be true of the fiction I read. But of course it is. Off the top of my head I could only think of one black lead in any of the books I have read recently: Frank Johnson in Ed Lynskey's novels The Dirt-Brown Derby and The Blue Cheer.
Then there's TJ, Matt Scudder's adopted street kid and sometime sidekick in Lawrence Block's fine New York-based series. (There is a fascinating analysis of TJ, coming from an altogether different angle, in an article by Liverpool-based writer Chris Routledge here).
Now, my memory is not what it was, and therefore I am probably forgetting some PI or cop I read about last week (although as I go through a Scandinavian and Tudor phase, probably not, although CJ Sansom's Shardlake series does feature a Moorish doctor).
The best I could come up with were Lincoln Rhyme, Jeffrey Deaver's quadriplegic criminalist, and Alex Cross, James Patterson's Washington detective. But I began to wonder if perhaps I was just thinking of Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman playing the two in Hollywood adaptations.
A quick flick around the net suggests that Ryhme was originally white in the books, while Cross was always black. (I only ever read one of Patterson's novels and didn't much like it, so it is not surprising it didn't make much of an impression.)
But even a reasonably quick tour of the net, reveals that there is a great canon of crime fiction out there. There's a great resource at the Springfield Massachusetts library detailing a long list of African-American fiction writers. I have only heard of one them: Walter Mosley, but I have not read any of his stuff, even though he is published here in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
There is also an old, but excellent, feature by Kevin Burton Smith at January Magazine, tracing some of the history of the black fiction scene.
I suppose it is dangerous territory, getting into an analysis of why there should be so little black crime fiction, and I'm not sure I have anything particularly insightful to offer, having relatively little experience or knowledge of the commissioning process. But across the cultural spectrum, just as across society, and with the obvious exception of the music industry there seems to have been little in the way of breakthrough from coloured exponents of the arts. Television has its highlights: The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and, closer to home, Goodness Gracious Me.
Some of it is doubtless demand-driven: a predominantly white population probably prefers, or at the very least is probably thought to prefer, output that it reflects its own experience. It would be surprising if some of it wasn't prejudice. After all this damagingly pervades every other corner of life.
I don't suppose there's a great deal I can to change behaviours, other than change my own habits and indulge in a spot of positive discrimination. Walter Mosley it is, then...
Top marks to the Observer
In the typically crime-free zone that was the weekend literary reviews in the UK national newspapers, one offering stood out. The Observer carried a cracking interview with Sebastian Fauks talking, inter alia, about the challenge of writing the first James Bond novel in decades, Devil May Care, coming from Penguin in June.
It also carried some terrific reviews from Peter Guttridge, including Ritual by Mo Hayder, Laura Wilson's Stratton's War and Meltdown from Martin Baker.
Second place goes to the Guardian, where Laura Wilson was again in evidence, this time as reviewer, and also enjoying Ritual.
