From C. August Dupin’s needling repartee with the Parisian police in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” to Sherlock Holmes’s insinuating banter with Lestrade, Hercule Poirot’s passive-aggressive one-upmanship with Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard, hard-boiled Sam Spade’s agon with the district attorney in The Maltese Falcon (1930), and Philip Marlowe’s dismissal from the police force for insubordination, detective fiction has always shown the private investigator at odds with official police bureaucracy. It’s one way of dramatizing the messiness of the idea of justice—at once an individual (possibly personal or private) code and at the same time susceptible to a codifying proceduralism (all part of the detective’s “advantage of being unofficial,” as Holmes puts it in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Silver Blaze” [The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), New York, 20]). But when the law itself is shown to be tilted toward only a portion of the citizenry it...
The African American Experience in Crime Fiction: A Critical Study
The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction
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Paul Grimstad teaches literature at New York University and Columbia University. His first book, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (2013), is out in paperback from Oxford University Press. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, the London Review of Books, n + 1, the New Yorker, Nonsite, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and Raritan.
Paul Grimstad; The African American Experience in Crime Fiction: A Critical Study
The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction. American Literature 1 December 2017; 89 (4): 898–900. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4257964
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