Servants of darkness: Crime fiction and the American working class

In "Servants of Darkness: Crime Fiction and the American Working Class," I uncover the hidden history of postwar African American literature centered on the urban crime and detective fiction form. Although I excavate the work of a number of black writers, the main focus of this project is Chester Himes, the first black American to produce a sustained body of detective fiction, as well as Robert Beck, a.k.a. Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines, writers who, despite their status as the number one and number two best-selling black American authors of all time, have received no critical attention by literary and cultural scholars. I draw from a diverse archive of materials, including out-of-print pulp paperbacks, prison memoirs, autobiographies, personal essays, and interviews conducted with significant publishers, writers, and their relatives. Here I provide the first literary and cultural history of black crime writing and the culture industry that has supported it.; I have essentially three main arguments. The first is that this loose collective of detective and crime novels forms a coherent genre of American literature. This genre is the inheritor of a gothic tradition created by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville in the 19th century, and reinvented by hard-boiled school writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler between the two World Wars. The second argument is that the work of Chester Himes, Robert Beck, and Donald Goines has operated as a shadow companion to the African American literary canon represented by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. I reveal the exceptional importance of class in African American literary and cultural production by examining the uncanny similarities and significant cleavages between these two groups of writers. The third argument is that these novels about pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and ghetto revolutionaries are neither disposable pulp trash, nor authentic expressions of urban working-class culture. Uncovering the history of sensationalist publisher Holloway House Books, I show how pulp publishing proved to be another exploitative economy to those black authors trying to escape their working-class lives. I argue that the stories of criminals on the run, the rise and fall of neighborhood pimps, and the failed revolutions of underground militants have provided working-class readers with imagined resolutions to the daily struggles and rhythms of service-economy labor.