Dreams of Justice Read Free Page A

from one of the (I had thought) most reliable Old Pros.”
    “On the occasions when he encountered a book so atrocious it should never have been published at all,” Nevins writes, “he didn’t hesitate to say so bluntly. And during the early 1950s, the evil days of McCarthyism and HUAC, his single bete noire was Mickey Spillane, whose best-selling thrillers Boucher despised for their neo-fascist political slant, joy in sadism, sniggering approach to sex and slapdash prose and plots, all the antitheses to Boucher’s own values which were rooted in Christian intellectualism and the liberal humanist tradition. In the 1960s when Spillane’s influence had faded, Boucher mellowed toward the creator of Mike Hammer and began to see in him the last of the old pulp storytellers.”
    Lenore Glen Offord described Boucher’s career as a reviewer in these words in The Armchair Detectivein 1969: “There is a difference, significant but not always recognized, between reviewing and criticism… Anthony Boucher was a critic. He brought to his work an encyclopedic knowledge of the mystery, in both long and short forms, and could relate the subject at hand to the genre as a whole. Through his own experience as a writer he understood the difficulties of mystery technique; also, he could be strict with those who didn’t understand them…above all, he respected the craft.”
    Phyllis White said to Nevins: “There is a word I hear a lot now that I didn’t hear in those days that describes what he was. He was a mentor. So many authors wrote to me after he had died saying that they had always written attempting to please him or feeling that he was looking over their shoulder, and not knowing how they would get along when he wasn’t there.”
    Reviewing “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes” for The New York Times in 1968 in one of his last columns, Boucher wrote: “Good detective stories are as I have often quoted Hamlet’s phrase about the players, ‘the abstracts and brief chronicle of the times,’ ever-valuable in retrospect as indirect but vivid pictures of the society from which we spring.”

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    Black Mysteries
    Many readers of all races tend to think that the black mystery genre began with Chester Himes in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, and that then there was a 30-year hiatus until Walter Mosley hit the scene.
    But before Himes came many other black writers—as
    Paula L. Woods pointed out in “Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century,” a collection she edited for Doubleday in 1995.
    There was Rudolph Fisher, whose 1932 book “The Conjure Man Dies” was the first detective novel with a black hero. Fisher was a doctor, musician and writer who became part of the 1930s Harlem Renaissance; he died of cancer at 37, in 1934.
    George S. Schuyler, prolific author of serial mysteries for such newspapers as the Pittsburgh Courier, is best known for his 1931 satirical novel “Black No More.” He worked as a journalist into his 70s, and died at age 82 in 1977.
    And there is John A. Williams, author of “The Man Who Cried I Am,” a monumental 1967 thriller with implications that still reverberate today.
    Since Walter Mosley arrived with a bang with 1990’s “Devil In A Blue Dress,” scores of other black crime writers have enjoyed critical and financial success: Paula L. Woods, Gary Phillips, Gar Anthony Haywood, Robert O. Greer, Grace Edwards and Eleanor Taylor Bland are just a few of their names.
    WHITE BUTTERFLY, by Walter Mosley (Norton)
    Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a Los Angeles apartment building owner who pretends he’s the janitor and who solves crimes not for money but to save his own and his friends’ skins, is trying to convince a grim secretary that he really does have an appointment to see the Oakland police chief.
    “I had told her, in my best white man’s English, ‘I would like to be announced to the chief’s office. I know that this is an unusual request, but