Clues 42.2: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context.

Clues, vol. 42, no. 2 (2024)—a theme issue on BIPOC female detectives in a global context guest edited by Sam Naidu (Rhodes University, South Africa)—has been published. Contact McFarland to order the issue or a subscription. Abstracts follow below; I will update this post once the ebook versions are available.

Introduction: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context / Sam Naidu

The guest editor discusses the rationale for and content of this Clues theme issue, including articles on the TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the work of Eleanor Taylor Bland, Oyinkan Braithwaite, K’im Ch’aehŭi, Maria L. M. Fres-Felix, Pauline Hopkins, Tiffany D. Jackson, Vaseem Khan, Angela Makholwa, Marcia Muller, BarbaraNeely, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kwei Quartey.

“Or my name ain’t Venus Johnson”:
The Birth of Pauline Hopkins’ Black Female Detective in Hagar’s Daughter
Andrea Tinnemeyer

Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (serialized 1901–03) meditates on detective fiction’s potential to offer agency and self-created potential for a Black woman in Jim Crow times. The result is a liberating use of genre that not only celebrates the prowess of its detective, Venus Johnson, but also affirms the knowledge that flows from Black women and their communities.

Night Girl and the Nate-Rock:
Material Feminisms and Double Consciousness in BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam
Lisa Koyuki Smith (CUNY Graduate Center)

This study focuses on BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992), exploring Neely’s material feminisms avant la lettre, their connection to W.E.B. Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, narratological understandings of the detective genre, and narratives of racial passing that express the discursive and material complexity of race relations in the United States. 

Listen to the Silence:
Reconsidering Race in Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone Hard-boiled Detective Novels
Alexander N. Howe (University of the District of Columbia)
This article examines the development of the Native identity of Marcia Muller’s female private eye, Sharon McCone. McCone initially is identified with one-eighth Shoshone heritage. In Listen to the Silence (2000), McCone learns of her adoption and the membership of her birth parents in the Shoshone Nation. The series’ second half explores McCone’s Native identity, and contemporary Native experience, with increasing nuance and detail. 

“You are a Symbol, Persis”: The Complexity of Postcolonial and Feminist Progress in Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House Series
Sophie-Constanze Bantle (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House series presents 1950s India as rife with opportunity and difficulty. Post-independence feminist and postcolonial emancipation is portrayed as a complicated and ongoing process, mirrored in discussions around Persis’ status as a symbol. Persis combats her society’s social problems, providing an example of agency in the face of oppression.

Poison and espionage.

On the Spy Museum's SpyCast, host Andrew Hammond discusses the role of poison in espionage (such as with Alexander Litvinenko) with Neil Bradbury, professor of physiology and biophysics at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, and author of A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them.

The avian Nick and Nora.

Austin Wood in The Advocate discusses a pair of bald eagles—dubbed Nick and Nora after Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles—at White Rock Lake in Texas.