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.
Crimetime: Toughness, Gender, and Genre in Philippine Detective Fiction
Nicole Kenley (University of California San Diego)
This article reads Maria L. M. Fres-Felix’s collection of stories featuring Filipina detective SJ Tuason, Crimetime, to explore Tuason’s performance of gender-neutral toughness as a policing mechanism in Quezon City. Tuason uses toughness to expose and combat the culturally specific systems of corruption in the Philippines that contribute to antifeminist structures and violent crimes against women.
Grandma Detectives in Korea: Older Women Against the Crime of the “Silver Market”
June Oh (University of Texas at Tyler)
This essay investigates the characterization of “grandma detectives” in K’im Ch’aehŭi’s Grandma Detective Trio (Halmasi T’amjŏng T’ŭrio, 2022) and these characters’ particular setting to show how their marginal position as older women with disabilities allows them to perform and negotiate the tropes of Korean detective fiction.
Ambiguous Female Figures in African Noir: Subversion or Submission?
Sam Naidu
African noir authors Angela Makholwa (Red Ink) and Kwei Quartey (The Missing American) focus on gender-based violence in the African locations of Johannesburg and Accra . They therefore inscribe deliberately ambiguous female detective figures that represent subversion of and submission to dominant social and generic conventions.
The Detectives Who Kill:
Black Female Detectives in the Works of Oyinkan Braithwaite and Nnedi Okorafor
Emily Chow-Quesada (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Works by Oyinkan Braithwaite and Nnedi Okorafor demonstrate the lethal duality of their Black detectives who are also killers. This duality sets the detectives apart, allowing them to pursue justice and defend the rights of others. The analysis shows how African crime fiction by Black female writers in the twenty-first century intertwines gender and sociopolitical discourses.
Seriously Different:
Divergent Representations of the Latina Detective in Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Delia Poey (Florida State University)
This study situates two Latina characters from the television series Brooklyn Nine-Nine within multiple contexts including Latinas on screen(s), the female detective,and transgressive representation within the sitcom genre itself . This study proposes that the use of comedy facilitates divergent representations of the female detective and Latina detective specifically.
Claudia Coleman’s One and Only Case:
The Trauma of Detection in Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
Lexey A. Bartlett (Fort Hays State University)
This essay draws on narratology and contemporary analyses of post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma to argue that Monday’s Not Coming (2018) by Tiffany D. Jackson reflects the trauma of successful detection in its narrative structure while highlighting the inequities of attention to crime and associated trauma in BIPOC communities.
Making the Footprints: A Tribute to Eleanor Taylor Bland
Norlisha Crawford and Caroline Reitz
Eleanor Taylor Bland was a pioneering figure in series detective fiction by African Americans and by women. Her sleuth, Marti MacAlister, balanced a commitment to the genre and to expanding its capacities to include the personal and well as professional aspects of her characters’ lives.
Interview with Kwei Quartey
Sam Naidu
Guest editor Sam Naidu discusses with author Kwei Quartey his approach to his work, including his Black female detective Emma Djan.
REVIEWS
Kelly Ross. Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature
Cynthia S. Hamilton (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Laurence W. Mazzeno. The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes and Beyond Meike Heinrich (Freie Universität, Germany)
Bernd Stiegler. Arthur Conan Doyle and Photography: Traces, Fairies, and Other Apparitions
Ellen Burton Harrington (University of South Alabama)
Marta Usiekniewicz. Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction
David A. Stivers (Savannah College of Art and Design)
Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack, eds. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight
Anissa M. Graham (University of North Alabama)
David Riddle Watson. Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
Diane M. Calhoun-French
Ruth Hawthorn and John Miller, eds. Animals in Detective Fiction
Rachel Schaffer
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