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Book Reviews
Shades of Black
Edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland
Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95
A black writer, bemused by the huge market for mystery books, once quipped that she wanted only one mystery solved: "Why are white people so evil?"
The answer to that and more can be found in this new volume of whodunits with a political bent. Among the emerging voices and established writers in the genre (including Walter Mosley), several authors in this collection have been lauded by the Chester Himes Black Mystery Writers Conference, named for the author of Cotton Comes to Harlem, which was later made into a successful crime film. (The next conference will be held in Oakland May 14, 2005)
In Small Colored World, Terris McMahan Grimes chronicles the exploits of a sassy mother-daughter team investigating the plight of a jailed elderly black woman: "Getting Mother through the metal detector with five thousand metal stays in her long-line bra was the hard part," Grimes writes.
With A Matter of Policy, Robert Greer crafts a saga about a pensive Vietnam vet whose attention to detail helps him finger the perpetrator of a gory crime.
Percy Spurlark Parker opens A Favorable Murder
with confidence: "By the way of a definition, I've got a kiss-ass
job." Some stories scream "amateur hour." Still, the collection
explores worlds scarcely imagined by Agatha Christie.
-- Evelyn C. White
This review by Evelyn C. White, author of Alice Walker: A Life, was originally published in the March 31, 2004 issue of the East Bay Express.
