The recent mentions of Goines and Heard have made me a bit
curious about Black hardboiled fiction. I've only read a
smattering -- Himes's Harlem Cycle, plus Run Man Run, a few
Iceberg Slims, Nathan Heard's Howard Street, Vern Smith's
Jones Men, Walter Mosley, Ronin Ro's Street Sweeper
(bad, and not good bad). I've gathered a number more that I
have not read -- a few by Goines, several of the Old School
Books authors like Pharr, Cooper and Perry, a bunch of
blaxploitation novelizations and Holloway House books,
particularly by Readus. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone
could help me figure out a reading list to get me started,
with recommendations about the best authors and their best
books. Perhaps it could be broken down into categories like
the following:
Vintage Black hardboiled/noir
Contemporary Black hardboiled/noir
Whites writing Black hardboiled/noir
Maybe they could be further broken down into literary and
trashy examples, with trashy a classification of genre not
quality -- not that there's a clear line between the two, but
I'd put most Holloway House books towards the trashier end,
seemingly trying to be a Black Gold Medal.
Mark
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 26 Mar 2004 EST