Like their predecessors, the hard-boiled novels of the thirties, which, as David Madden suggests in his introduction to Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, deal with an “indifferent, violent, deceptive world” that treats the tough guy “like an object” (xviii), much ethnic detective fiction has imbedded in it strategies for exposing the social and economic disparities that ethnic Americans face. So-called ethnic detective fiction in particular, dealing with marginalized, colonized figures, clearly goes beyond mere entertainment, which is primarily why the genre has caught the attention of academics and social historians. Today, according to Jones, “crime writers, black and white alike, are tackling the volatile subject of race with a daring conspicuously lacking in mainstream fiction” (87). “Once a high-protein staple of the American literary diet,” Jones writes, “social realism fell from favor” (86). A different version enlarged with a (.)ġ In a June 2002 issue of Newsweek Malcolm Jones points to the crime novel as perhaps the only real source of contemporary social realism in America. 1 This paper was originally read during the 2001 Tours symposium.
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