734 The American Century: Literature since 1945a childhood friend and sidekick whom he both loves and fears. Alexander is gleefully
amoral and murderous; and his casual, conscienceless approach to things adds depth
and shade to the portrait of Rawlins – not only a contrast but a reminder of dark
currents running within the protagonist, just below the brooding, reflective surface.
Mosley has said that he owes a debt to Albert Camus in his conception of Easy
Rawlins. And it is clear that, like other African-American writers before him, he has
used existentialism to explore the trials of race. Whatever else he is, this amateur
detective (anti-)hero is a man in process, using his quicksilver sensibility, not just to
get by, but to make himself and make his own morality up, as he wanders around
some of the meanest streets in the city.
Native American sleuths began appearing in fiction well before their African-
American counterparts. Popular interest in the West and in what was seen as the
exoticism of Native American cultures led to the wide dissemination of books with
titles like Velvet Foot, the Indian Detective, or, The Taut Tiger (1882) in the later part
of the nineteenth century. Even “Buffalo” Bill tried his hand with a mystery story
that had a Native American detective, Red Ruard, the Indian Detective, or, The Gold
Buzzards of Colorado: a romance of the mines and dead trails (1886). The “Indian
detective” in these and similar stories was adept at tracking, following footprints, or
investigating the scene of a crime. He had an intimate understanding of the terrain,
and he could negotiate different cultures with aplomb. In other words, he was
stereotypical: a heroic type, evolved out of a number of perceptions and received
assumptions about Native American people, with varying degrees of accuracy. What
is different about more recent developments in this area is that mystery writers now
are far more alert to cultural difference. Writers such as Tony Hillerman (1925–2008),
in novels like The Blessing Way (1970) and Finding Moon (1996), pursue their work
on the intersection where Anglo and Native American cultures meet. They expand
the methods of investigation to incorporate different value systems and processes of
thought; they explore the uneasy meeting, the conflict and occasional congruence,
between whites and Native Americans; and they open the genre to political processes,
such as the rights of indigenous peoples, or the impact of commercial exploitation
of the land – both on the harsh landscapes of the Southwest and on those cultures
still closely tied to the earth. This opening up of the generic field of mystery to the
processes of history and in particular the problems of cultural conflict is not just
the work of those who take Native Americans or African-Americans as their prime
subjects. Chicano culture enters the detective genre in the fiction of Rudolph Anaya
(1937–), concerned with Sonny Baca, an Alburquerque private eye who first appears
in Zia Summer (1995). It does so again in Partners in Crime (1985) by Rolando
Hinojosa (1929–). In turn, immigrant culture in general and Korean culture in
particular is the scarcely hidden agenda in Native Speaker (1995) by Chang-Rae Lee
(1965–), a book that uses the mystery formula to investigate what is called the “ugly
immigrant’s truth” of social exploitation, cultural confusion, and, sometimes,
personal self-hatred. In novels like these it becomes impossible to preserve a
distinction between mystery fiction and serious literature. If there was ever a wall
between genre writing and other forms, then that wall has now been torn down.GGray_c05.indd 734ray_c 05 .indd 734 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM