New Series of Novels About a Black Female Private Detective
My love of jazz music and its history led me to an obsession with a long-defunct gay bar in Harlem that catered to rough trade. My interest in criminal history led me to an obsession with a still-unidentified African American serial killer (a very rare breed) who preyed mostly upon women of mixed race in Atlanta a century ago. It also led me to an obsession with perhaps the most prolific—and certainly the scariest and most fascinating—African American serial killer in American history, Jake Bird. My obsession with the history of the occult led me to an obsession with the voodoo-inspired ax murders of entire mixed-race families in Louisiana and Texas, also a century ago. My interest in modern civil right history led me to an obsession with the horrifyingly cynical history of the Black Panthers, who ruled an entire city with drugs and murder while hiding behind the façade of brave patriots fighting for their people’s civil and human rights.
And my hatred of that irritating and useless piece of advice for a writer—“Write about what you know”—led me to undertake the most audacious and seemingly impossible task a middle-aged white man like myself could undertake: writing a series of stories about a black female spanning the years from 1911 (when she is twenty-one) and 1975, the last year of her life (when she is eighty-five). Stories that span sixty crucial years of African American history and feature a black female private eye—a phenomenon so rare I can flatter myself that it is entirely unique.
Thus was born “Miss Clytie” James, a native of Baltimore and, from an early age, an operative with the fictitious Eternal Vigilance Detective Agency, a cross between a traditional detective agency and a vengeful spy network. Miss Clytie is a strange hybrid character, neither a feminist/civil right heroine nor a bloody-minded agent of vengeance. She is a sort of human foxhound, obsessed against her better reason with the almost sensuous thrill of the hunt. She is an extraordinarily gifted detective who yearns for the wider world to acknowledge her gifts—which it often does not, because of her race and gender—but whose gifts are so copious and familiar that she regards them as a simple fact of life, like having arms and legs.
She lives for travel and dark adventure but yearns to be a good, traditional wife to her two husbands—one of whom she loses (through her own fault) to racial violence, the other to war. She loathes and is fascinated by the villains she pursues, and freely acknowledges that she has much in common with them. She scores some remarkable victories—and sometimes botches things up beyond repair.
Each of the seven short novels in the series—whose collective title is Miss Clytie’s Vendettas—brings her face to face with a new setting, a new challenge, a new horror. In The Inquisition for Blood, the young Miss Clytie faces (and solves) a real-life mystery—the voodoo-inspired murders of entire mixed-race families in Louisiana and Texas in 1911 and 1912. In The Mulatto Ripper, based on the true story of a black serial killer who preyed on (mostly) mixed-race women in Atlanta, also in 1911 and 1912, she solves the (officially unsolved) case—but it takes her fifty years to do it. In Arranging a Lynching, she attempts to stop an epidemic of lynchings in the rural North Carolina town of Rocky Mount by fighting evil with evil, and brings about a horrible personal tragedy in the process.
Buffet Flat Blues is set in the gay/lesbian underworld of Jazz Age Harlem, with its sensual cafeterias called “buffet flats.” Much of the story takes place in a real-life and, according to most historians, nameless Harlem gay bar. When I read of the place and its muscular, brutal habitués, I thought, “If you were ever in a jam in Harlem back then, you’d want these men on your side.” So that no-longer-nameless bar features in the story, as does real-life serial killer and all-round pervert Albert Fish. (I would like to thank Harlem historian and HuffPo contributor Michael Henry Adams for helping me with the research for this story, and especially for revealing to me the name of the nameless establishment.)
The remaining three books bring the series into more modern times. Jake Bird’s Rules for Success, or: Miss Clytie and the Psychiatrist, in which Miss Clytie learns some important lessons from the infamous serial killer, takes place largely in the late 1940s. Freeing a Child (a horrifically ironic title—you’ll have to read the book to find out how) takes place in Oakland, California in the early 1970s. It deals with a drug-dealing group of murderous sociopaths who rule the city while cynically posing as civil rights freedom fighters. (Any resemblance to the Black Panthers is great and obvious, but of course I’ll deny it.) The last book, Miss Clytie’s Christmas Master Class, or: Blind Willie’s Mother takes place during Christmas week of 1975—the last few days of Miss Clytie’s life.
So, other than as a way of meeting a literary challenge, why was Miss Clytie born? I have already explained the origins of many of the individual storylines. It is strange how the one overarching creative idea enfolded those smaller, diverse ideas into its folds like a spider’s web. But as for Miss Clytie herself—like any literary conceit worth its salt, her genesis was complex and mysterious. She is, hopefully, not an illustrated sociological construct but a reasonable facsimile of a human being in all of her hall-of-mirrors complexity. But if she stands for something colder, more abstract, then she stands for horror.
In “Why Bigger Was Born,” an introductory essay to his novel Native Son, Richard Wright talks about the genesis of that novel’s central character, Bigger Thomas. At the end of that essay, Wright says, “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” Miss Clytie is an artistic attempt to plumb the nature of horror—not only the manifold horrors that can beset any of us from without, but the horrors that we freely allow to grow within us, and to ensnare others within their clutches.
And my hatred of that irritating and useless piece of advice for a writer—“Write about what you know”—led me to undertake the most audacious and seemingly impossible task a middle-aged white man like myself could undertake: writing a series of stories about a black female spanning the years from 1911 (when she is twenty-one) and 1975, the last year of her life (when she is eighty-five). Stories that span sixty crucial years of African American history and feature a black female private eye—a phenomenon so rare I can flatter myself that it is entirely unique.
Thus was born “Miss Clytie” James, a native of Baltimore and, from an early age, an operative with the fictitious Eternal Vigilance Detective Agency, a cross between a traditional detective agency and a vengeful spy network. Miss Clytie is a strange hybrid character, neither a feminist/civil right heroine nor a bloody-minded agent of vengeance. She is a sort of human foxhound, obsessed against her better reason with the almost sensuous thrill of the hunt. She is an extraordinarily gifted detective who yearns for the wider world to acknowledge her gifts—which it often does not, because of her race and gender—but whose gifts are so copious and familiar that she regards them as a simple fact of life, like having arms and legs.
She lives for travel and dark adventure but yearns to be a good, traditional wife to her two husbands—one of whom she loses (through her own fault) to racial violence, the other to war. She loathes and is fascinated by the villains she pursues, and freely acknowledges that she has much in common with them. She scores some remarkable victories—and sometimes botches things up beyond repair.
Each of the seven short novels in the series—whose collective title is Miss Clytie’s Vendettas—brings her face to face with a new setting, a new challenge, a new horror. In The Inquisition for Blood, the young Miss Clytie faces (and solves) a real-life mystery—the voodoo-inspired murders of entire mixed-race families in Louisiana and Texas in 1911 and 1912. In The Mulatto Ripper, based on the true story of a black serial killer who preyed on (mostly) mixed-race women in Atlanta, also in 1911 and 1912, she solves the (officially unsolved) case—but it takes her fifty years to do it. In Arranging a Lynching, she attempts to stop an epidemic of lynchings in the rural North Carolina town of Rocky Mount by fighting evil with evil, and brings about a horrible personal tragedy in the process.
Buffet Flat Blues is set in the gay/lesbian underworld of Jazz Age Harlem, with its sensual cafeterias called “buffet flats.” Much of the story takes place in a real-life and, according to most historians, nameless Harlem gay bar. When I read of the place and its muscular, brutal habitués, I thought, “If you were ever in a jam in Harlem back then, you’d want these men on your side.” So that no-longer-nameless bar features in the story, as does real-life serial killer and all-round pervert Albert Fish. (I would like to thank Harlem historian and HuffPo contributor Michael Henry Adams for helping me with the research for this story, and especially for revealing to me the name of the nameless establishment.)
The remaining three books bring the series into more modern times. Jake Bird’s Rules for Success, or: Miss Clytie and the Psychiatrist, in which Miss Clytie learns some important lessons from the infamous serial killer, takes place largely in the late 1940s. Freeing a Child (a horrifically ironic title—you’ll have to read the book to find out how) takes place in Oakland, California in the early 1970s. It deals with a drug-dealing group of murderous sociopaths who rule the city while cynically posing as civil rights freedom fighters. (Any resemblance to the Black Panthers is great and obvious, but of course I’ll deny it.) The last book, Miss Clytie’s Christmas Master Class, or: Blind Willie’s Mother takes place during Christmas week of 1975—the last few days of Miss Clytie’s life.
So, other than as a way of meeting a literary challenge, why was Miss Clytie born? I have already explained the origins of many of the individual storylines. It is strange how the one overarching creative idea enfolded those smaller, diverse ideas into its folds like a spider’s web. But as for Miss Clytie herself—like any literary conceit worth its salt, her genesis was complex and mysterious. She is, hopefully, not an illustrated sociological construct but a reasonable facsimile of a human being in all of her hall-of-mirrors complexity. But if she stands for something colder, more abstract, then she stands for horror.
In “Why Bigger Was Born,” an introductory essay to his novel Native Son, Richard Wright talks about the genesis of that novel’s central character, Bigger Thomas. At the end of that essay, Wright says, “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” Miss Clytie is an artistic attempt to plumb the nature of horror—not only the manifold horrors that can beset any of us from without, but the horrors that we freely allow to grow within us, and to ensnare others within their clutches.
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