FEATURES:Black Underground and crime writing

What's going on?

Gareth Evans surveys the hard-bitten world of Black Underground and crime writing - from the original Jazz poet, and godfather of rap, Gil Scott-Heron to ex-pimp Iceberg Slim and Clinton favourite Walter Mosley. With additional research by Ben Slater.

The 90s have seen huge changes in the publishing world, from an everest of rising advances to numerous corporate takeovers, and, with the broadsheets ready to proclaim 'The Death of the Book' on an almost weekly basis, it would seem to be an uncertain time for writers and publishers alike. However, as always, things are not so clearcut. Systems favour balance, and for every new conglomerate on the block, a clutch of young independent outfits are making themselves heard. Alongside similar developments in music and film, publishing is making the most of the myriad new technologies available to produce work that resists mainstream trends in content, production and distribution. And one of the strongest and fastest growing sectors is in the publication of Black writing.

Of course, Black writers have long been publishing with great success in the UK. From the Booker Prize-winning Ben Okri, through Caryl Phillips, Jackie Kay and Marsha Hunt (important for her patronage of the Saga Prize for debut Black British writers) to Wilson Harris and John Agard (to name only a very few), great fiction, drama and poetry has enriched both the culture and the tongue. Long-standing support for Caribbean and African literature in English from publishers Faber and Longman has also been vital in promoting texts from the widest reaches of the English-language diaspora. However, this article concerns itself with a particularly distinctive tradition, or traditions; those that, while running concurrently with the development and promotion of more mainstream Black writing, speak with an altogether different and more ambiguous tone.

The heritage and practice of what might be called Black 'Underground' writing - although this is inadequate, borrowing as it does from more well-known modes of 'white' literature - have until recently been pretty much off-limits to the general reader in Britain. We must look first to the United States. Black Underground literature there has of course had its more prominent voices: Ralph Ellison's extraordinarily powerful fiction Invisible Man (now in Penguin C20 Classics) applied Joycean techniques to Black urban mid-century life to fashion a savage critique of American society. Improvisational, experimental in the most committed way, it is a perfect example of the kind of new voice that started to be heard in the post-war period.

It grew out of an overwhelming sense of rage and frustration with the prejudices and innate totalitarianisms of the nation and set the tone for a series of distinctive works that, growing out of oral and protest traditions, and infused with the rhythms of blues and jazz, spoke in stark and accessible language to Black (and white) readers alike of the enormous difficulties of ghetto and street life.

While the books of such as Richard Wright, Bob Kaufman and James Baldwin added to the more consciously 'literary' wing of this movement, it was writers like Iceberg Slim, Clarence Cooper Jr, Charles Perry, Donald Goines and Vernon Smith who could claim to be writing directly from the asphalt and tenements about the trials, tribulations and fleeting epiphanies of ghetto life. Their texts dealt with 'the life', a life inevitably underscored by the experience of crime; the hustling, pimping, dope dealing and simple survival of ghetto existence. These writers are not household names, but we can at least read them now thanks to publishers such as Edinburgh-based Payback (part of Canongate). The heritage is a large, overlooked and important one, and it requires specialist commitment on the part of the publisher. That is not to say that it is a ghetto undertaking, but rather a focused venture of love and appreciation, bringing back into the light numerous authors lost to print. Payback, taking its name from a James Brown song, exists to acknowledge the debt that contemporary culture owes to innovative Black expression and, because of the central oral element, makes music criticism and biography (see Charles Mingus' delirious autobiography Beneath the Underdog for way-out weirdness) a major part of its list. Alongside pioneering works on Black music such as Leroi Jones's Blues People, it puts out legendary jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron's early novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory. Along with the Last Poets, Scott-Heron was part of the great explosion of Black poetry and lyric in the late 60s, a time of protest, empowerment and the Black Panthers. This period also saw the emergence of a new Black cinema, and, suitably, Melvin van Peebles' screenplay for his seminal Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song is also represented.

The re-issue of 'Crime-Life' books is a major part of Payback's intentions, and none is more successful, and more fits the description of Outsider writing, than the work of Iceberg Slim. His books have sold an astonishing 12 million copies in the States, vindication enough that such a voice is needed. Born Robert Beck, Iceberg (a moniker that launched a whole roster of Rap pseudonyms) was a supplier of prostitutes in Chicago and undoubtedly involved in much of that city's notorious criminal activity in the 40s and 50s. After three stretches in prison he chose to reflect upon his life - from the relative safety of Los Angeles - in the form of novels. The first, Pimp: the story of my life (first published in America in 1969), is pure autobiography - an unflinching, unapologetic account of his career as a hustler and street operator from adolescence to prison. However, what elevates Pimp beyond a true-crime memoir is Slim's rich combination of street slang and the ripe hyperbole of the tabloid or the pulp story. The opening lines of the prologue are among the best (and the most pungently scene-setting) in the whole of crime literature: 'Dawn was breaking as the big Hog scooted through the streets. My five whores were chattering like Magpies. I smelt the stink that only a street whore has after a long and busy night. The inside of my nose was raw. It happens when you're a pig for cocaine.' Pimp might be accused of exploiting the degradation of women and men, but Slim never pretends that this is anything but an honest report of his actions, and in that sense it is a brave and compelling work.

However, Iceberg is not alone in walking the walk and talking the talk when it comes to hands-on experience. Lost novelist Clarence Cooper Jr overdosed after a lifetime of prison and addiction, while Donald Goines, who shares Iceberg's US publisher Holloway, was murdered aged 39, but not before writing 16 novels of the hardest pulp detection.

This whole tradition is present in Payback's Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: an anthology of black mystery, crime and suspense fiction of the twentieth century, edited by American journalist Paula L. Woods. It is a definitive collection of fiction that traces developments and innovations within the genre; from Rudolph Fisher's Conjure Man Dies, which is thought to be the first piece of Black crime writing, through to the Harlem-set low-life tales of the pioneering Chester Himes (who has many titles in print with Payback) and the politically orientated spy stories of John A. Williams and Sam Greenlee, in which the notion of the 'spook' or shadow-agent becomes a metaphor for the Black experience in America. One particular gem is an extract from Njami Simon's novel Coffin & Co. , a self-reflexive and hilarious fable about two retired Harlem cops who believe (or would have us believe) that they are the real-life counterparts of Hime's legendary heroes Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones.

The volume also includes such modern innovators as Britain's Mike Phillips, and the hugely popular Walter Mosley, Bill Clinton's favourite writer, although this oft-repeated fact can't have done his sales much harm. His first novel to feature the thoughtful private investigator Easy Rawlins, Devil in a Blue Dress (Picador), kick-started a sequence - Gone Fishin', White Butterfly, A Red Death, Black Betty (Serpent's Tail) - which made highly effective use of post-war American history, the progress of civil rights from the 40s to the 60s becoming an unavoidable backdrop to whatever case Rawlins stumbled into. Mosley combines the terse language and metaphor of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction with a deep sense of melancholy for the state of the ghetto. Recently Rawlins has given way to Socrates Fortlow, the outsider-hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Serpent's Tail), a man who has served his time for murder and must contemplate the brutality of the streets from the position of a transgressor redeemed.

Crime writing in general is of course a huge industry now - a browse along the labyrinthine shelves of London's Murder One bookshop will leave you dizzy with the number of guises the genre can adopt. And Black British writer Mike Phillips has enjoyed acclaim and sales within its diverse walls for a fair while now. He broke new ground for the British thriller with the acclaimed Blood Rights (Harper Collins), which introduced protagonist Sam Dean, a freelance journalist who inevitably ends up involved in networks of crime. Dean has recurred in The Late Candidate and Point of Darkness (both Collins) and, while he is not necessarily on the side of the law, he does have a strong political conscience. In The Dancing Face (Collins), the hero is a lecturer drawn by his political beliefs into the theft of an ancient African artifact. Again Phillips weaves complex struggles about identity into his characteristically compelling plots.

While Payback concentrates specifically on post-war Black American fiction and books that fall outside of genre to deal with the full range of Black experience, other presses lays less claim to promoting literature and more to satisfying popular demand. London's X Press, based in cutting-edge Hoxton Square, was the first to identify this market, and hit pay dirt with its very first title, Victor Headley's explosive underworld tale Yardie (now in Pan). He followed this with Excess and Yush! , a powerful and extreme trilogy which left no doubt that this guy knew his territory, and at the same time introduced a new gangster grouping into popular consciousness.

The X Press is now a fully fledged operation, covering everything from children's books to romance, but it hasn't forgotten its roots, and stirred up the tabloids when it put out Donald Gorgon's aptly titled Cop Killer a couple of years back.

Whilst Britain's Black crime writers thrive, its less explicitly genre-based Underground writing is, perhaps by definition, less well-known. We might be rather more familiar with the potent, moving dub and protest poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah, god-fathers of the spoken word who can also boast a stack of albums and collections, all eloquent and innovative explorations of Black British experience, from the rigours of police harassment to the impact of narcotics on the community, telling it like it is in a language that nevertheless rises above polemic into often triumphant expressions of spirit and defiance. Now a new generation is expressing itself through the lens of rave culture. One of the best of this grouping, Q, with his speed prose poem Deadmeat (Sceptre), exposes club culture from the inside out, and the book's marketing equally entered new territory, with promotions in the kind of venues that outflank a conventional bookshop push.

There is no question that the territory described within these books is a predominantly male one. Individual writers have often had to answer to charges of misogyny. It is hard, violent and does not seek escapist answers. The life of a community is at stake, and in that sense the situation is too serious to do anything but commit entirely to attempting a truthful telling of events, whether real or imagined.

The writing therefore is anything but insular, and welcomes all who take it on its own terms: passionate, committed, raging against the machine and prejudice - in short, some of the most powerful books you are likely to experience. Coming up from the streets, but bringing with them worlds and characters that will stay with, and maybe even change, you. n

Gareth Evans is a freelance writer, reviewer and researcher. He teaches Print Media at the University of the West of England in Bristol and co-edits Entropy: a journal of experimental culture with Ben Slater.

© The Library Association
Last updated: 22 February 1999