Randomly, I picked up the July 1948 ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY
MAGAZINE last night, and read Hughes Allison's first
contribution there, a borderline hb procedural called
"Corollary," which Dannay in his extensive headnote
calls
"the first attempt to project in words a Negro detective who
is a character rather than a caricature" (apparently not
aware of Chester Himes's work, perhaps). Allison's detective,
named in proletarian solidarity Joe Hill, is the sole AA tec
in an otherwise Cauc squad; as playwright Allison puts it in
the headnote, "Could tough, hardboiled Sam Spade or suave,
gentlemanly Ellery Queen enter that dark, costly museum-room
[continuing a metaphor for African-American society he'd
established] and single out the culprits?
[...answering in the negative:] For neither Sam Spade nor
Ellery Queen is equipped to think with his skin." (A neat
trick, taken literarlly.)
The story is creditable, a bit stiff, with Hill's bosses
sitting around chatting with Hill and each other, echoing
each other in a semi-comic manner, as they treat with DAs and
such via the telephone (perhaps the result of a playwright
tacking prose); Allison wasn't too fond of storefront
churchmen such as his villain here, the Prophet Hamid, or at
least he had Joe Hill decidedly unsympathetic.
I haven't had a chance to check my copy of Walter Albert's
impressive new CD ROM version of DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY
FICTION: An International Bibliography of Secondary Sources,
to see how much citation of Allison there's been in the
critical literature...or, for that matter, I haven't checked
to see how much else, if any, Hughes published as CF.
TM
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