Black Women Detective Novelists Across Two Centuries

I wanted to see how many Black-authored detective and crime-related novels by women appear in the 20th century as opposed to the 21st century in the Literary Navigator Device.

For “Reading Form,” I selected novel, and for “Author Gender,” I selected “woman.” Using the genre filters, I selected “Crime/Detective/Mystery fiction” and then chose Early 20th century (1900–1939), Mid-20th century (1940–1965), and Late 20th century (1966–1999). I then repeated the search with only the 21st century selected.

I ended up with 8 results from the 20th century and 71 results from the 21st century. The contrast between the two periods is striking and immediately visible through the Navigator’s filtering system.

This discovery suggests that there are far more novels by Black women novelists in the 21st century. It also shows how the Navigator makes it possible to quickly identify shifts in genre participation across time.

Related:

• Navigator Discoveries

Navigator Discoveries

This series of posts provides short research-based discoveries and use cases related to the Literary Navigator Device. Each entry highlights a specific search, explains the method used, and identifies a clear pattern, contrast, or finding drawn from the results.

Entries 

• Black Women Detective Novelists Across Two Centuries

Subfields in African American Literary Studies

A brief take on subfields in African American literary studies, showing how areas like the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright studies, the Black Arts Movement, and Toni Morrison Studies emerged over time to organize research, debates, and scholarly communities.

Script by Howard Rambsy II
Narration by Kassandra Timm

------------ 

Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

Alliteration as Cultural Strategy

A brief take on recurring alliteration in African American language practices, tracing how phrases like Sorrow Songs, Freedom Fighters, and New Negro Movement, use sound, rhythm, and repetition to enhance memorability, circulate ideas, and reinforce traditions of creativity, resistance, and representation.

Script by Howard Rambsy II 

Narration by Kassandra Timm

------------ 

Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

The Convergence: When Collegiate Black Men Meet African American Literary Studies

The Convergence: When Collegiate Black Men Meet African American Literary Studies (October 2026) tells the inside story of a first-semester literature course for Black men at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, taught every fall since 2004. Drawing on twenty-plus years of classroom practice, student voices, and campus data linking the course to higher persistence and graduation rates, the book shows how early, culturally grounded engagement with poetry, speeches, rap, fiction, and visual culture fosters deep reading and intellectual confidence.

Related:

• Black Men Readers 

• Book Notes

C. Liegh McInnis's Secret Histories of Prince's Contributions

For 20 or so years, C. Liegh McInnis has been providing me and others with what I’d call the secret histories of Prince’s contributions.

McInnis will absolutely not like that title, because he’ll point out that the histories aren’t secret. It’s out there for anyone looking and interested. But he sometimes forgets he’s a Prince expert. So what’s common Prince knowledge to him isn’t so with a lot, no, most, of us.

But another reason I call it “secret” is because McInnis often passes along casual tidbits about Prince in personal correspondence or just in conversation. You’ll mention a point, “Oh, I liked that movie last week.” McInnis will go, “Me too. And I’m glad that Prince provided Jane Doe with private lessons on playing guitar, which she then used to develop a band, which included John Doe piano, whose first cousin produced that movie based on inspiration from that band.” Seriously, it’ll be like that.

Aspects of the secret histories emerged recently when I shared my reflections on the New Edition Tour. I mentioned Tevin Campbell in passing, and McInnis sent me an email noting the songs that Prince had written for Campbell. I had no idea. He then went on to mention Prince’s role in shaping shifting directions in the tone and content of R&B.

I’ll have to remember to tell my students and junior colleagues about how someone like McInnis demonstrates the power of specializing in a major figure and then following that person’s career for years, decades, and, in this case, following the band members, influences, and disciples of that person. All of that is important in African American literary studies, where we’re constantly trying to figure out whether it’s better to focus on a major figure or devote time to various less well-known writers.

McInnis has me going back and forth on that. On the one hand, it seems more democratic to focus on several less prominent figures, right? But then, how would so much knowledge about Prince and others have flowed forth if McInnis hadn’t been as laser-focused as he’s been? Would I have been the beneficiary of so many secret histories?

Related:

• A Notebook on the Work of C. Liegh McInnis

A Brief Review of the New Edition Tour

Alright folks, a quick review

I traveled to Nashville to attend the New Edition, Boys II Men, Toni Braxton concert on Friday. I enjoyed it, mostly the idea of listening to music from years, no, decades ago, and seeing the folks perform it live. For some reason, with this show, Toni Braxton felt more like a sidenote. She performed only a few songs, and the other two groups performed more. Maybe it'll be different later this week when they perform here in St. Louis. But New Edition and Boys II Men were the real highlights. They were still hitting all their notes and moves. Well, that is, except my dude Bobby Brown, who can't move like the rest of them. But he was hanging in there.

Nashville is just like St. Louis in the sense that at an R & B concert, the audience is mostly Black women. "Look at us twinning," R & B audiences say to Black church congregations. But having said that, I was reminded that it had done something deeply positive to my young mind and the youngsters in my environment back in the day as we grew up witnessing those Black boys and young Black men groups doing coordinated dance moves together as they sang. (Y’all already know, so I won’t even point out that New Edition is criminally under-credited for creating the blueprint for the white boy bands that followed.)

Back to Black girl, now senior woman audiences: The early 1980s up through the 1990s were a unique moment for the amount of wholesome, affirming songs focusing on Black girls. From the 1983 “Candy Girl” up through maybe Tevin Campbell's 1993 “Can We Talk,” it was a brief, yet golden moment for songs that placed Black girls in the spotlight in a loving, not overly sexualized kind of way. This pattern of Black girl songs was less visible or plentiful in earlier decades and, lord Jesus, far less common in subsequent decades that followed.

This show didn't invest a lot in staging, not on the levels of Mariah Carey or Usher. This was more on the lower-level production, like Fantasia or Fred Hammond & Co. As a reunion tour, I enjoyed this better than Brandy and Monica. Still, they could've added more here and there to really contextualize the time and work they've covered. We're talking about a group that formed in 1978 and debuted in 1983.

I'm sometimes reluctant to give the South too much credit, but there's this fact: Nashville has a much more robust music scene than St. Louis. Beyond the concert venue, Bridgestone Arena, their downtown scene has various live music spots and bars. The most prevalent forms are country and southern rock, and a persistent indie vibe. Y'all know I've gone to a lot of music events in St. Louis, but the city itself doesn't have a really robust infrastructure for music. Of course, Nashville is majority white, and St. Louis is majority Black. I assume that all kinds of racial barriers prevented folks in St. Louis from building structures for a thriving music scene. I get that, but still............

Farah Jasmine Griffin and African American Literary Studies

At some point, in our continuing efforts to chart the development and scope of African American literary studies, we will need to reckon with the many contributions of one of the field’s most influential figures, Farah Jasmine Griffin. For me, she has certainly been a model of possibility, offering multiple blueprints and routes.

I was inclined to briefly comment on her contributions after listening to her talk yesterday.

Back in 1995, Grifin she hit the scene with "Who Set You Flowin'?" The African-American Migration Narrative and has been producing groundbreaking work ever since. Her books include the If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001),  Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (with Salim Washington, 2008), Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (2013), and more recently, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (2023).

In 2021, I did a series of blog posts on her book Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, which touched on her work but likely did not go far enough in noting how Griffin has been one of our discipline's most critical cultural witnesses. She began her career at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s and moved to Columbia University around 2000, where she has since built a distinguished career. 

Consider that Griffin entered the profession in the mid-1990s, during a defining moment when African American literary studies was developing in new and consequential ways. There is understandably a tendency to focus on more prominent figures from that period—Henry Louis Gates Jr., bell hooks, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, and Trudier Harris among others. But Griffin, a junior to those figures, was there as well, just at an earlier stage of her career. Her soft-spoken and measured style also placed her somewhat outside the more visible Black public intellectual circuit that gained prominence during that period.

At Columbia University, Griffin became a member of the influential Jazz Study Group, which helps explain her sustained engagement with jazz. Founded by Robert G. O'Meally, the group brings together scholars, musicians, critics, and students for wide-ranging discussions of the music. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Griffin later co-edited Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), a volume that reflects the intellectual energy of the group's exchanges. 

Based on various articles and presentations over the last two decades, Griffin is viewed as one of our leading Toni Morrison scholars. If you were hosting a gathering on Morrison at Princeton or Cornell or wherever, and you wanted expert thoughts on Morrison, then you likely thought of Farah Jasmine Griffin.

So it's possible that a large group of people know Griffin as a jazz scholar, and then a whole other group know her as a literary scholar. And there's more. She's been an important chronicler of Black Studies based on this notable document, Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective of Ford Foundation Grant Making, 1982-2007. She also provided key leadership as the inaugural chair of its African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia.

When I spoke Griffin her after talk, somehow the subject of William J. Harris came up. "Did you know he was one of my professors?" she asked.  

"Did I know?" I responded, "You're one of the main reasons I can never become his top student of all time. Of course I know you're one of his former students."

We laughed. 

Griffin, Dana A. Williams, Brent Hayes Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Mark Anthony Neal represent a generational cohort of literary and cultural scholars who made notable contributions to African American literary studies over the decades. We also have to add Alondra Nelson to that mix. While she's not a literary scholar, her work on Afrofuturism affected so many of us. And obviously, there are dozens more than the ones I've just named. 

It is worth thinking about a figure like Griffin for multiple reasons. She has produced outstanding work, for one. She also offers a clear sense of what a long, noteworthy career can look like. More than that, she stands as a testament to the possibilities of working across multiple disciplines, distinguishing herself through scholarship on jazz as well as Black literary and cultural history.

You trying to get a sense of what's possible as a literary scholar or an intellectual in general? Then, you likely want to think of Farah Jasmine Griffin.