Albany, New York, experienced massive upheaval when the Volstead Act of 1919 established Prohibition. Crime already proliferated in the capital of the Empire State, with rival political machines stooping to corruption and the mob with their heavy-handed powers of persuasion. As it did nationwide, Prohibition in Albany served merely to force alcohol-related commerce underground and lawlessness and violence to the forefront of city activity.
This ambitious study examines the works of modern African American mystery writers within the social and historical contexts of African American literature on crime and justice. It begins with a historical overview that describes the movement by African American authors from slave narratives and antebellum newspapers into fiction writing, the work of early genre writers, such as Pauline Hopkins and Rudolph Fisher, the protest writers of the 1940s and 1950s, and the authors who followed in the 1960s.
The title of this book comes from an old blues song and appropriately so. Lizzie Stuart has been looking at her past to some degree since the first Lizzie Stuart/John Quinn book DEATH’S FAVORITE CHILD. YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED ON MONDAY will bring Lizzie to the end of one journey and the beginning of another. As the book opens Professor Stuart is given a lead into her mother’s past. Lizzie has never known her mother nor the reason she deserted her as an infant. As she wades through gangsters’ memories and the music world Ms. Bailey opens a richly drawn world for her reader.
A comprehensive text that provides historical perspectives on the status of women; analysis of popular culture/mass media images of women offenders; and discussion of societal responses to women who kill.
On August 16, 1912, Virginia Christian became the only female to die in the electric chair in the state of Virginia. She was a 17 year old (her age was the subject of debate) African American juvenile who had been convicted of the murder of her white female employer, Ida Belote. Virginia and her family was sharecroppers on the woman's farm. I discovered the case when I was during research for Blood on Her Hands, a book about women and murder. In Old Murders, I change the details of the case a bit and move it up to 1955. This is the case from the past that Lizzie finds herself probbing as two land developers in present-day Gallagher battle for the contract to develop the city's waterfront. Lizzie is also trying to find out what happened to a talented young artist/Piedmont State student who has gone missing.
. . .When I sat down to write A Dead Man’s Honor - actually the book I was working on when I went off to Cornwall on vacation - I found myself going back to the dissertation I had written when I was a grad student about crime and justice in Danville, Virginia from 1900-1930. It was as I was researching and writing that dissertation that I really began to think deeply about mob violence, particularly about lynching and how it was related in some people’s minds to the concept of honor. So the book is about what happens in a Southern town on a hot August day in 1921 when the city physician is murdered. It’s about the ripple effect of that murder and the lynching that followed.
. . .I went on vacation to Cornwall and took my characters, Lizzie Stuart and John Quinn, along. It happened when Joy, my best friend from grad school, received a Fulbright award. She was going to Finland to spend a semester teaching there. En route, she and her son Gregory wanted to do some sight seeing. They invited me to meet them for a week at a seaside resort in Cornwall. Although I had more than enough to do to keep me at my desk, once I had seen the images of Cornwall on the Internet, I couldn’t resist.
