Take a look at any list of the greatest detectives in fiction – say, this one – and it’s hard to ignore the fact that they’re overwhelmingly white and male. Some of them may be intellectuals, while others prefer to solve a tricky case with their fists, but one thing Sherlock Holmes shares with Sam Spade, Jack Reacher and Kurt Wallander is the colour of his face.
A quick flick through my copy of Peter Haining’s survey The Golden Age of Crime Fiction reveals only two characters who aren’t white: a Thuggee assassin in a Victorian penny dreadful and the Earl Derr Biggers private eye Charlie Chan. Biggers was something of a sucker for inscrutable, “eastern” wisdom, but the character was this Ohio-born, Harvard-educated author’s attempt to find something new. “Sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff,” Biggers said. “But an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order had never been used.”
In the wake of Charlie Chan, publishers employed other white writers to bring a bit of oriental exoticism to crime fiction, such as John P Marquand with his secret agent Mr Moto, and Hugh Wiley with his detective Mr Wong. But crime fiction in the golden age continued to reflect the times.
According to Professor Maureen T Reddy, “whiteness and heterosexuality are fundamental elements” of the hardboiled crime of the 1940s and 50s. In her 2003 study Traces, Codes and Clues, Reddy argues that “the central white/male/heterosexual consciousness is sacred, unchallengeable, which in turn emphasises the great degree to which the fiction is about that consciousness. It seems clear that racism (and sexism and heterosexism) is a necessary element of hardboiled detective fiction and is in fact a cornerstone of that fiction’s ideological orientation.”
Writers such as Chester Himes, who began writing crime fiction featuring African American detectives in the 1950s, and Robert Beck (AKA Iceberg Slim), who started writing gritty novels drawing on his own experiences as a pimp in the 60s, blazed a trail continued by writers such as Walter Mosley, Attica Locke and Paula L Woods. But as the world has become steadily more globalised, 21st-century detective fiction has become more multinational as well, with writers such as Alex Segura drawing on their own heritages and experiences to diversify the genre.
Segura’s Pete Fernandez series follows a Cuban American investigator working the beat in the author’s home city of Miami. When he first started to read crime fiction as a child, Segura recalls “a sense of: ‘Where are the people like me?’ I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, and comic books, but the book that kind of crystallised it for me was Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, which I read way too young, maybe eight or nine. It was steeped in the ceremony and traditions of Italian families, and while I’m not Italian I connected to that … the main characters weren’t just white.”
It’s an experience shared by Amit Dhand. Growing up in Bradford, West Yorkshire, Dhand says there were “no characters for Asian readers. If you were white you could see Bond, or Bourne or Bauer on the bookshelves or on the screen, but there was nothing if you were British Asian.”
For Dhand, who writes as AA Dhand, the turning point was reading Tess Gerritsen’s 2001 novel The Surgeon. “I think it was the first time I’d read a crime novel by someone who wasn’t white and I thought to myself that I wanted to do something like that,” he explains. That something turned out to be a British Asian Sikh detective, Harry Virdee.
There’s plenty of crime fiction set in LA, but Steph Cha found that the city that is home to the largest Korean population outside Korea was not making room for them on the page. When she started reading crime fiction in college, she recognised two crucial things about the genre right away: “It was an excellent tool for exploring place and community, and it was dominated by straight, white, male protagonists who could only take readers so far.”
Cha has written three novels featuring the Korean American PI Juniper Song. “I wanted the heritage and identity stuff to be in the background, as it is in my day-to-day life,” she says. “My Korean-ness is important to me, but I don’t walk around thinking about how Korean I am in any given situation. There are readers who expect non-white protagonists to go around feeling their differences on every page, but that is not true to my experience. At the same time, being Korean American – and a woman – means I don’t have the same defaults as a white dude, and that’s reflected in Juniper Song.”
Dhand shares this supple approach to questions of heritage and identity. “Harry Virdee is a Sikh and a British Asian,” Dhand says. “But that’s not what defines him for every second. What defines him is what he will do in any given situation, how he feels about right and wrong. He’s a complicated character … he has a Muslim wife, his family have disowned him because of this. He’s uncompromising in his job. It’s more about being British than anything else.”
Segura’s Fernandez may be nothing extraordinary in 21st-century Miami, but he’s still a little unusual in the world of detective fiction. “The Cuban American perspective, politically, is very unique and different from the two parts that make it up,” he says. “While the Pete books are not soaked in politics, I don’t shy away from him having an opinion, or reflecting the Miami that I know – the people, their opinions and showing how they might be different from the rest of the country. I think it’s important, even if it just gets people thinking about it from a different perspective.
“I can’t speak for all Cuban Americans, but for me, growing up, there was always this feeling of being apart – of this different, distant land that held such sway over everything we did or thought, and that’s a powerful feeling.”
Song, Fernandez and Virdee are all detectives who represent the migrant populations of the cities they work in – but non-white detectives remain a rarity.
“For every PI novel with a protagonist of colour, there are about 10 books about gruff white cops falling in love with murdered white women, 10 ‘girl’ books about murderous white women, and 10 more about serial killers in Scandinavia,” says Cha, who also edits the noir crime section of the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I’ve been going to crime conferences since 2013, and I’m regularly on panels where I’m the only woman and the only person of colour, speaking to rooms full of white people. [The genre] may be improving little by little, but it’s probably premature to declare that the landscape has changed in any meaningful way.”
While Dhand’s Virdee books have been optioned for TV, no contemporary Asian detective has made the transition on to western screens as yet. “Perhaps everyone’s waiting for the glass ceiling to break,” Dhand says. “But in the three years since I published the first novel, there’s hardly been a deluge of Asian crime authors coming on to the scene.”
Crime fiction is beginning to discover that non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual characters don’t have to be the “other”, don’t need to be the villain or the colourful cameo. But until more writers with a broad variety of backgrounds and experiences step forward and more publishers take them on, crime – or at least the solving of it – will still be something of a white man’s game.
