Yen Sin.Ĭharlie Chan was created by white man Earl Derr Biggers in the 1920s and played throughout the 1920s and ’30s in films by white actors in “yellow face” - though his grown sons were played by Asian Americans. In the case of Asian characters, they might be the exotic, the Chinatown femme fatale, or the “yellow peril” villain in the Fu Manchu mold, characters like Wu Fang and Dr. If those folks were present, they were minor characters: the maid, the train porter, and so on, often speaking in stereotypical dialogue. The decade wound down with Raymond Chandler’s seminal hard-boiled detective novel, The Big Sleep, and there were countless private eyes (Carrie Cashin, “attractive as sin, hardboiled as hell,” from the pages of Crime Busters), G-men and women, cops, and masked crime fighters (like the Black Bat and the Spider) populating the pages of the other pulps.īut none of these stories were written by or about African Americans, and few featured a person of color as the lead character. Cain’s novella The Postman Always Rings Twice on the shelves. 1934 kicked off with Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and saw James M. Black Mask also spawned the five stories that became Paul Cain’s Fast One, one hell of a twisty, tough nihilistic story set in 1932-’33 Los Angeles. Among the books that were written were Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), the plot basis for the films Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, and his template for the private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon (first serialized in 1929 in the pages of Black Mask pulp magazine). THE LATE 1920s into the 1930s were a protean time for crime fiction.

Harlem Redux by Persia Walker