Similar to the ‘old school’ and Harlem Renaissance authors earlier in the century, African American mystery writers today are conjuring up an enticing selection of works. This new group constitutes the . . .Noir Wave

At age 7, Gar Anthony Haywood began picking up the books with lurid covers that he found scattered around his father’s bedroom. Science fiction, mystery and detective novels--Haywood soon devoured them all, but even as a youngster, he wondered: Why aren’t any of these characters black like me?

Years later, Haywood discovered there was a handful of African American noir writers from the ‘40s and ‘50s known as the “old school” of black detective fiction.

“I read some Chester Himes and picked up [‘In the Heat of the Night’], whose character Virgil Tibbs was black, even though the author wasn’t. But other than that, there weren’t any, and I didn’t understand why. I thought the field could use some people of color.”

So Haywood decided to write his own.

“Fear of the Dark,” which featured unflappable South-Central private investigator Aaron Gunner, was published in 1988 after Haywood won a competition sponsored by the Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin’s Press for best first detective fiction.

More than a decade later, Haywood has released his sixth book in the Aaron Gunner series, “When Last Seen Alive.” A second series by the author, featuring a retired pair of amateur sleuths named Joe and Dottie Loudermilk, who cruise the West in their Airstream trailer solving mysteries, has also debuted.

Haywood may not be as well-known in mainstream publishing as, say, Walter Mosley, but he is part of an explosion in black detective and noir fiction that has taken the publishing world by storm in the last couple of years.

“Until 1988, there were fewer than 10 or 15, and some of those were only published in very obscure publications or black newspapers and periodicals,” says Richard Yarborough, an associate professor of English at UCLA who will be offering a seminar on black mystery writing in the spring. “Since 1988, we’ve had 25 to 30 new black mystery writers, and frequently they have published six to eight books each. That’s huge.”

The Desire to See That Justice Is Done

The reasons for this growth are varied, but for starters, the genre, although highly regimented, has historically allowed authors to comment on a variety of racial, cultural and societal issues, and that is appealing to many of these new writers. Indeed, even O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden is working on a mystery.

“We’re all fascinated with evil and wrongdoing and seeing people brought to justice, but for African Americans, that sense of seeing wrongs righted is very powerful because, historically, we haven’t always seen that happen in our lives,” says Paula L. Woods, whose debut work of fiction, “Inner City Blues” (W.W. Norton) was published this month.

Gary Phillips, whose most recent book, “Bad Night Is Falling,” explores the city’s tensions between blacks and Latinos through the firebombing death of Mexican immigrants in a Los Angeles housing project, has a slightly different take.

“Where else can I tell all these tales of political corruption and racial animus but in the mystery detective novel?” he asks.

Phillips’ protagonist, Ivan Monk (inspired by Thelonius), reflects the cultural diversity of his hometown. Monk is a black private investigator who owns a doughnut shop and lives in Silver Lake with his girlfriend, a Japanese American judge. His cases often start in the inner city and take Monk from downtown to the harbor and everywhere in between.

“What I’m doing has a historical root that goes all the way back to Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest,’ ” Phillips says. “You’ve always had a lot of politics in mystery novels.”

Phillips’ background helps him mine this rich vein. The 43-year-old grew up in South-Central when it was middle class, before the jobs disappeared and the economic structure collapsed. A longtime political activist and self-described “hoodlum intellectual,” Phillips is the former host of a talk show on KPFK-FM (90.7) and is a founding director of the downtown-based Multicultural Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that works to improve race relations and enact public policy.

Mysteries With a Political Edge

In the grass-roots style that typifies Phillips, his first book, “Violent Spring,” which was set against the backdrop of the 1992 L.A. riots, was brought out by a small press called West Coast Crime that Phillips helped launch to publish mysteries with a political edge.

“They were looking for partners, and I put in $3,500 and a lot of sweat equity,” Phillips says. “I have a degree in graphic design, so I drew and designed the covers and helped market and distribute them. We sent them out for review, we did publication parties, we even went on mini-tours.”

The hard work paid off: Phillips’ books were picked up for mass-market reprinting by Berkley’s PrimeCrime Press, a division of Penguin Putnam.

But Phillips isn’t quitting his day job quite yet. He was recently dropped by Berkley because sales of his books were slow, a company spokeswoman said.

That irks Phillips, who says mainstream publishers just don’t know how to market to black audiences.

“They market it for white folks who buy hardcover books, but not everyone reads [books on] the New York Times Bestseller List,” Phillips says.

But Gerry Howard, editor in chief for trade paperbacks at Doubleday, says most mysteries don’t make the New York Times list anyway. Howard, who edited Mosley and Woods while at W.W. Norton, says the key to sales is positioning.

For him, that includes taking out ads in black publications, sending the novel to those on select mailing lists, booking authors onto black-oriented TV shows and doing signings in cities with large African American populations.

“You do exactly what you do with white detective fiction,” Howard says. “You try to find the people who will respond to it. By now there’s a real brotherhood and sisterhood of black crime writers, so there’s already a sort of tribal drum set up.”

UCLA’s Yarborough says that black writers may suffer from the fact that sales patterns tend to be different in the black book-buying community, starting more slowly and spreading steadily through word-of-mouth instead of the big initial peaks that publishers aim for.

Still, word is getting out.

At Eso Won Books, a black-owned bookstore in the Crenshaw district that specializes in books by and for African Americans, white fans often show up when a black mystery author is scheduled to read.

“Our black customers are definitely happy to see black characters, but as writers get known, white readers buy the books too,” Eso Won co-owner James Fugate says.

The Genre’s History Goes Back a Century

While Mosley remains the best-known (and bestselling) crossover example of black detective fiction, the genre’s rich history dates back 100 years, says Woods, who, in addition to writing her novel, edited the 1995 compilation “Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes, Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century” (Doubleday).

Woods’ anthology is a rich primer for those who want a historical grounding in the genre and reflects years of research among back issues of long-defunct magazines and out-of-print titles.

Among the revived gems in “Spooks, Spies” is Pauline E. Hopkins’ classic locked-room mystery story “Talma Gordon,” which was originally published by Colored American Magazine in 1900.

The Harlem Renaissance writers of the ‘30s--more known for poetry and lofty prose than hard-boiled fiction--are represented by Rudolph Fisher, who penned the 1932 classic, “The Conjure-Man Dies,” the first known detective novel to feature a black protagonist.

Woods also includes Himes’ crime-busting duo Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, who sleuthed their way through the black literary scene from the 1950s to the 1980s. She then moves to such mainstream, nongenre writers as Richard Wright and Ann Petry, then into contemporary turf with Mosley, BarbaraNeely and Eleanor Taylor Bland.

“There’s a real hunger on the part of all kinds of readers of all races to get those perspectives on the black experience, and Mosley’s popularity has paved the way on the part of publishers to say, ‘We’d like to have one like that, or two or three,’ ” Woods says.

There’s a desire to rediscover the past masters too. W.W. Norton is publishing the “Old School Book” series, which reprints classic but unsung novels by black authors in the post-World War II era that were often cut and altered by their original publishers. The first in the series, Himes’ “Yesterday Will Make You Cry,” was originally published in a bowdlerized version as “Cast the First Stone.”

Today’s black writers are also expanding away from the gritty urban canon of authors such as Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, whose 1969 classic, “Pimp, the Story of My Life,” has sold more than 6 million copies in numerous languages, according to its publisher, Holloway House.

Woods says the success of mega-selling black authors such as Terry McMillan and Alice Walker have opened the doors for other writers to create unique characters of their own. Woods’ own character, LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice, comes from an upper-middle-class family. Charlotte’s mother, a fourth-generation Angeleno, claims membership in the “blue vein society,” an unofficial social register of African Americans whose skin tone is light enough to see the blue veins beneath.

Haywood’s Aaron Gunner is also middle class, although “I also try to attach some issues near and dear to my heart, like the reemergence of black militancy, gangs in the inner city and [problems between] the African American community and the LAPD,” Haywood says.

There is no formula today for black detective fiction other than the standard parameters that dictate the genre. Black writers have mastered this and added their own twists.

As a result, BarbaraNeely’s protagonist is a black maid named Blanche White who solves murders on the side in books such as “Blanche Cleans Up” and “Blanche on the Lam” (Viking).

“[Her being a maid] is a very significant figure for blacks that doesn’t carry the same connection for white readers,” says Yarborough, who also directs the university’s Center for African-American Studies.

John Ridley, whose hard-boiled noir fiction has been called Jim Thompson-meets-Elmore Leonard, features a down-at-the-heels black Hollywood screenwriter named Jefty Kittridge in his new book, “Love Is a Racket.”

Although he writes from the grifter’s street perspective, Ridley’s background begs to differ: He has a degree in East Asian culture and languages from New York University and has written for film and TV shows such as “Martin,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “The John Larroquette Show.”

Ridley’s first novel, “Stray Dogs,” was made into the 1998 Oliver Stone movie “U-Turn” (Ridley also wrote the screenplay), and the 33-year-old received a “seven-figure advance” from Knopf for his two-book deal.

“Hollywood is my day job, what I do to support myself in the style I’ve become accustomed to, but the difference between writing for Hollywood and writing literature is the difference between crawling over broken glass and flying,” Ridley says.

Then there is author Nikki Baker, whose sleuth is a black lesbian. Penny Mickelbury’s heroine is a black lawyer. Robert Greer’s novels are set among the African American community in Denver. Taylor Bland’s books take place in a small town in the Midwest. Hugh Holton’s protagonist is a Chicago policeman. Terris McMahan Grimes’ novels unfold in Sacramento. Valerie Wilson Wesley’s character is a single mother and private eye in Newark, N.J. “White Chocolate” (Forge), a new novel by Elizabeth Bowman, involves a biracial woman who gets pulled into solving a mystery because of her ethnic identity.

“I suspect that soon we’ll have a gay black male detective,” Yarborough says, “although I haven’t found him yet.”