title: Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction
author:  Maureen T Reddy 
description: Detective fiction featuring white women and people of color-such as Barbara Neely's Blanche White and Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins-has become tremendously popular. Although they are considered "light reading," mysteries also hold important cultural and social "clues." Much recent scholarly work has demonstrated that race is both a cultural fiction-not a biological reality-and a central organizing principle of experience. Popular writers are likely to reflect the conventions of their own historical situations. <P> In <I>Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction</I>, Maureen T. Reddy explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. She notes that even those writers who appear to set out to revise outdated conventions repeatedly reproduce the genre's most conservative elements. The greatest obstacle to transforming crime fiction, Reddy states, is the fact that the genre itself is deeply embedded in the discourse of white (and male) superiority. There is, therefore, an absolute necessity to break away from that discourse-through reversal or other strategies-in order to produce work that defies, and thus helps readers to defy, the dominant ideology of race.
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  Penumbra
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Carolyn Haines
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Tyrus Books (2006)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  Rating:
  
  
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  Tags:
  
  
  Mystery, Historical
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### From Publishers Weekly
  
  
  Far from Haines's fluffy Southern cozies in tone, if not geography, this
  thriller from the author of *Crossed Bones* aims at a noirish literary quality
  it only partly achieves. On the plus side are powerful scenes of suspense and
  a moody evocation of time and place. Eschewing anything so obvious as naming
  an actual date, Haines makes it clear through subtle clues that the action is
  happening just after the end of WWII. The entrenched racial structure of a
  small Mississippi town of that era is similarly well done. Chief among the
  novel's shortcomings is the heavy-handed rendering of the love story between a
  mixed-race beauty, Jade Dupree, and all-white deputy Frank Kimble. Other
  interracial relationships are integral to the story, but the tantalizing
  possibility of a strong un