New to me, is what I mean, and then a couple of old friends: this week in my classes I have just finished teaching Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man for the first time in Mystery & Detective Fiction, and on Wednesday we start P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, while as of tomorrow it’s all Middlemarch all the time until the end of term in the Victorian Women Writers Seminar.
I enjoyed working up The Expendable Man for class and then talking it through with my students. I used it to raise many of the same questions that usually come up when we’re working through Devil in a Blue Dress: about the whiteness of “classic” crime fiction, for one thing, and the genealogy of African-American crime novels, and about the ways race complicates common themes in the genre, from ideas about the role of the police to the relationship between the specific crime and its solution (or not) and larger contexts of racial and social justice. Mosley’s novel is very different in style and tone, though, as well as in its specific historical contexts, so this time instead of talking about World War II or the history of policing in Los Angeles I sketched out a basic timeline of the civil rights movement (the novel presumably takes place around the time of its publication, so the early 1960s) as well as the fight for reproductive rights, with some attention to what it was like at this time in Phoenix specifically, where the novel mostly takes place.
It is quickly evident with Hughes’s novel that the murder that needs solving is in some ways less important than the systemic problems glaringly exposed through Hugh Densmore’s vulnerability, not even so much as a suspect but just as a black man in a relentlessly racist society. Ultimately, though, as we discussed, to say that the novel is “about” the crime of racism does not really tell us much about it in particular: you still need to dig in and think about what it is exactly that Hughes has to show or to say. What is the effect, for example, of giving us a protagonist who is so irreproachable? (I read one scholarly article about the novel that—oversimplifying the argument, of course—felt she had flattened out his humanity to serve her political purposes, making him too ideal or too safe.) What do we think about Ellen, the woman who is initially an incidental romantic interest but becomes an important ally? And what about Iris / Bonnie Lee, who enters Hugh’s life like an inadvertent femme fatale (or does she know what she is doing?) only to become a murder victim herself? When I posted about the novel after my first reading of it last year, I noted that I was bothered by what seemed to me its vilification of abortion providers. I felt basically the same during my rereads of it as I prepared for class discussion, but I was curious what the students thought and I’m not sure we reached any firm conclusions about whether we were supposed to consider Iris in any way a victim of a systemic problem similar to (if, in this scenario, less important than) the one that puts Hugh’s life at risk.
Overall, I think the book worked well for the course. I did note to my students, as I was putting it alongside novels like A Rage in Harlem, Blanche on the Lam, and Devil in a Blue Dress, that it was perhaps odd—and had given me pause—to assign a book about race and crime that is written by a white woman. As I said when reflecting on that in my earlier post, the Afterword in the NYRB edition is by Walter Mosley: he seems fine with what he calls Hughes’s “gamble,” and his admiration for the book certainly suggests that he thinks the gamble paid off. I don’t know if I needed to cite Mosley in defense of my choice, but I also didn’t think I should just ignore the issue, so I did highlight his comments. My feeling is that the book itself justified its own inclusion on the syllabus, both by its quality as a novel and by the quality of the discussions it prompted.
I haven’t taught An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in the mystery survey class for a while—possibly, since 2018, which is the most recent set of lecture notes I have saved for it. I have assigned it a couple of times since then in the seminar I also teach on Women and Detective Fiction, most recently in Fall 2022. It is an odd book in many ways but I really like it: I consider it as much a novel of ideas as a crime novel, and I think of it as pushing back against the tendency in most of the other novels we’ve read this term, especially The Maltese Falcon, to treat love as an inadequate motive for action. I like the way mixing up the reading list a bit every time I offer the course makes different conversations happen. (I admit I am relieved, however, that I get a break from this course next year, as I have been teaching it so often that sometimes it’s a struggle to keep it fresh even so. Except The Moonstone. I don’t think I could ever get tired of teaching The Moonstone! It’s sad to think that I am eventually—in the foreseeable future, now—going to retire and then I will never get to teach The Moonstone again.)
I have gone on a pretty long time already and haven’t said anything about the other novels I have been or will be teaching this week. I’ll have to post again once we’ve actually started Middlemarch. I have such a good group of students in the Victorian Women Writers Seminar: a bit quieter than some groups I’ve had, maybe, but always really astute and interesting in their comments and willing to engage with whatever questions I or their classmates bring up. So I’m optimistic that this is going to be a really satisfying month reading through this great novel with them. It’s not the slowest pace I’ve ever set for reading Middlemarch, but I think it’s pretty reasonable: we’re doing just the first 10 chapters for Wednesday, for example. I reread them on the weekend—what a treat. And speaking of new conversations, I’m not sure I’ve ever put it next to North and South before, or in the same course as Villette, and I can already tell that these juxtapositions are making slightly different things stand out.
WordPress is being weird about inserting images tonight so I’m going to post this without any, just so it doesn’t malinger unpublished. If I can I will perk it up with some pictures tomorrow!
Novel Readings 
I wonder how interested your students are in discussing ‘big’ issues, such as racism and abortion. Do you find that they’re open to more than superficial exploration of these debates, or would they rather just listen to you and get on with their work in silence?
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As a rule, we aren’t discussing these issues as issues, if that makes sense, but as issues in our novels, which changes the demands of the conversation somewhat, though of course not entirely. In this case, for example, we were not debating the pros and cons of abortion or abortion rights but trying to get a purchase on how they are being treated in the novel. Is Doc Jopher, who provides Iris’s (apparently botched) abortion shown as a villain for being willing to do a procedure that the novel’s other doctors and most notably the novel’s exemplary protagonist seem to find abhorrent, a violation of their oath? Is there some victim-blaming involved regarding Iris, then? Or does the novel imply or draw out parallels between her vulnerability and Hugh’s, making her doubly a victim, of murder and of an oppressive system? Doc characterizes his abortion services as helping “poor little girls” who need it, but he’s an avaricious drunk as well, so what do we do with that? What does the novel suggest justice – a just outcome – to her murder would include? It is not clear to me that Hughes is making the case that this just society includes safe, legal abortions, but she does include plenty of markers for how their inaccessibility puts women in danger.
In terms of race, obviously we were not debating whether racism is OK or not! And it’s obvious in this novel that the bad guys are racist white guys. One thing we considered (drawing on the articles I’d read) was what kind of man Hugh is and what that means – for example, he is not an activist, not someone who is trying to fight the system but instead someone who (as he says) is not looking for trouble but trying to get out of it. And yet he can’t avoid it, which helps highlight the irrationality and injustice (you can “do everything right” and it won’t matter) of the society he is living in – and then we see him get angrier and more willing to be violent, which is also interesting. So we are trying to articulate the novel’s politics, I suppose would be the way to put it, not debating issues in the abstract. I think that makes it possible to have discussions grounded in textual details, and students seem pretty willing to engage on those terms.
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Fair enough. Just wondering as, from what I’ve read online, students today seem reluctant to get involved in ethical debates in class. Good to hear that your class seems to work, anyway 😉
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Speaking of perking up Middlemarch with some images, I came across these recently and thought of your attachment to the book. Although I’m not sure perking up is something they’d be good at.
https://restlessbooks.org/blog/preview-middlemarch-illustrations
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I found this a fascinating post. I’m not interested in mystery and detective fiction so my initial thoughts were that I couldn’t imagine taking a course in it and that it would be a waste of precious opportunity to study literature at university.
But as I read your post, I could see that I was wrong to be dismissive about it. The detective fiction that I have read, is by Agatha Christie, and for me, it’s the class issues that arise when all those plots are set in Big Houses, with domestic staff and a clodhopper policeman wearing boots instead of shoes. It’s the same with the ‘cosy crime’ stories that are being reissued at the moment… reading those nostalgic all-white novels is a way of avoiding difficult issues of policing in Britain. But I can see that teaching detective fiction set in America raises very different issues, and it looks like a great way to introduce students to interrogating race in the literature that they read.
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I’ve been teaching this course for over 20 years and writing about it here for nearly as long, so I will try not to take it personally that you assumed I had been wasting everybody’s time! 🙂
Detective fiction is a genre with a long history and a wide range of subgenres, each with its own conventions to be exemplified or subverted. Because crime fiction is always about a moment where something goes wrong, it is always bringing us up against failures – of society, of justice, of relationships, of character. Like any kind of fiction, it has the capacity to be very smart and interesting about its subjects or not, depending on the skills of the writers. P. D. James said she intended to move away from crime fiction but found its discipline useful, the very basic plot requirements providing a structure for any kind of character and thematic development she wanted to pursue. American crime fiction definitely engages with social and historical contexts, but it’s not the only place where race (or gender or other issues of what we now call ‘social justice’) come up. The Moonstone is all about these questions, and imperialism and religion.
I do teach Agatha Christie in this course too, and there’s plenty to say about her novels as specific kinds of crime fiction (with its challenges and its limitations, for writer and reader) and as literary phenomena. It makes little sense for universities to ignore an author whose books have outsold pretty much everyone else’s, as if they cannot be of interest to scholarship. One of the things we talk a lot about in this course is finding the right framing questions: these might (or might not) be different for genre fiction than they are for “literary” fiction – itself a distinction we consider and complicate over and over, or at least that is what I try to use this class for! It’s fun but I believe – of course, or I wouldn’t keep teaching it – it is also intellectually substantive.
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No, no, no, no … I only thought that initially! Only in paragraph one!
In my defence, my Lit studies were forty years ago, when the idea of teaching any kind of genre fiction in a university arts course was never contemplated. Yours is the first explanation I’ve ever seen that made me realise that it could be worthwhile. And intellectually deserving its place in an arts course.
I was just trying to say, in a ham-fisted way that you’d wrought a great change in my thinking about this.
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Thanks, Lisa! Honestly, I did not take it personally, though I also thought it might be interesting if I sketched out a bit more about why I do think it’s an intellectually interesting genre. I appreciate that you changed your mind! Just think how many more books this might make you want to read now. 🙂
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Don’t tempt me!
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If you ever want recommendations, hit me up!
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I enjoyed reading all this (even without the pictures heheh). All the changes you’ve made to the reading sound great to me. Even though I am usually very strict about reading mystery series in order, I couldn’t find Mosley’s earlier books when I began, so I have been all over the place (his Leonid McGill series was easier to locate because it’s more recent) and when I was choosing projects for this year though it might be fun to go back and read them “properly”. But it’s March now, and I’ve had to use my ILLs for other things so far. Maybe 2025… (Oh, and I loved Blanche on the Lam!)
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I’m a bit embarrassed to say I have never gone on to read any more of Mosley’s books – just for my own taste, they are not quite my ‘thing,’ and a bit paradoxically maybe I read a lot less crime fiction now than I used to. I have wondered if spending so much time (I teach this class almost every single year!) going over and over its classics and conventions has worn away my enthusiasm for it as a form, just a bit. I do keep up with specific series I have a long investment in, like Elizabeth George or Tana French – and I do keep poking around for new possibilities for the class.
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Funny, I just started A Rage in Harlem. As usual I am greatly enjoying Himes’s grotesque Harlem. Expendable Man is on my list; very interesting to hear how it “teaches.”
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Rereading it for class confirmed my initial impression that artistically it is not as good as In A Lonely Place – it is less subtle, at least once you get past the remarkably unnerving opening section and all the issues are out in the open.
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Yes, past the halfway point I can see that. Cotton Comes to Harlem was similar, wonderfully audacious to begin but less surprising as it goes along.
Now, Blind Man with a Pistol, that one is different. (I’ve read Himes out of order).
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