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I don't often read short stories, not even crime ones. No particular reason, aside from preferring writers to have a broad canvas to work on. Or maybe I've had bad experiences with others either shoehorning a quart into a pint pot (and no, I don't know what the metric equivalent of that expression is!) or producing a slight item that really wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Having got that off my chest, I can report that the standard in SHADES OF BLACK: CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS is generally very high. Editor Eleanor Taylor Bland has a broad array of stories at her disposal, most of which are tightly-written examples of the genre. I admit here and now that I must have some sort of bizarre fixation about trains, as the two stories that worked best for me in the anthology were ones with railway themes. Frankie Y Bailey's Since You Went Away is set in March 1946 on a New Orleans to Chicago train, with the demobbing of troops going on all around. Walter Lee Stuart is a sleeping car attendant who solves a classic closed circle of people murder. Murder on the Southwest Chief, written by Eleanor Taylor Bland and son Anthony (he's obviously got as good an ear for dialogue as mum!), is in a similar vein, but set in the modern day and featuring Taylor Bland's Detective Marti MacAlister. Both these stories stand out, as they have compelling central characters with strong voices, and a focussed plot. Short story writers have so little time and space in which to grab us by the collar, shake us around a little, dust us down and return us to our seat. One or two of the writers in the anthology haven't quite grasped that in the shrunk-down form, you can't hang around -- Chris Benson's Double Dealing never got out of first gear for me. And there's Small Colored World by Terris McMahan Grimes where I loved the distinctive voice of the narrator and her scary mother, but wasn't so enamoured of the plodding plot. If you want voice, go for The Secret of the 369th Infantry Nurse by Patricia E Canterbury. It features the 11-year-old Triplets -- three best friends living in a 1920s coastal village -- and had me smiling at how girls bond the world over, whilst seeing mysteries all around them. Canterbury has written three novels using the characters, and they sound like they'd be worth tracking down. There's only one true stinker in the whole book, which isn't bad by the law of averages. Charles Shipps' God of the Pond has clunky, unrealistic dialogue and a totally forced plot and had me muttering 'no, please, don't let him finish it like that, please no, oh hell, he has!' Walter Mosley's Bombardier is, as you might expect, a little gem. And I was very intrigued by the late Hugh Holton, a high-ranking Chicago policeman who also wrote crime fiction. The anthology is an excellent calling card to raise the profile of black writers, and also provided me with a list of those I'd want to catch up with again.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, March 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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