5/26/2023 0 Comments The Real Lolita by Sarah WeinmanThat story may have been true, or it may have been a clever marketing ploy to heighten interest for readers at the time. IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT by John Ball Penguin Classics, 176 pp. Ball had said he’d conjured up the idea as far back as 1933, while making an itinerant living as a magician working the coasts, but claimed he had to wait for a more hospitable time in America to write it. The best thing about John Ball’s 1965 detective novel In the Heat of the Nightmay be its setup: While visiting the South, a black homicide investigator from Pasadena reluctantly joins forces with the town’s racist white police chief to solve a murder, and both gain a grudging respect for the other in the process. MacManus may have had good intentions, but those, Allison wrote, “are seldom consistent with the harsh facts of history.” The history of this matter is well documented - so well documented that those who are informed can tell at a glance who knows and who is guessing. You have to know Negro life as Negroes live it - and they live on numerous political, economic, social, and intellectual levels growing out of cause-and-effect patterns, the character of which is historical. When you begin handling Negroes as major characters in fiction you immediately enter into that big and enormous and important and most complex area of American life called the Negro Question - where no answer can be secured from any part of that question if conjecture is allowed to play even a small part.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |