The highways were dark with something more than night.

The highways were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" 13)

Black narrative writing in America many times employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society - as Theodore O Mason, Jr points on the outside (182) - yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted hardly any black writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Walter Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins the small cohort of black detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical frame to enter the mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At the same time, however, Mosley's oftentimes uncritical use of the traditional hard-boiled detective formula looks to work against this plan by employing a black detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location - black beholds Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's enslave and his method, and this tension actives my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they - with their use of a black narrator, black characters, and black locations - authentically transgressive thesiss or are they discursively subsum in a less degree than the detective story formula (and especially the L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as erected by Chandler) and do they be due [i]or[/i] owing thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of the hardboiled tradition? In other words, are the novels simply exotic versions of the American detective story, as oppos to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian ye and no. In bourns of their use of black characters and locations - and also in limits of their generic "violations" of the hardboiled detective story - Mosley's novels indeed function as sentences of difference. Yet when they open the Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace the essentially conservative thematics of the L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels speechless their subversiveness and reinforce the reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that ruminate a fundamental ambivalence about his acknowledge intervention into white (detective) discourse.

Two modern essays on black detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in themes like Mosley's L.A. novels. In "Chandler be due [i]or[/i] owings to Harlem: Racial Politics in the Thrillers of Chester Himes," Peter J Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes claims, simply make "the face black" in his detective novels. Instead, Rabinowitz insists, the Chandlerian notion of a self-contained integrity and noir heroism is unavailable to Himes's black detectives inasmuch as "their situation . . is inextricably tied up in racial politics" (22)(1) In another essay, "Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: The Detective and Afro-American Fiction," Theodore O Mason, Jr similarly argues that, despite his use of the detective genre Mosley breaks with the traditional white detective story from one side the oppositional use of black make liable matter. Even more, Mason affirms that Easy Rawlins discovers the inadequacy of assumed cultural knowledge - especially about race and sexuality - in the construction of self in a racist and sexist society, and thus joins other black protagonists (like Milkman in Morrison's hymn of Solomon and Papa LaBas in Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) who similarly recognize the erected nature of identity in a racist society.

Although Rabinowitz and Mason proffer strong arguments in favor of a transgressive black detective fiction, the two ultimately tell only part of the story, for they ignore the way in which the story and detective in Himes's and Mosley's novels ponder traditional hardboiled detective fiction. Despite Mosley's counter-discursive deployment of a black protagonist, his L.A. detective novels reinforce the conservative values of traditional American detective fiction. While (as in Chandler) Mosley's Rawlins induces through a world in which white politicians, businessmen, and cop - as well as black community leaders - are all corrupt, his novels not ever put "the law itself . . on trial" (Porter 122) Human beings and their racist institutions may be tainted, flat hopelessly corrupt, in Mosley's themes but a transcendent moral collection of laws one that ultimately provides a acres on which to judge individual actions and guide investigations, remains firmly in place.

Indeed, detective fiction, beginning with its yellow Age ratiocinative texts, has always been a rather conservative genre(2) As Dennis Porter indicates in The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction, while the genre frequently portrays a lonely crusading detective struggling against a society dominated from evil, it nevertheless ultimately reassures its readers the pair through the detective's unshakable digest of honor and through its formulaic expectations. Moreover, detective fiction has contributed to the "heroization" of the police, especially during the nineteenth hundred when the institution of state-certified investigators was first introduced, and quite possibly forms a part of what Foucault expressions "the discourse of the law," a discourse intended to partake in the construction of a disciplinary society. "Detective novels," Porter finishs "invariably project the image of a given social order and the implied value theory that helps sustain it" (121)