Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by W. Russel Gray

When it comes to law-breaking for a just cause, Rawlins has an affinity to the series hero of Robert B. Parker's seventh Spenser adventure, Early Autumn (1981). Spenser is guided by the situational ethics of many fictional sleuths; Rawlins's escapades arguably manifest the practicality and expedience that oppressed people learn the hard way. In A Red Death, he holds his own in opting for natural as opposed to legal statutory justice. Despite his commendable wartime combat record, Easy must remain on guard against racism. He conducts himself as Spenser might, were Spenser black. Parker's creation of a memorable black sidekick for Spenser in Hawk, an occasional leg breaker and hit man, shows insight into the predicament of the urban black underclass. In a radio interview, Parker further demonstrated his awareness: "I intend Hawk to be practical in a way that most people who have been oppressed are practical.... Blacks are more practical than whites in terms of matters of expedience as opposed to matters of scruple ... because they've learned what's important the hard way ("Fresh Air").

Neither Spenser nor Rawlins is deterred by the illegality of breaking and entering. For example, Spenser uses a shim to get into the apartment of a custody-violating father and later burgles the father's files and, in a separate incident, the mother's financial records. These break-ins produce blackmail leverage to free an adolescent from abusive parents. No slouch himself at illegal entry to secure clues, Rawlins breaks into a junkyard and discovers secreted papers used to set up two of his acquaintances. Also, prying open the lock of another acquaintance's house produces incriminating financial notes.

More seriously, Spenser and Rawlins employ intimidation and even become unintended accessories to homicide. Spenser manhandles a small-time crook to connect a fire insurance broker to an underworld boss. After his murderous sidekick Mouse kidnaps Easy's treacherous real estate manager, Rawlins participates in an unfriendly interrogation. A gallant Spenser roughs up the mobster who terrifies his significant other, then Hawk kills him, explaining that, alive, the humiliated mob boss would be even more dangerous. Similarly, in his Griffith Park attempted extortion of a triple murderer whom he already has framed, Easy is almost killed. As luck would have it, Mouse is nearby to blow away the renegade IRS murderer and shakedown artist.

Their adept uses of extralegal tactics place Spenser and Rawlins squarely in the hard-boiled tradition. Typically, argues LeRoy Panek, hard-boiled heroes react against "absolutes, authority, and power" and are attuned to "the conflict between statute law and natural law" (219). Richard Schnickel explains the resultant vigilantism as a consequence of law enforcement organizations' being "too dumb, [too] numb, or [too] crooked" (273), to which Easy and other blacks, real and constructed, would add, "too racist."

The convention of extralegality for a just cause antedates the advent of hard-boiled heroes. End-runs around the law were familiar detective genre elements even before such characters were called "detectives." In "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" (1841) Poe's C. Auguste Dupin excuses from legal responsibility a material witness who did not come forward when an innocent man was accused of the grotesque killings actually committed by the witness's pet orangutan. Furthermore, in "The Purloined Letter" Dupin steals a stolen letter after staging a peace-disturbing distraction outside, as Sherlock Holmes does in "A Scandal in Bohemia."