Photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images (1970)
Sample of authors
Himes, Chester
Chester Bomar Himes was among the foremost Afro-American authors, especially in terms of the way he wrote about racism in America in all its guises. He caused a great deal of attention as an author of crime fiction in France in the 1950s. However, his stories about the lives of blacks and Latinos living in urban ghettos were not beginning to be discussed seriously in the United States until...
Literary figures
Merci Rayborn
Gender: Female
Female police detective, based in Orange County in California and featured in a trilogy by T. Jefferson Parker. Merci Rayborn is young, attractive, stubborn and devoted to her work – but is dogged by misfortune. Already in the first book, she makes a mistake which leads to the death of an older colleague – and he is the father of her as-yet-unborn son. As a single mother, she solves crimes where h...