Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (43 page)

“Fuck me!” Loomis screamed in a furious rage.

“Yeah, I suppose we have done just that.”

No children, no money, and no wife. Loomis thought; only a few hours ago, he had felt secure and hopeful. It was all over now. He felt like crying, but what good were tears? He was literally out for blood now. There was nothing left for Loomis to think about but murder.

“You're going to die, you motherless bastard,” Loomis promised.

“Aren't we all, someday? Judy, Judy, Judy.” He concluded. “No one's to blame. She actually suspected that you knew all along, but you were so busy detecting everything but her affair, you never had a clue. You simply had a Glitch in the computer.”

Frankie Y. Bailey
is a faculty member in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany. Her area of research is crime and culture focusing on two areas: crime history and crime and mass media/popular culture. She is the author of the Edgar-nominated
Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction.
She is the coeditor of
Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice.
She is the coauthor of
“Law Never Here”: A Social History of African American Responses to Issues of Crime and Justice.
She and Donna C. Hale are the coauthors of the forthcoming book,
Blood on Her Hands: The Special Construction of Women, Sexuality, and Murder.
As a mystery writer, she is the author of
Death's Favorite Child
and
A Dead Man's Honor,
featuring criminal justice professor/crime historian Lizzie Stuart. Bailey is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Association of Crime Writers, and Romance Writers of America. Her most recent work is the third Lizzie Stuart mystery,
Old Murders.

Jacqueline Turner Banks
currently has two series of novels: one of young adults novels and one of adult mysteries. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and her screenwriting work has won her honorable mention for two separate scripts. Her videoscript
Black People Get AIDS Too,
won numerous awards, including the Bronze Award for best documentary at the National Film Festival and an honorable mention at the Black Filmmakers' Hall of Fame. The film was also screened as an award presentation at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Her young adult novels have received many awards as well. Her fourth novel in the juvenile series,
A Day for Vincent Chin and Me
, is nominated for the state award in Oklahoma and North Carolina. She is currently marketing an adult fantasy series.

A Chicago-based writer and lawyer,
Chris Benson
has worked as a city hall reporter in Chicago for an area radio station and as Washington editor for
Ebony.
His articles also have appeared in
Jet, Chicago,
and
Reader's Digest
magazines. In addition to his journalism experience, Chris has worked as a promotional writer and as a speechwriter for several Washington, D.C., politicians, including former U.S.
Representative Harold Washington, and as press secretary for former U.S. Representative Cardiss Collins. As an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), he taught magazine article writing, with an emphasis on literary journalism—using the best techniques of fiction, including character development, descriptive narrative, and theme, to add depth and texture to nonfiction writing. Chris is coauthor of
Death of Innocence,
Mamie Till-Mobley's story about the life and death of her son, Emmett Till, and the love that helped her survive. Chris also has written
Special Interest,
a Washington-based suspense thriller, and is at work on the sequel,
Damage Control.
In “Double Healing,” the short story included in this anthology, Chris wanted to play with the compression of time and space to intensify the suspense. The story unfolds in roughly a thirty-minute time span on a gritty urban street in Little Beirut, as the protagonist considers everything that led to yet another bloody murder, hoping that nobody—the legal gangbangers, the police—will figure out what really brought him to that spot on the block.

Eleanor Taylor Bland
says, “I just completed the eleventh novel in the Marti MacAlister mystery series. I always have material for at least three more novels floating around inside my head and dozens of characters waiting to get out and be given a voice. Marti is a joy to write about, the perfect protagonist. I never feel any constraints. I can write a novel that is cozy or suspenseful, a puzzle or a thriller. I can include social issues that are important to me. I can depict Marti's family life as wholesome and caring, while allowing family members to be their less than perfect selves. They are a stable contrast to the central plot, which generally depicts families that are dysfunctional and villains who tend to be sociopaths or psychopaths. Many of you know my son, Anthony Bland. He has been traveling to fan conventions with me since he was four years old. Anthony is fifteen now. He was twelve when the non-fictional elements of “Murder on the Southwest Chief” took place. He's been keeping travel journals over the years, and his jottings, recollections, and somewhat sinister mind provided major contributions to the story.”

Patricia E. Canterbury,
is a native Sacramentan and holds BA/MA degrees from the California State University in Sacramento. Patricia is the assistant executive officer for the State of California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors and is a political scientist, award-winning poet, award-winning short story writer, and novelist. As a political scientist she was a member of the 1985 United Nations Women's Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Her speech, “Women and the Family Farm” is part of the permanent United Nations archives.
The Secret of St. Gabriel's Tower
is her first published novel, the first of the proposed Poplar Cove Mysteries series. Her great-grandfather was a merchant in Sacramento the day that gold was discovered. Patricia won the 1989 Georgia Poetry Chapbook contest for her
collection of poetry
Shadowdrifters, Images of China.
She is married to Richard Canterbury, a short story writer, and they live in Sacramento with their pets: three cats, a red Doberman who thinks he's a cat, one fresh-water and one salt-water aquarium, and a vicious parakeet named Spike. She has been published in numerous poetry journals throughout the United States and is hard at work on the next Poplar Cove Mystery.

Christopher Chambers
is a Washington, D.C., native who served four years as an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, before turning to teaching communications at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C. His critically acclaimed debut mystery-thriller novel,
Sympathy for the Devil
(Crown, 2001) has been followed by
A Prayer for Deliverance
(Crown, 2003). He's served on panels with such masters as Donald Westlake and Stuart Kaminsky; he is active with the National Association of Black Journalists and the Mystery Writers of America. He resides in Maryland with his sweetheart, Dianne.

Tracy Clark
is the author of two as-yet unpublished novels,
Hard Promises
and
Borrowed Time.
She is currently working on her third novel,
Into Temptation
. She lives and writes in Chicago.

Publishers Weekly
says, “
Evelyn Coleman
knows how to keep the pages turning in her inventive, funny, assured debut thriller,
What A Woman's Gotta Do
from Simon & Schuster.” Optioned by the Academy Award–winning producer of the movies
The Peacemaker
and
Deep Impact, What a Woman's Gotta Do
is now in paperback from Dell. Coleman also has two highly praised juvenile mysteries with the Pleasant Company's American Girl History Mystery series. Coleman is the past president of Mystery Writers of America, SE, the 2002 Georgia Author of the Year in Children's Literature, a King Baudouin Cultural Exchange Fellowship recipient, and a former winner of the Atlanta Mayor's Fiction Award. Coleman was also the first African-American in North Carolina Arts Council's ten-year history to win one of their fiction fellowships.

Grace F. Edwards
was born and raised in Harlem and is the author of the Mali Anderson mystery series. She is a member of the Harlem Writers Guild and currently teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College. Her Harlem-based mystery series has been adapted for television at CBS, featuring Queen Latifah as the intrepid sleuth.

Robert Greer,
author of the C.J. Floyd mystery series
The Devil's Hatband, The Devil's Red Nickel, the Devil's Backbone, Limited Time,
a medical thriller, and a short story collection,
Isolations and Other Stories,
lives in Denver, where he is a practicing surgical pathologist, research scientist, and professor of pathology and
medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. His short stories have appeared in numerous national literary magazines, and two recent short story anthologies showcasing Western fiction. He also edits the
High Plains Literary Review,
reviews books for National Public Radio, and raises Black Baldy cattle on his ranch near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. His fifth novel,
Heat Shock,
was published in 2003.

The first book in
Terris McMahan Grimes
's Theresa Galloway series,
Somebody Else's Child,
garnered an unprecedented double Anthony Award for best first mystery and best paperback original, as well as an Agatha Award nomination for best first mystery. She also won the Chester Himes Black Mystery Writers award. She began her career as a feature writer with the
Sacramento Observer
newspapers. Her current projects include a coming of age novel set in 1964 Oakland, California, a memoir, and a Negro Leagues baseball-themed novel. A native of Tucker, Arkansas, Terris grew up in Oakland, California—the home of Ebonics—and graduated from McClymonds High School. She attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated with a degree in English from California State University, Chico.

Gar Anthony Haywood
is the Shamus and Anthony Award-winning author of nine crime novels: six featuring African-American private investigator Aaron Gunner; two recounting the adventures of Joe and Dottie Loudermilk, Airstream trailer owners and beleaguered parents of five grown children from hell; and
Man Eater,
which
Publisher's Weekly
called “The best Elmore Leonard ripoff since Elmore Leonard.” He has also written for the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times,
authored scripts for television dramas, including
New York Undercover
and
The District,
and has cowritten two Movies of the Week for the ABC Television Network. He is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America's Southwest California chapter.

Hugh Holton
(1947–2001) was a captain in the Chicago Police Department and the author of seven novels featuring CPD Detective Larry Cole. He did not just try his hand at straight police procedurals, however, but incorporated science fiction or fantasy elements into his books as well. The only son of a police officer, he grew up in Woodlawn, and attended nearby Saint Anselm Elementary School and Mount Carmel High School. In July 1964, Holton joined the police department's cadet program, which had been launched to encourage young college students to join the force. Two years later he enlisted in the army for a three-year tour of duty, including a seven-month stint in Vietnam. By March 1969 he'd returned to Chicago and joined the police academy. As he was moving up in the department, he began to get interested in writing, after a lifetime of reading authors such as Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Mickey Spillane, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He enrolled in the writing program at Columbia College and the summer program of the prestigious Iowa
Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and later placed his first short story in
Detective Story
magazine. Once he began writing, he also contributed a monthly column on the police for
Mystery Scene Magazine.
His book
The Left Hand of God
won a Readers' Choice award at the Love Is Murder conference in Schaumburg, Illinois, in 1999. He passed away on May 18, 2001, just eight days after his eighth novel,
The Devil's Shadow,
was released.

Geri Spencer Hunter
is a native of Mashalltown, Iowa, and a graduate of the University of Iowa's College of Nursing. She is still active in the nursing field, working as a public health nurse. Her first novel,
Polkadots,
was published in 1998, and her second novel,
Mother's House,
was recently published as well. She is a member of the Zica Creative Arts and Literary Guild and is currently working on numerous projects in various stages of completion. She's married with children and grandchildren and lives in Sacramento, California.

Mary Jackson Scroggins
is an eclectic writer, who has published essays, articles, and short stories—literary and mystery. Her writing focuses on the unseen, underrepresented people who populate her life and on family—what constitutes one and what does not. She writes about strong, resilient, family-oriented working women and the strong but not overshadowing men with whom they partner. She is also a women's health advocate and is on the board of directors of Haiti Lumiere de Demain, a nonprofit organization that provides books for children and promotes literacy in Haiti, and on the advisory board of Washington Independent Writers, the largest regional writing group in the country. The story that appears here is an extension—not the completion—of “Dreams of Home,” which appeared in the anthology
Women on the Case.
As Dicey Scroggins Jackson, she is completing two novels, one featuring Gloria Bell in the search for her teenage daughter who disappeared from a homeless women's shelter. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband/best friend, Kwame.

Glenville Lovell
is the author of
Too Beautiful to Die,
published by Putnam, a noir mystery set in New York, starring Blades Overstreet, a black ex-cop with two white siblings, who is trying to win his estranged wife back as he maneuvers through the minefield of his dysfunctional family in his attempt to solve the murder of an FBI agent. His other two novels are
Fire in the Canes
and
Song of Night.

Lee E. Meadows
is the author of the Detroit-based mystery series featuring Lincoln Keller, Private Investigator. Both
Silent Conspiracy
and
Silent Suspicion
have received critical raves. Meadows is currently working on the third Lincoln Keller novel,
Silent Rage
. “A Small Matter” starts the adventures of his latest protagonist, Dr. Garrison Brock.