Signifyin' Hagar's Daughter
...the detectives in early classic crime fiction were almost invariably white because:
[T]he hero or heroine must be able to probe into the lives of the people involved in the criminal event. For an author to suggest that a black might be allowed to engage in this type of activity in a white community in which psychological and physical boundaries restricted black movement was ludicrous. (xii)
Bailey refers here to the perceptions of the White crime fiction community, of course. Classical crime fiction writers inserted their detective characters into the (generally upper/middle class) suspects' lives almost exclusively through the front door. A man of independent means like Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin, or a University man like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, or a genteel little old lady like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, or an aristocrat like Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, could gain the entrée into almost any house in the country (members of the working classes being only too happy to see such exalted persons in their homes, of course). Such writers as Poe, Doyle, Christie, and Sayers considered themselves "ladies" and "gentlemen," and wrote primarily of "ladies" and "gentlemen," for "ladies" and "gentlemen," with lower-class and non-White characters marginalized, stereotyped, and often exaggerated to amuse their target audiences.
The later, "hard-boiled" detectives (almost exclusively male as well as White), like Dashiell Hammet's Sam Spade, could either bully their way into the crime arena, or get hired by rich and gorgeous sex objects who provided the entrée.
Black crime fiction writers, beginning with Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (in Hagar's Daughter, the first Black-written detective story), often solve the problem of universal access to suspects' lives through the kitchen door. Their Black detectives disguise themselves, usually as servants, thus...
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