The Jones Men was a thrilling novel to discover. A lost “cult” novel from the 1970s, written by veteran journalist Vern E. Smith, it is a story of the drug trade on the streets of Detroit, and it absolutely blew me away when I read it forty years after its initial publication. The novel crackles…
Filmmaker and sometime mystery writer Nelson George (The Plot Against Hip Hop and Night Work) wrote a commentary in the February 15, 2013, New York Times, “Still Too Good, Too Bad or Invisible.” The piece focused on the portrayal of black leading men in recent movies, including Quentin Tarantino’s lauded and lambasted Django Unchained, for…
I have a favorite crime writer. I bet you’ve heard of him. But you may not be able to come up with his name. Here, have a sample and see if you can guess who it is: Well it’s 9th and Hennepin and all the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes and the moon’s…
