This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.

Shortly after the publication of Native Son, literary critics began to assume that Richard Wright was the head of a group of authors who emulated his literary style. Critics of the 1940s and 1950s included in this group, which they dubbed “The Blues School” or “The Wright School of Postwar Negro Fiction,” authors like Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and, prior to the publication of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. This chapter will throw a new perspective on the relationship between Ellison and Wright, by investigating how Ellison positioned himself vis-à-vis the critical claim that he was a member of “The Wright School.”