NORMAN KELLEY – Black Heat.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, 2002. First Edition: Cool Grove, trade ppbk, 1997. Reprint hardcover: Amistad Press (HarperCollins), 2001.

   I need some help here. If you can think of another series detective novel as focused on black power politics as this one is, let me know. Black Heat is the first appearance of former Brooklyn-based prosecutor turned private eye Nina Halligan, who is both female and black.

   (The second is The Big Mango (Akashic Books, 2000), and I’m glad to know that there is a second one, because after over 300 pages of small print and letting it all out in the first one, I thought perhaps Kelley had left himself with nothing more to say.)

   Nina is hired to find the daughter of the widow of an assassinated black leader of the 1970s, Sister Ronnie, a former movie star, who has been in a mental institution for the last two decades, unable to withstand the pressures on her as a grief-stricken black Madonna.

   In the meantime the legacy of Dr. Malik Martin, her husband, has been fractured and split between two opposing groups of black power activists, one ultra-conservative, anti-rap and anti-feminism, the other more progressive, but each with guns, firepower and the motivation for wiping the other from the face of the nation.

   The pace of the first three-quarters of the book is slowed by the huge amount of expository dumps needed to fill in the background, and a list of characters is badly needed to keep them all straight.

    Even worse, the continuity is severely marred — if you’re trying to read this a detective mystery — by ever-changing statements of who admitted to what, and when.

   Nina Halligan, who tells her own story, is a tough person to identify with, with a mercurial temperament and obsessed with finding the killers of her murdered husband and two children.

   Not that she has much time to spare for the latter, as all her energy is diverted to the ever-growing case at hand. Streetwise and violent, and nearly out of control by the end, this is not a story to which you can cuddle up and relax with.

   Perhaps unique in the world of detective fiction, with lots of jagged edges, this won’t be a book for everyone, but the strong images it invokes are designed to stay with you for a while — and ignoring any of its flaws — I guarantee you that they will.

[UPDATE] 01-17-09. Taken from an online biography: “Norman Kelley is an independent journalist [and] author [who] has written for L A Weekly, The Village Voice, The Nation, [and] Newsday [among others].

    “He is also the author of the ‘noir soul’/ mystery series that features ‘Nina Halligan’ in Black Heat (Amistad), The Big Mango (Akashic Books), and A Phat Death (2003).

    “Norman Kelley was also a contributing writer to Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Books, 2004) and DC Noir (Akashic Books, 2006). […] He edited and contributed to R&B (Rhythm and Business): The Political Economy of Black Music (Akashic Books, 2005).”