Marginal Man and Hard-Boiled Detective: Racial Passing in Robert Skinner’s Wesley Farrell SeriesPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2011-06-24 05:20Z by Steven |
Marginal Man and Hard-Boiled Detective: Racial Passing in Robert Skinner’s Wesley Farrell Series
Clues: A Journal of Detection
Volume 26, Number 3 (Spring 2008)
pages 56-69
DOI: 10.3172/CLU.26.3.56
Sinéad Moynihan, Lecturer in English
University of Exeter
The author argues that tropes of detection and racial passing are mutually compatible in Robert Skinner’s six New Orleans-set mysteries. Set in the 1930s, they feature Wesley Farrell, a businessman-turned-sleuth who is passing as white. A passing plot coupled with a murder mystery foreground the issues of detection, evidence and clues, guilt, confession, exposure, and the often gross disparity between law and justice.