SOURCE: Crooks, Robert. “From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.” College Literature 22, no. 3 (October 1995): 68-90.

In the following essay, Crooks examines the crime fiction of Mosley and Chester Himes, applying ideas about the American frontier myth to each author's representations of race.

Western Frontier and Urban Frontier

They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don't care if there's no bread over on your side. They don't care if you die. And … when you try to come from behind your line they kill you.

(Wright 407)

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” marked a watershed for the European-American version of the history of North America.¹ By 1890 the western frontier as a geographical space had disappeared, and “the frontier” as signifier was now cut adrift...