SOURCE: "From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley," in College Literature, October, 1995, pp. 68-90.

In the following essay, Crooks analyzes the frontier mentality in the detective fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.

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. By 1890 the western frontier as a geographical space had disappeared, and "the frontier" as signifier was now cut adrift, its attachment to past, present, and future conceptual spaces a matter of debate. Indeed, for Turner himself the signifier slides significantly, sometimes figuring as a place where European-American settlement or colonization of North America ends, but also as a conceptual space, a shifting no-man's-land between European-and Native-American cultures, and finally, ideologically, as a "meeting point between savagery and civilization."

Other conceptual...