Across the Curriculum with Detective Fiction for Young People and Adults

Rationale

One of my objectives in teaching this unit is to get my students thinking about ways in which two of the overarching themes in my American Literature curriculum, The American Dream and Taking a Stand, are relevant to the detective novels we will read, so that this unit will arise organically from what has come before rather than appear as an add-on that breaks away from the continuity of the rest of the course. I think a little context and background about the semester-long American Literature course I usually teach will be helpful here, as I know many high school teachers who are interested in the material presented in this unit probably approach American Literature similarly and may be wondering how to make four works of 20th century detective fiction fit.

I have always taken a traditional approach to teaching 11th grade American Literature. I start with the Native Americans who first inhabited what later came to be called North America, and I work my way through the early European explorers and colonists to the slave narratives and on up to the twentieth century, touching upon the major periods of American literature in between. Everything is taught in chronological order, emphasizing the historical context out of which the literature arises. As mentioned above, a couple of themes I ask the students to think about as the course progresses are The American Dream and Taking a Stand.

My take on the American Dream, however, is somewhat untraditional. Because of my own interests and biases, I ask the students to think about people outside the American mainstream for whom the Dream is very difficult or even impossible to achieve. I also ask them to consider what the American Dream might mean to different people. Where do the many goals of a diverse country intersect and where do they diverge? How is success defined by different racial, ethnic, religious, and socio-economic groups? Is the meaning of success different for a woman than it is for a man? Are all Americans striving for different variations of the American Dream or are there many different American Dreams? (A subtle but real distinction lies in those two possibilities.)

Our second theme, Taking a Stand, is based on the idea that there are people in American society who are alienated from the mainstream and for whom achieving material or economic success (i.e. the conventional notion of the American Dream) is secondary to or completely overshadowed by the struggle for social acceptance, respect, and/or equality. People of color, women, unskilled and undereducated persons, and mentally disabled persons are among those who may fall into this category. Because many of my students and their immediate families are themselves racial or ethnic minorities, and because all my students attend a vocational school that is preparing them to become part of the workforce rather than the intellectual and economic elite, I strongly believe that I must share with these students the stories of Americans before them who had to struggle with some of the same obstacles with which they will have to struggle.

So how does detective fiction fit into this picture? Surprisingly well. The four authors I have chosen to focus on in this unit write about characters that belong to a more or less marginalized segment of the population: Native Americans in the case of Tony Hillerman, African-Americans in the novels of Barbara Neely and Walter Mosley, and women in the rural south in the case of Sharyn McCrumb. While some of these authors explicitly critique mainstream society's treatment of their protagonists, others like Hillerman take a quieter approach to this theme while exposing readers to a marginalized segment of the American landscape (both human and geographical) that, especially for urban and suburban East Coast kids, is normally inaccessible to them. While the mystery element is the hook that grabs and holds the students' interest, the explicit or implicit social commentary on American life presented by these novels is built into the lessons.

As we get into the specific novels, I will ask the students to think about the particular subset of the population with which the novel concerns itself and how the members of that subset, including the protagonists, see themselves in relation to the traditional notion of The American Dream. Regarding our other theme, Taking a Stand, I will ask students how the protagonists in each unit take official and personal stands and if these stands ever conflict with one another. Since our protagonists are outside the mainstream of society, one might expect them to take personal stands that do not necessarily uphold the values, traditions, or conventions of the majority. This is particularly interesting and tricky when our protagonist is acting in an official (i.e. mainstream) capacity as a member of a law enforcement agency or as a professional private investigator or attorney-at-law.

Because they are set in the 20th century, I do envision and recommend focusing on these novels toward the end of the American Literature course if the course is taught chronologically, but the books could also be assigned earlier in the course to be read independently while the class is working its way along the literary and historical timeline to the 20th century. Much of the early American literature I cover consists of excerpts and short stories we read entirely in class, so it should not be burdensome for students to have outside independent reading to do along the way. There is also the question of whether to assign all students all four novels or to divide the class into two reading groups, each of which reads two novels, or four reading groups, each of which reads one. The strategies and classroom activities in this unit are flexible enough to allow for any of these possibilities, and teachers should decide what would work best in their particular circumstances.

Another objective I have in creating and teaching this unit is meeting Delaware's state standards for English Language Arts. Detective fiction is ideally suited to many these standards. I will only list a few of the most obvious and relevant here:

1. (a) Students will be able to demonstrate an overall understanding of printed texts by making predictions as needed
2. (b)L Students will be able to demonstrate an overall understanding of literary texts by identifying story elements (e.g. characters, setting, plot) and story structures (conflict, resolution, cause/effect)
3. (g) Students will be able to demonstrate an overall understanding of printed texts by comparing information between and within texts
4. (a) Students will be able to connect their own experience to those of literary characters; explain the reasons for a character's actions; identify with characters
5. (c) Students will be able to connect their own experiences to those of literary characters by relating to the feelings of characters of varying ages, genders, races, cultures, religions, and disabilities
6. (a) Students will be able to respond to literary texts by making inferences about content, events, characters, setting, mood, theme, tone, and author's decisions such as formatting and use of dialogue, dialect, and figurative language
7. (b) Students will be able to understand social and political issues