商品簡介
A lost crime classic from Clarence Cooper, Jr., a black crime writer from Detroit whose first novel, The Scene, was a literary sensation. Believed to be too raw, and possibly damaging to his literary career, The Syndicate was published under pseudonym in 1960, a hard-hitting, fast-paced story plunging into the psycho-sexual depths of a ruthless enforcer sent to retrieve syndicate money. Cooper's subsequent work fell into pulp oblivion.Cooper is a rare figure in crime fiction, a writer whose work--though always transgressive and fatalistic in its view--ranged from narrative-driven noir to more experimental forms, provoking comparison to writers as varied as Burroughs and Jim Thompson.The Syndicate, in its relentless pacing and dark humor, simmers beneath its pulp veneer with questions about racial and sexual identity that give powerful, paradoxical animation to the character's ruthless quest. This is the first U. S. Publication under the author's real name, with an afterward by Gary Phillips (The Obama Inheritance), including biographical material on Cooper, childhood friend of Malcolm X. Cooper struggled with heroin addiction most of his life, did much of his writing in jail and died on a New York street at the age of 44, alone and strung out, not far from his last known residence: the 23rd Street YMCA.
作者簡介
Clarence Cooper Jr. published six books of crime fiction, all between 1960 and 1967. These had mostly to with the harder edges of life in black America: the underworld of the urban street, of drug addiction and violence.Cooper was born in Detroit in 1934 and later lived in Chicago, after spending time in a Michigan reformatory. Sometime in the mid-1950s, while in his early twenties, he worked as an editor for The Chicago Messenger, a black newspaper, and began using heroin regularly at that time. His early work, drawing on autobiographical material, received a good deal of critical attention, but the mainstream acclaim was short-lived.Cooper’s subsequent novels, though now well regarded, ended up in the slush pile at Regency House, where most were brought to print by editor Harlan Ellison in the early sixties.Until now The Syndicate has not been published in the U.S. under Cooper’s real name, but only abroad, where--with its pulp overtones and renegade violence--it is regarded as a cult classic.Cooper did much of his writing in jail, and never fully shook his drug addition. He stopped writing in the late sixties, drifted back into street life, and died in New York in 1978.
