"The Queen City Detective Agency"

Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop and Play Pretty Blues. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, and the New York Daily News, among other publications. A former Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“They were worried about the black-and-white police cruiser that had been parked across the street for hours.”

The Page 69 Test works well for my book.

Page 69 concludes Chapter Eight of The Queen City Detective Agency. The sentence above is the only complete one on the page.

Set in 1980s Mississippi, Queen City follows the private detective Clementine Baldwin, a former cop, as she investigates a high-profile murder. Chapter Eight ends with Clem waking up to realize that the DA’s office assigned a squad car to watch her apartment—not out of suspicion but concern for her safety. They’re afraid the Dixie Mafia will seek retaliation against the PI handling the case.

The last line of the chapter invokes the fraught relationship many people have with the police. The “they” who are worried about the police cruiser across the street are Clem’s neighbors, and as we learn in the next chapter, her neighbors, like Clem herself, are Black.

Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner...

Although Queen City takes places thirty years before the Black Lives Matter movement, I did my best to conjure it, a sort of ghost from the future. Writers of historical fiction often succumb to anachronistic virtue—making their historical protagonists improbably, if not impossibly progress-minded and pure-hearted—but the issues rooted in Black Lives Matter are, unfortunately, perennial. I couldn’t cite the moment by name, of course, but I could address racially motivated violence an discrimination committed by those who are supposed to protect and serve.

The line on page 69 is one of many like it in Queen City. A primary crux of the novel concerns how Clem Baldwin’s allegiances, as a woman of color and as a former badge, are pulled in two directions. She has faith in the law but also knows how often it’s broken by the very people meant to uphold it.

Visit Snowden Wright's website.

The Page 69 Test: American Pop.

My Book, The Movie: The Queen City Detective Agency.

--Marshal Zeringue