NEW YORK (AP) – In “Underground Airlines,” an upcoming novel by Ben Winters, a black bounty hunter rides through a poor neighborhood in Indianapolis alongside a white policeman.
“As we crossed Broad Ripple Avenue,” Winters writes, “we passed a small knot of black kids, laughing and walking together on the narrow sidewalk; one of them, a short kid pushing a bike, wore a hoodie pulled low over his eyes. Cook slowed down and gave a blurp of the siren, gestured at the kid to make sure his face was showing. I caught the kid in the mirror with his middle finger aloft, a miniature of impotent rage frozen in the side-view as we drove away.”
Winters could imagine the scene simply by following the news. The wave of police killings that helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement is also influencing a genre that captured tensions between police and non-white communities well before the rise of social media and cellphone videos. Publishers and writers say that story lines known to readers of Gary Phillips or Walter Mosley or Eleanor Taylor Bland will likely become more common and intense.
“When you’re writing a book, you’re not in an isolation chamber,” said Winters, who in “Underground Airlines” depicts slavery still being legal in the U.S.
“This particular issue has long and faithfully been represented in crime fiction,” said Joshua Kendall, editor-in-chief of the crime fiction imprint Mulholland Books, Winters’ publisher. “It’s simply that much of the fiction has been overlooked, just as the actual rate of abuse overlooked by media until now. That said, we need and want more fiction about it. The curiosity, concern and appetite seem to have finally grown.”