The woman on the cover of Ed Lacy’s, aka Leonard Zinberg’s 1952 novel Sin in Their Blood is supposed to be dead, but we kind of like our alternate interpretation that she’s clowning around. Whether dead or joking, though, based on the art you’d never guess the book is about a rightwing organization extorting a black man who’s passing as white—thus the sin in his blood—but that’s exactly what’s at the crux of this tale. Lacy, who was white, dealt with African American issues quite a lot. He’s actually credited by some with inventing the first black private eye—Toussaint Marcus Moore. The first Moore novel, 1957’s Room To Swing, won an Edgar Award—crime fiction’s top honor.
African American subject matter was important to Lacy. From the earliest years of his career he explored racial issues, for instance in 1940’s Walk Hard—Talk Loud, which is about a black prizefighter. During the 1950s he was married to a black woman and lived in Harlem, so he was always writing what he observed personally. Harlem is where he blossomed as a writer, where he lived much of his life, and where he died in 1968. Today Lacy is remembered as an important contributor to crime fiction, and we recommend his work. As a side note, the above cover would have fit perfectly into this collection, one of the most interesting groups we’ve shared over years, we think. And for good measure you can see another in the same style here.
