Snowden Wright's "The Queen City Detective Agency," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Queen City Detective Agency: A Novel by Snowden Wright.

The entry begins:

My mind’s eye is a fountain of youth. It magically keeps actors the same age as when I first encountered them. For that reason, whenever I try to imagine which actors should play the co-leads in my latest novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, I think of ones who’ve aged out of the two parts: Sanaa Lathan and Steve Zahn, for example, or Thandiwe Newton and Norman Reedus.

In those pairs of examples, you probably noticed a specific racial coupling. There’s a reason why.

The central protagonist of Queen City is the private investigator Clementine Baldwin, a young Black woman and former cop. Clem’s a pragmatist at heart. In her early years as a PI, she quickly realized that as a Black woman in 1980s Mississippi, she wasn’t granted much authority by the white people she encountered during her investigations. To contend with such deeply ingrained racism, Clem hired a “prop” to stand beside her as she questioned witnesses, interviewed clients, and navigated the bureaucracy of city hall: a lunkhead of a white guy, as she at first calls him. Dixon Hicks may be a lunkhead, but he and Clem soon grow closer than she expected. By the start of the novel, they’ve reached a genuine partnership, one of mutual respect and camaraderie. Consider Hicks a Watson to Baldwin’s Holmes.

Although Sanaa Lathan and Thandiwe Newton would be great for Clem—as would Reedus and Zahn for Dixon—I feel it’s important to...[read on]

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

--Marshal Zeringue