PAULA L. WOODS

Inner City Blues

Of course, as I was to later discover, many have — Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Valerie Wilson Wesley, to name just a few. But when I was collecting and editing stories for my anthology Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century, there was only one other writer — Eleanor Taylor Bland — who had created a black police detective as a protagonist. Yet it was that kind of character who intrigued me the most.

Living in Los Angeles, which has always had one of the most, shall we say, aggressive police forces in the country, I saw first-hand what it was like to be "policed." When I was five I saw my father get stopped by the LAPD and humiliated for DWB (driving while black). I was with him again when we saw white officers beating black citizens during the Watts riots in 1965. And, unfortunately, I was also front and center when the city of tarnished angels exploded in fires and freestyle shopping without a credit card in 1992.

But from the sixties to the nineties, policing in Los Angeles had changed dramatically to include officers who looked like my father, my mother, and me. But an organization's culture doesn't change as dramatically as its complexion, something I'd learned myself working in corporate America for almost twenty years. Because I had faced a crisis of conscience in my own career — a point when I had to decide whether I could I remain in an organization whose values did not mesh with mine, regardless of the job titles and monetary baubles dangled before me — I wondered whether women, and specifically black women, faced similar challenges.

That question sparked months of research, of talking to women detectives in the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, of discussing research on sexual harassment with sociologists, of tracking every instance of sexual and racial discrimination in policing I could find. My work culminated in the creation of Inner City Blues and Charlotte Justice, a black female homicide detective working in the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division, the same division that investigates high profile cases like the Ennis Cosby and Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders.

Birthing Charlotte was simple enough in some ways — there are no female homicide detectives in the Robbery-Homicide Division, so I had full creative license there — but very difficult in others. She had to be damn good at her job or there would have been no way she could have shattered RHD's bulletproof glass ceiling, which required me to learn just what makes for a stand-out detective in the LAPD. But I also wanted Charlotte to reflect the conflicting emotions I'd seen in every female officer I encountered — how to be tough as nails while being feminine enough to have your nails done! And if you do express your femininity and wear a little lipstick, how can you prevent some male predator riding in your squad car or sitting at the desk across from you from interpreting that as a come-on?

For black officers, the dilemma gets even deeper — how do you maintain your self-esteem on the job when you come from a community that generally despises police officers as oppressors, that has seen some of its members "taken downtown for questioning," never to return? Does a career in policing make you a sell-out, an "Oreo" — black on the outside, but white on the inside? What motivates you to keep on keeping on?

Another issue I wanted to explore stems from a common mistake I see people make all the time — assuming cops don't have a life beyond their jobs. So it was especially important to me that Charlotte have a family, that she come from a culture that I hoped readers would find fascinating, one which would give them a rich slice of contemporary black LA life beyond the gangbangers, athletes, and entertainers seen on television. So I intentionally made Charlotte''s family a group of high-achievers but a little wacky, too — from her Southern-talking, mad scientist of a father (actually a successful cosmetics chemist) to her Saks-shopping, aging debutante of a mother, from her big brother, a cop-turned-crusading attorney, to a younger sister who's working on a second doctorate degree in psychology and thinks Charlotte's career in the LAPD is part of an unresolved "Supersister" complex. Not to mention her boxer, Beast — modeled after my own beloved dog Sampson, an eleven year-old boxer-with-an-attitude — who exhibits his own crime-fighting abilities. Is there any wonder poor Charlotte sees herself at family gatherings as "a cloth coat in a room full of mink?"

As you can see, my girl Charlotte does have a good sense of humor, which she needs — along with some good loving, courtesy of Aubrey Scott, an old flame (see Chapter 13 for a sample) — to get through the adventures she undertakes in Inner City Blues.

Because I love LA and feel it's always gotten a bad rap as a tarted-up tinsel town with no history or culture, I also tried to bring a bit of historical perspective to the proceedings and predicaments in which Charlotte finds herself. For example, in the novel, which is set in the 1992 riots, Charlotte unravels the long-ago disappearance of a black radical, which gave me a chance to comment on everything from the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 to the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And the buildings where some of the action takes place are designed by Paul R. Williams — not the seventies songwriter but an exceptionally talented black architect who designed everything from mansions to mortuaries, territory Charlotte comes to know quite intimately over the course of the novel.

There was a phrase chanted in LA during the riots of 1992: "No Justice, No Peace." Birthing Charlotte Justice has made me understand just how true that slogan is. Charlotte has become a part of my psyche now, and writing of her adventures in a post-modern paradise a way of exploring and exorcising the demons and misconceptions that plague us all.