(1928-1984)
The literary roots of Ernest Tidyman’s most famous creation, John Shaft, have been subsumed by the character’s motion picture incarnation in the early 1970s, and neither fictional nor film versions have remained nearly as vibrant in the collective memory as a certain musical evocation of the black private eye—the eternally sinuous “Theme from Shaft” by Isaac Hayes. Tidyman’s first Shaft novel was published in 1970, a year before the movie version garnered huge box office rewards with its depiction of an African-American action hero, with studly Richard Roundtree in the title role. There had been A-budget American films with black protagonists before, but nearly all had been earnest, liberal, and socially-minded projects, the sort that usually starred Sidney Poitier. Shaft was something different: a sexy, violent, mainstream popcorn flick with an unabashedly ultra-glamorized, black-leather-clad hero ready to go toe to toe with James Bond as the ultimate swaggering, sharp-dressing superhero.
Shaft’s creator was a white man. A Cleveland native of English-Hungarian roots, Tidyman at the time of Shaft’s release was one of the last of a dying breed of tough, fecund, journalism-bred characters who could move between one creative medium and another as the markets shifted, with a tabloid news hawk’s instinct for headline premises, hot stories, and punchy prose. After service in the U.S. Army, Tidyman got work on the hometown Cleveland News (where his father was a long-established crime reporter), then moved on to papers in New York City. He turned to fiction writing in the 1960s, publishing action and exploitation novels like Anzio Death Trap (1968) and Flower Power (1968), the latter a sexy and hot-off-the-headlines exploration of Haight-Ashbury “groove-ins.” Again responding to the zeitgeist, Tidyman conceived the idea of a black private eye hero in the midst of combustion in the African-American population and the increasing national concern for racial equality. developers and then Hollywood embraced his refreshing concept. Tidyman’s delineation of John Shaft was pulp fantasy for the most part, and not entirely lacking in what scolds would call racial stereotyping—including his private dick’s moniker, with its priapic connotation (though Tidyman would claim the name came to him innocently, while staring at a fire shaft in a Manhattan building). Still, Shaft was so positively and unapologetically a hero that Tidyman was awarded a prestigious Image Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He followed his original Shaft novel with six sequels (two film productions followed the first in the series). The novels were tough, compulsively readable, and brought Shaft’s asphalt stomping ground to vigorous life, a sweeping yet intimate depiction of New York City that betrayed the eye of a seasoned Big Apple reporter. The success of the first Shaft movie would spur the production of other commercial and action films with dark-skinned protagonists, spawning a vibrant subgenre known as “blaxploitation.”
Tidyman’s success with Shaft led to lucrative screenwriting jobs including The French Connection (1971) and the Clint Eastwood western High Plains Drifter (1972) (from Tidyman’s original story). He continued writing prose all the while, and in addition to the Shaft series and other novels he published two fictionalized true-crime stories, Dummy (1974), about a black deaf-mute accused of murder, and Big Bucks (1982), about a large-scale mail robbery. A heavy drinker and smoker, Tidyman saw his health decline when he reached his fifties, and he died from kidney failure in 1984.
Works
- Absolute Zero (1971);
- Anzio Death Trap (1968);
- Big Bucks (1982);
- Dummy (1974);
- Flower Power (1968);
- Goodbye Mr. Shaft (1973);
- Last Shaft, The (1975);
- Line of Duty (1974);
- Shaft (1970);
- Shaft Among the Jews (1972);
- Shaft Has a Ball (1973);
- Shaft’s Big Score (1972);
- Shaft’s Carnival of Killers (1974);
- Starstruck (1976);
- Table Stakes (1978)
