(1937-1974) Also wrote as: Al C. Clark
Goines was and remains the master of black street-gangster fiction conceived from the inside out. In 16 novels, written in a five-year burst of creativity, Goines explored and exploited ghetto life at its most violent and hopeless, a grimly exciting nihilist’s tour of hell on Earth.
Born in Detroit to a relatively stable and comfortable family (his parents owned a local dry cleaner), Goines in his early years had minimal contact with the lawless, bloody world that he would ultimately write about. But during a stint in the army he got hooked on heroin, and when he returned to Detroit in 1955 he quickly became a member of the crime and drug underworld.
Sometime in the ’60s, while serving a prison sentence, Goines began writing stories for his own amusement. A love for cowboy movies—and perhaps a desire to think about wide open spaces while in confinement—led him to write a western. A few years later—serving a different sentence at a different prison—Goines read the new topic by a black writer with a criminal background named iceberg slim. The topic inspired Goines to take another shot at writing, this time a story about his own colorful and dramatic life on the streets. Following in Iceberg’s footsteps, Goines wrote Whoreson (1972), a first-person “memoir” about a Detroit ghetto pimp, based on the author’s own experience hustling and running prostitutes. Goines sent the manuscript to Holloway House, Iceberg Slim’s developer; Holloway accepted it and asked for more like it. Goines quickly pounded out a second autobiographical novel, Dopefiend, a grueling, compelling work of fiction drawn from his dreadful life as a heroin addict.
Out of prison and now a published author, Goines tried to live the straight life. He continued writing, and Holloway House eagerly purchased the manuscripts as soon as they arrived. Black Gangster (1972), his third novel, was a more elaborately imaginative effort, with an intriguingly ambivalent attitude toward the subject of black political movements and self-styled revolutionaries, hot-button topics of the day. In Black Gangster, the title character invents and leads a “liberation” movement in order to provide a cover for his oncoming crime wave. Later novels would take on the social and political turmoil of the ghetto with a more Manichean, us-against-them perspective (“them”—the enemy—being the white race). In 1974, Holloway House and Goines introduced a more pointedly political action series published under the pseudonym of Al C. Clark. Beginning with Crime Partners, the series tracked the explosive adventures of a black militant named Keny-atta (the name of postcolonial Kenya’s first president). Patterned in part on the rhetoric of the Black Panther Party (and anticipating some of the goals of the Black Muslims under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan), Kenyatta’s movement declares war on ghetto vice, its suppliers and enablers, and the white police officers who patrol the black neighborhoods like colonial rulers.
Goines’s writing was primitive, his plotting anarchic, but the overall impact was often powerful and had the high-voltage charge of the real; finding himself in the middle of one of Goines’s swirling visions of violence and hate, the weak-kneed reader could become almost nauseated.
Goines’s initial dream of a quiet author’s life did not last long. He was back on smack, and other bad habits were gradually returning. Hoping that getting away from his old haunts might be the key to salvation, Goines and his family left Detroit for California, moving to the Los Angeles ghetto of Watts. There, a short drive from Holloway House headquarters in Hollywood, Goines wrote the majority of his 16 published works. After two productive years, Goines decided to go back to Detroit. Back in his hometown, on the night of October 21, 1974, Goines and his wife were shot to death, the motive and identity of the killers unknown (though they were reported to as have been “two white men”). A completed manuscript was found among Goines’s belongings, published by Holloway House as Inner City Hoodlum, described by the developers as a tale of “smack, numbers money and murder in the black cesspool of Los Angeles.” A mere four years had passed between Goines’s completion of Dopefiend and the writing of 15 other novels, his release from prison for the last time, his new career as the best-selling king of what Hol-loway House called the “Black Experience genre,” and his murder.
Works
- Black Gangster (1972);
- Black Girl Lost (1973);
- Cry Revenge (1974);
- Daddy Cool (1974);
- Dopefiend (1971);
- Eldorado Red (1974);
- Inner City Hoodlum (1975);
- Never Die Alone (1974);
- Street Players (1973);
- Swamp Man (1974);
- White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief (1973);
- Whoreson (1972)
As Al C. Clark:
- Crime Partners (1974);
- Death List (1974);
- Kenyatta’s Escape (1974);
- Kenyatta’s Last Hit (1975)
