Criminal Milieu Research Articles

Juvenile Delinquency and Recidivism: An Overview

Recidivism in juveniles is a legal notion in criminal law. Juvenile refers to someone under theage of 18 the definition of an adult varies from nation to nation. In India, the Juvenile Justice Actmandates that juveniles convicted of misdemeanors be housed in institutions that offer therapeutic,educational, and vocational programs.The presence of a criminal milieu has influenced many young people to turn to criminal activity as ameans of self-expression. In this paper, we discuss two variables that contribute to juvenile recidivism.Firstly, in the adolescent population, a lack of parental oversight contributes to criminalmisbehaviour. Juvenile recidivism is fueled by peer pressure. Teenagers who are unemployed or earninglow wages are more likely to commit crimes. Secondly, mental health of juveniles is also a hot topicinternationally. Suicidal thoughts and behaviours are exacerbated by mental health issues. Depressiveillnesses, juvenile detention, and other societal issues combine to create a climate where youth rush toterminate their lives.In light of the 2012 Delhi rape case and after much debate, intensive conversation, and demonstrations,Indian Parliament enacted the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015. The authorhas explained that howjuveniles can now be disciplined using new methodsunder new legislation andadequately implementing existing ones.

Firearm and Criminal Milieu Homicide in Sweden

This study analyzes the trend in firearm and criminal milieu–related homicides in Sweden in the past three decades. A particular focus is on the 2010–2019 period, during which a dramatic increase was noted, although an increase in firearm homicides with illegal guns had already started in the late 1990s. In extant literature, the rapid increase in the 2010s is posited to be associated with fast access to illegal weapons, especially among youth in the most urban regions, Stockholm and Skaane County in particular. As a result, many victims and perpetrators are young men. This issue is proposed to be exacerbated by the new possibilities for organized crime setups in the wake of the digital revolution, a heightened level of social problems in the aftermath of high immigration from developing countries in combination with the dismantling of welfare institutions, and a self-increasing chain reaction of violence triggered by random episodes in the criminal milieu. These hypotheses are largely supported by this study’s findings.

Firearm Homicides in Europe: A Comparison with Non-Firearm Homicides in Five European Countries

ABSTRACT Detailed, comparative research on firearm violence in Europe is rare. Using data from the European Homicide Monitor, this paper presents the prevalence and characteristics of firearm homicides in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland between 2001 and 2016. Furthermore, we compare firearm to non-firearm homicides to assess the degree of uniqueness of firearms as modus operandi. We find that the firearm homicide rate varies across our sample of countries. We also identify two country profiles: in Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, most firearm homicides take place in public and urban areas, involving male victims and perpetrators. In these countries, the use of firearms in homicides is largely concentrated in the criminal milieu. In Finland and Switzerland, firearms are mostly used in domestic homicides, with a higher share of female victims. We explore these findings in relation to firearm availability in each country.

Nаучна заснованост криминалистичког оперативноg аналитичког сазнања

The paper looks into the scientific basis of criminalistic analytical-operational knowledge. In criminal proceedings, this type of knowledge is the basis of legal sustainability and credibility of the indictment, criminal investigation and evidence before the court, and for development of public policy in the fight against crime in modern society. The purpose of the paper is to prove that the basis of criminal operational and analytical work is intellectual activity in which the procedures of logical, meaningful, systematic and reasoned, rather than common sense of criminal analysts are strictly followed in the process of acquiring operational knowledge, which includes naming and marking criminal phenomena, processes and events and represents a logical basis for understanding the analytical process in criminalistics. In criminalistic operational-analytical research, accurate, relative and applicable knowledge is gained about a certain subject from the criminal milieu, by applying adequate criminalistic and other research methods, which fulfills two essential preconditions of this type of research, primarily the determined object of criminalistic operational research and verified methods of true or at least probable knowledge. The methodology of the research subject in this paper required the application of the operational method of document content analysis in conjunction with hypothetical-deductive and statistical methods, as well as basic analytical-synthetic methods of knowledge. The research results provided a scientifically based theoretical-methodological view of criminalistic analytics and its end product criminalistic, operational-intervention and operational-instructive knowledge that will be helpful to criminalistic and other analysts and researchers in various state institutions and organizations that have a developed criminalistic-analytical and investigative activity in their organizational structure.

Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility as Part of Criminal Policies

The increase in peer violence and juvenile delinquency from year to year has kept the question of minimum age of criminal responsibility open around the world. States, not only in different parts of the world, but also within smaller regions territorially connecting them, have been developing various criminal legal responses to this question. Reasons behind such a variety lie in circumstances of economic, social, cultural, religious, political, and even political nature. In theory and practice, two opposing concepts can be distinguished – the so-called repressive and holistic concepts. Advocates of the first concept believe that a strict criminal policy is the safest way toward decreasing criminality among children and minors. On the other side, supporters of the holistic approach believe children in early age cannot understand the meaning of their actions, that is why lowering the age of criminal responsibility would introduce children to the criminal legal system too early when society could take timely measures that would prevent children from adopting a criminal pattern of behaviour. Using the comparative law method, as well as other qualitative and quantitative methods necessary for a productive analysis and deduction of valid conclusions, in this paper we aim to point up key aspects of the differences between the repressive and holistic approach to determining the minimum age of criminal responsibility. The final result is a firmly established belief that it is necessary to give advantage to the approach that does not see the children and minors drawn into the criminal milieu as part of the problem but as part of the solution.

Homicide drop in seven European countries: General or specific across countries and crime types?

This study examines homicide trends in seven European countries – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden and Switzerland – all of which manifested a substantial drop in homicide mortality between 1990 and 2016. By using data from the European Homicide Monitor, a coding scheme created to enable cross-country comparisons, combined with the national cause-of-death statistics, we explore generality versus specificity of the homicide drop. We examine changes in the demographic structure of victims and offenders and disaggregate homicides by different subtypes of lethal incidents, such as family-related homicides referring to conflicts between family members, and criminal milieu homicides occurring in the context of robberies, gang-related conflicts or organised crime. Results point to the generality of the drop: in most of the countries studied, the declining trend included all homicide types. The overall decline in homicide mortality was driven mostly by the decline in male victimisation and offending. In most of the countries, the gender distribution of victims and offenders changed only slightly during the study period, whereas the development of the distribution of homicide types manifested greater diversity. Our findings illustrate the benefits of disaggregated analyses in comparative homicide research.

De vechter en de bierkaai

Hesdy Gerges is a heavyweight kickboxer whose career was interrupted because of his involvement in an cocaine transport. This article is analyzes the biography of this top fighter, describing the macro context of an expanding market for full-contact martial arts, the meso level of the gym and its relation to the criminal milieu, and the fighter and his body on the micro level. Hesdy is used to set an example, and since it takes more than seven years to reach a verdict, the impact on his private life and his career as a fighter is large. The study is based on participant observation and 33 interviews, twenty of which with the protagonist.

Trauma, violence and recovery in the life stories of people who have injected drugs

This paper reports qualitative data about violence and trauma amongst drug injectors in Scotland, collected using a life story method with 55 drug injectors currently in recovery. It focusses on different types of violence and trauma that occurred whilst using drugs. Stories told of very severe and repeated traumas often involving extreme violence. One motive for escalating and continuing drug use was avoidant coping to deaden the emotions and thoughts regarding these traumas. Many traumas were due partly to the criminal drug milieu, so respondents were in a vicious cycle of using opiates and other sedative drugs to cope with the consequences of being involved in a lifestyle of using, supplying and obtaining illegal sedative drugs. Drugs were used as a dynamic method of self-medication or avoidant coping to cope with life in a criminal milieu. Traumatic events were more often described as worsening the lifestyle than as being motives for quitting. Amongst the traumas recounted were many incidents of extreme violence. Using drugs to block the psychological effects of such traumas may help explain why people persist using opiates despite experiencing evident serious harms. Interventions need to recognise this, be trauma-aware and appreciate that violence and trauma have severe adverse effects on drug injectors even when they are themselves hardened and violent.

Infiltracija u kriminalnu sredinu

The characteristics of the modern organized crime have demanded the properly organized competent authorities in order to be able to oppose it successfully. It cannot be achieved without the infiltration into the criminal milieu as a complex criminal-operating activity. It is also a postulation for the competent authorities being engaged in a prevention and combating crime to strive to provide reliable sources of information in the criminal structures, with the aim of detecting the intended or committed criminal acts as well as collecting the evidence of their perpetrators' guilt. Nowadays, it's almost impossible without an "insider" to reveal the structure of the criminal organization, the committed and planned crimes, having in mind extensive protection measures taken by its members. The changes themselves in the manifestation of the organized crime have gone beyond the mere use of informants and made a need for developing the new investigating techniques, aimed at the infiltration into the criminal milieu, which includes the usage of the undercover investigators in order the conspiratory investigations to be conducted and the simulated activities to be realized.

Generic outlier: John Clarke and ‘the shabby suit crime comedy’

From 1999 to 2005, Australian cinema produced several crime comedies beginning with Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands (1999) which served as a ‘prototype’ (Grindon 2012) for the variations that followed, including two farcical satires adapted for the screen by John Clarke. Clarke adapted for television two crime novels by Australian author Shane Maloney, Stiff (2004) and The Brush-Off (Neil, 2004). For Stiff, Clarke directed as well as wrote the screenplay. Production for both was by Huntaway films, a company owned by him, The Brush-Off director, Sam Neill, and co-producer, Jay Cassells. While these two films do not match the famed Clarke and Dawe sketches (Australian Broadcasting Company TV) for satirical bite and artistry, they are an interesting subset of this crime comedy ‘cluster’ (Grindon 2012) within what might be called ‘the shabby suit crime comedy’ genre. Clarke’s crumpled protagonist stands apart as an educated little man up against the forces of political corruption and vice. It is argued here that the films identified from this short time-span share thematic concerns and iconography as well as neglectful male tailoring: the group of Australian crime comedies possesses similar syntactic and semantic generic qualities (Altman, 1984). This article discusses the outlier status of Clarke’s pieces within that group as farcical satires in a political rather than criminal milieu, as well as their distinctive techniques and artistic success.

Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival

Reviewed by: Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival Joan M. West Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival, 2018. <siff.net/festival>. SIFF 44 screened some 250 features over twenty-five days in eleven main theaters (five for the entire time; six in Seattle neighborhoods and nearby communities for shorter periods). France, Belgium, Quebec, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Benin supplied this year's selection of twenty-seven films with French connections. Interesting statistics: eight of this group accounted for forty César nominations. 30% of the group were inspired by a literary source (memoire, comic strip, graphic novel, novel). 37% of them were made by female directors, and the same percentage were debut films. Several SIFF French selections have already entered American distribution. Gauguin, voyage de Tahiti (Édouard Deluc) and Le redoutable (aka Godard, mon amour) (Michel Hazanavicius) craft portraits of two artistic giants—social rebels both—who upended the norms of their chosen forms of creative expression. Beyond the art, both directors address the destruction caused in human terms by such narcissistic prodigies. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Une prière avant l'aube, based on English boxer Billy Moore's memoir of his imprisonment in Thailand for drugs, yields a story of redemption after copious blood and violence. Along the same vein, Coralie Fargeat's debut film Revenge was the opening weekend midnighter. Attendees had mixed reactions: was this a feminist rape-revenge tale, a MeToo call to stand up against sexism, or just another example of New French Extremity horror (done by a woman)? Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur also divided viewers: take this tale of search for true love seriously or cynically? In either case, searcher Juliette Binoche and voyant Gérard Depardieu earned plaudits. Michael R. Roskam's Le fidèle pairs Matthias Schoenaerts as a bank robber with Adèle Exarchopoulos as the professional-racecar-driver [End Page 205] daughter of a crime-connected businessman. These two bond in an irresistible, fateful passion. Even if set realistically in the criminal milieu of late 1990s Belgium and a tale drawing on conventions of the polar français and American film noir, the outlaw robber-lover's final, tragic gesture evokes that of a Romantic hero or a faithful medieval knight. Always eagerly anticipated, SIFF's archival program contained restorations of two French classics: Luis Buñuel's celebrated Belle de jour (1967) and Jean Renoir's Le crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), which the poet Jacques Prévert helped script. French schools from the Seattle area helped programming for young viewers by sponsoring Belle et Sébastien 3, le dernier chapitre (Clovis Cornillac) and two animated works. Le grand méchant renard et autres contes (Benjamin Renner, Patrick Imbert), 2018 Best Animation César, imagines a fox hatching a clutch of chicken eggs resulting in chicks who take him for their mother. Comical escapades ensue that keep "maman renard" on the run! The Franco-Belgian Zombillénium (Arthur de Pins, Alexis Ducord) animates De Pins's graphic novel about an amusement park run by real monsters pretending to be fake vampires, zombies, etc. Behind the stunning visual entertainment—tattooed teen apprentice witch Gretchen on her skateboard-broomstick, for instance—the directors include doses of social commentary, from consumerism to social caste and workers' rights, from inattentive parents and unreasonable teachers to pop culture references. Several character-centered dramas deserve mention. Sashinka (Kristina Wagen-bauer) and Le petit paysan (Hubert Charuel) share several points in common. They are debut features grounded in autobiographical elements drawn from family experiences and feature profoundly interesting, if imperfect central figures. Québecoise Wagenbauer depicts a memorable, bittersweet mother-daughter relationship. The extroverted, emotionally-needy mother, who emigrated from Russia under the illusion of furthering her singing career, re-enters her partially estranged daughter's life like a hurricane. The daughter, a singer on the eve of her big break, is sorely tasked to weather this storm. Charuel's picture (Best Actor and First Film Césars), focuses on thirty-year-old bachelor Pierre, who has taken over his parents' traditional dairy operation. Documentary-like details shot on the director's own family farm...

Taxing Times: Inter-Criminal Victimization And Drug Robbery Amongst The English Professional Criminal Milieu

ABSTRACTThis article considers the oft-hidden instances of inter-criminal victimization in illegal drug markets amongst serious criminals in the North of England. Focusing on proto-criminal activity known in regional argot as ‘taxing’ (drug dealers robbing one another) it draws on ethnographic material and suggests that contrast to the literature on the subject from the USA ‘taxing’ in England rarely leads to cycles of retaliatory violence. Yet against a more general climate of precariousness in disadvantaged communities in England, ‘taxing’ as a deviant behavior is a gainful, relatively low-risk activity for a minority of established, professional violent criminals.

The real and expected privileges of the Security Service collaborators recruited from academic milieu in the 1980s

Abstract Despite the elaborated techniques of electronic surveillance, personal sources of information still remain the best possible method of infiltrating a criminal milieu. Such methods gain special importance in totalitarian states. Collaborating with the Security Service almost always had some notable benefits. For some of the TWs, collaborating was an additional, sometimes quite substantial, source of income. One of repeating motives for collaboration was a will to improve one’s professional position or to easily obtain a permission to go abroad. There were also persons, who were impressed with having contacts with the Security Service functionaries. Almost all collaborators were using different forms of help from the part of the Security Service. Most of them would obtain real financial and material profits. The spectrum of favours offered to those helping the repressive state apparatus was very extensive.

Criminal miles and phenomenological aspects of the criminalistics intelligence sources

The paper is based on research conducted by the author in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the third millennium, the modern scientific theory of crime investigation. The author's intention is to complete the huge gap that exists today in our scientific crime literature on the phenomenology of criminalistics intelligence sources. The presence of scientific and technical isolationist and conservative pragmatism in criminalistics theory in us, with whom I have never lied, accordingly, I have tried to work more fully convey the latest scientific views on foreign theory of criminology criminalistics intelligence sources as the primary tool for understanding, recognition and decoding of occurrence in the criminal milieu. From the above it is quite logical and scientific methodology established by first larly exposed to the general approach among law enforcement theory, the criminal underworld, and then access the research of criminalistics intelligence sources, through their determination to categorize the movement and management. From the results, the findings suggest that the traditional model definition, recruitment, management and installation source in a criminal milieu, which applies to us, abandoned for more than three decades of contemporary crime research and professional literature and practice in the world. Furthermore, the results indicate that it is of decisive importance to the understanding of criminalistics intelligence sources, methods of installation, movement models and management resources, to the criminal milieu could understand phenomena that are not visible, and carry with them the challenges, risks and threats. Not more contemporary understanding of the needs of society to counter the criminal activities of individuals or groups, it is enough to have informers or collaborators. Today, the world of crime must confront numerous, well-organized and professional criminalistics intelligence activities.

Inductive Discovery of Criminal Group Structure Using Spectral Embedding

Social network analysis has often been applied to the communications within criminal groups to understand their internal structure and dynamics. While access to the content of communications may be restricted by constitutional and procedural constraints, this article applies advanced network analysis techniques based on spectral embedding to telephone communications data. Spectral embedding facilitates deeper analysis by embedding the graph representing a social network in a geometric space such that Euclidean distance reflects pairwise node dissimilarity. This enables drawing a network in ways that accurately reflect the structure of the underlying group, and computing properties directly from the embedding. We illustrate spectral approaches for two Ndrangheta drug-smuggling networks, and extend them to a) examine triad structure (through the identification of the Simmelian backbone), which elicits key members, and b) to display temporal properties, which illustrates changing group structure. The results show that the two groups, although having the same purpose and coming from the same criminal milieu, have substantially different internal structure which was not detectable using conventional social-network approaches. The techniques presented in this study may support law enforcement in the early stages of an investigation.

The Social Life of Illegal Drug Users in Prison: A Comparative Perspective

Different degrees of criminalization of illegal drug use influence the overall composition of prison populations across countries. Individuals convicted of illegal drug-related crimes represent a significant part of the prison population in Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. These convicts are not a part of the traditional criminal milieu, but a product of the perception of certain acts as crimes in particular contexts (e.g., an increasing social distance, the state’s control over potentially dangerous groups, etc.). The experience of incarceration might cause important changes in their life after release. The idea that prison contributes to the interiorization of criminal norms rather than preventing deviant behavior in the future seems especially fruitful in regard to illegal drug users. Elements of prison subculture are described on the basis of an empirical research conducted in 1996-2003 in Russian prisons (N = 769 (49 of these were convicted in relation to illegal drugs) in 2000-2001; and N = 214 (24) in 2003). The social organization of everyday life of inmates convicted of drug-related offences in Russia, Kazakhstan (N = 396 (76) in 2001) and Ukraine (N = 208 (26) in 2003) is compared with that of other convicts to test the hypothesis about the lack of significant differences between the two groups.

MENTORS AND CRIMINAL ACHIEVEMENT*

Much of the research focusing on conventional occupations concludes that mentored individuals are more successful in their careers than those who are not mentored. Early research in criminology made a similar claim. Yet contemporary criminology has all but ignored mentors. We investigate this oversight, drawing on Sutherland's insights on tutelage and criminal maturation and incorporating ideas on human and social capital. We argue that mentors play a key role in their protégés' criminal achievements and examine this hypothesis with data from a recent survey of incarcerated adult male offenders in the Canadian province of Quebec. In this sample, a substantial proportion of respondents reported the presence of an influential individual in their lives who introduced them to a criminal milieu and whom they explicitly regarded as a mentor. After studying the attributes of offenders and their mentors, we develop a causal framework that positions criminal mentor presence within a pathway that leads to greater benefits and lower costs from crime.

Return to the Primal Noir: Two Modern Authors on the Black Dahlia

The unsolved 1947 murder of a beautiful young woman nicknamed the haunts American popular culture1 and has, in the past fifteen years, inspired two of today's best crime authors to each write a historical novel using the murder as its central event. On first reading, Max Allan Collins's Angel in Black (2001) and James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia (1987) could hardly be more different, offering vivid contrasts in prose style, use of historical material, and authorial attitude toward the topic. But deeper consideration reveals some interesting similarities-for example, both books' employment of the conventions of film noir to recreate the context of the post-World War II United States. Even more important, both authors see the death of the beautiful victim, Elizabeth Short, as an indication of where our country was headed in 1947. For these two authors, writing about the Black Dahlia represents a probing of the modern United States at the moment it became the modern United States-a return to the primal noir. Film Noir and the Black Dahlia Murder In 1947, the United States found itself prosperous and at peace, the wealthiest and strongest nation in the world. Paradoxically, however, intense anxiety bubbled under the surface. The memory of the ubiquitous slaughter of World War II, fear of the atomic bomb, communist coups in Eastern Europe, the loss of China, anticommunist paranoia-all lurked in the recent past, the uneasy present, or the immediate future. One way this postwar anxiety revealed itself was in the popularity of the film noir genre. Inspired by the fiction of authors such as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, Hollywood movies like The Big Sleep (1946) and Double Indemnity (1944) portrayed marginalized protagonists-usually private eyes or low-level hoods-struggling alone through a landscape of criminal treachery and police corruption, a shadowland that might explode into violence at any moment. Truth was ambiguous m film noir, the heroes were compromised, and many noir classics were set in Los Angeles, which even in the 1940s was seen as America's premiere existential terrain. Today it is easy to interpret the ambiguous heroes of the great films noirs as stand-ins for the United States itself, a country warily confronting a dangerous world and dealing with suppressed guilt for its part in the international bloodshed of the 1940s. Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe, for instance, played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, maneuvers through an LA underworld populated by grifters, gangsters, pornographers, and seductive women. The Big Sleep's shadowy criminal milieu is analogous to the violent and uncertain international situation that faced our country following World War II, and the film renders this underworld with such compelling atmosphere that it has evolved into a subject of parody. Compared to corrupt insurance agent Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, however, Bogart is a shining knight errant. MacMurray, a fast-talking womanizer when his film begins, by the climax allows his lust for a femme fatale to turn him into a scheming murderer. The compromised protagonist is a recurring feature of film noir that shows up in both modern novels. It was in this queasy context that film noir met reality on January 15, 1947, when the mutilated corpse of the was discovered near the corner of Norton Avenue and 39th Street in Los Angeles.2 Elizabeth Short, a strikingly beautiful twenty-two-year-old drifter, had been tortured, murdered, exsanguinated, bisected at the waist, and dissected. The crime touched off a media frenzy and a long-term mystery. During succeeding weeks, Sgt. Harry Hansen, the Los Angeles Police Department's best detective, led a task force that attempted to trace Elizabeth Short's movements and contacts in the days prior to her death. Scrambling reporters both aided and impeded the investigation, digging up vital facts but encouraging hundreds of false tips. …

L'utilisation des connaissances policières et des renseignements policiers dans les actes de corruption: une étude de cas

In recent years law enforcement's war against crime has led to important advancement in the training of inuestigators (specialized training), criminal intelligence gathering and information storage (computerization). The production of specific knowledge and the concentration of criminal intelligence may represent a source of criminal opportunities for police officers who are vulnerable to corruption. This paper focuses on criminal opportunities offered to corruptible police officers, and more precisely, on the use of police knowledge and criminal intelligence by corrupt police officers. Twelue cases of police corruption in the province of Quebec throughout the past 30 years are examined. Findings show that some corrupt police officers do indeed use their access to knowledge and criminal intelligence to commit corruption offenses. Such practices were found to be divided amongst cases in which the acts involved a single officer and those which required extensions into the criminal milieu.

Invisible Detection: The Case of Walter Mosley

In the years since Chester Himes's success in the 1950s and 60s, there has been a comparative dearth of African American detective fiction. The genre was once perceived by African Americans as trivial or, given its primarily white focus, irrelevant. Recently, however, the tide has turned, as writers have started to emerge who have glimpsed, only the possibilities of the genre for the expression of the African American experience, but also, more importantly, the ways in which it is perfectly designed for the purpose. The most prominent of these writers (who include Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, and Gary Phillips) is Walter Mosley, who follows Himes in choosing to work within the hard-boiled variant of the genre: his novels are in fact set in the same period in which Himes was writing, although the locale is 1950s and 60s South Central Los Angeles rather than Harlem. Given the turbulent and often violent nature of the times, the reasons a writer might choose to reflect them through the medium of hard-boiled detective fiction might seem self-evident. But Mosley's work has made the point increasingly explicit that there is more to his authorial decision than simply zeitgeist. More important is his perception that the narrative principles and the mores of the hard-boiled detective story, especially as they pertain to the investigative figure and his methods of operation, have a resonance that transcends the formula of the genre when the detective in question is African American. Mosley's Easy Rawlins, it transpires, is a lot more than simply a darker-skinned version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. The world of the hard-boiled detective story, popularized in the 1930s and 40s by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is essentially one of urban societal corruption and moral ambiguity. Rather than working to preserve social standards and values, as a detective does in a traditional mystery, the hard-boiled detective fights a lone battle against them while struggling to prevent himself from being infected by the corruption on which they are based. This struggle is additionally complicated by his constant immersion in the criminal milieu since an essential tool of his trade is his intimate knowledge and understanding of the criminal psyche: his ability just to penetrate it, but, when necessary, to identify his own psyche with its corruption. The hard-boiled detective's task, then, is not simply a matter of determining who the guilty party is but of defining his own moral position ... [in] a complex process of (Cawelti 146). These implications require the detective to redefine continually even such apparently basic terms as criminality: if a crime is a disruption or transgression of an established social order, for example, what constitutes criminal behavior in a society governed by moral chaos? The detective figure in the hard-boiled story, then, operates in a frequently murky borderland between good and evil, where he can never be sure at any given time which is which. He is thus an essentially liminal figure, with a foot in both camps, struggling to preserve the distinction between them, even if he is often unable, given the odds, to cause the good to prevail. The ambivalence and duality necessarily inherent in such a detective's perception both of society and of himself take on a more profound significance in Walter Mosley's novels, where they become a powerful metaphor for the African American experience of double-consciousness (in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase), especially in the urban America of the period. The changing of the investigative process become infinitely more complex, and painful to negotiate, when a black detective finds himself haunting an additional borderland, that where the interests of his own community and those of the broader, predominantly white, society uneasily co-exist and frequently collide. Mosley's protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is in fact characterized and motivated most centrally by his experience of duality and by a resultant ambiguity of attitude toward the cases he investigates, often reluctantly. …