Show of hands: How many of you knew that “Shaft” started as a literary character before he moved to the silver screen? In response to one of my tweets, a supremely literate and knowledgeable friend of mine recently told me he had no idea and suggested that it would be a good topic for a blog post. I completely agreed. With this post, I just wanted to give an overview of the literary version of the character, but in subsequent posts, I will review the novels themselves.
Shaft was the literary creation of Ernest Tidyman, who also co-wrote the screenplay for original film and among other works, he also co-wrote the screenplay for another iconic 1970s film, The French Connection. Ernest Tidyman was one of the few White individuals to ever receive an NAACP Image Award, due to his iconic character. The literary version of Shaft, hereafter referred to as “Literary Shaft,” is a lot like the character Richard Roundtree portrayed in the films (”Movie Shaft”). Both are cool, confident, tough brothers from the streets of New York, with a taste for the finer things in life. In all, there were six Shaft novels: Shaft (1971), Shaft’s Big Score (1972), Shaft Among The Jews (1973), Shaft Has A Ball(1973) , Goodbye, Mr. Shaft (1974), and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (1975). (There was a seventh novel, entitled The Last Shaft (1975), that allegedly ended with Shaft’s death, but I believe it only had limited distribution in the United Kingdom.)
The novels use an omnicient narrator, and due to the inherent nature of prose, we get into Shaft’s head a lot more than in the movies. For instance, in the novel Shaft, published in 1971, we learn exactly where Shaft was coming from before the film’s iconic opening shot of him emerging from the subway station. He wasn’t just heading to work, he was replaying his wonderful, romantic escapades of the previous evening, which only ended shortly before we catch up with him on the street. Also, in the course of his investigations, Shaft freely riffs on everything from hot dogs, to the weather, to his insecurities about getting older. When the reader is first introduced to John Shaft in the first book of the series, he is 28 years old, but by the sixth novel, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (1975), despite although only five years have passed since the first novel, Shaft’s Afro is now peppered with grey hair. The reader also learns about Shaft’s nearly fatal tour in the US Marine Corps and the mental and physical scars he still bears from his time as a common street hood.
Undoubtedly because of his past, Literary Shaft has a mean streak a mile wide. The movie downplayed this aspect, most notably in the first action scene in Shaft’s office. In the film, a scuffle between Shaft and two of Bumpy Johnson’s henchman results in one of them hurtling through the office window to his death after a mis-timed leap. In the novel, after calmly making mental notes about his office mail, Shaft dispassionately grabs the skinniest hood by the lapels and tosses him through the window, merely to serve as an object lesson to the surviving crook.
One of the regrettable, features of Literary Shaft is his homophobia. Movie Shaft enjoys a genial, familiar relationship with Rollie The Bartender (played by Rex Robbins) from The Bar With No Name, which is located across the street from Shaft’s Greenwich Village apartment. Whether it was through Gordon Parks’ direction or Robbins’ interpretation, in the film, it is strongly implied that Rollie is gay. For example, in one blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Rollie gooses Shaft in the ass as he steps behind the bar. Movie Shaft barely acknowledges the gesture, however Literary Shaft probably would have broken the guys fingers. Literary Shaft drips disdain for gays, and it’s an ugly attitude that recurs with irksome regularity throughout the series, particularly in Shaft Has A Ball, in which Shaft investigates a scheme to pull off a heist during a drag queen ball. At one point, Shaft feigns a come-on to a gay waiter to gain information, then encourages the man to meet him in a particularly sketchy area of Central Park later that evening. Shaft does so with the explicit hope that the man will get beaten up when he arrives.
Tidyman also demonstrates a strange fixation on the idea of a Black revolution, and this fixation manifested itself in the character of Ben Buford. In the first Shaft novel, and in the movie, Shaft needs an army to fight the Italian mob and recover the missing daughter of the Harlem gangster, Knocks Persons (known as “Bumpy Johnson” in the film). Persons manipulates Shaft into recruiting Ben Buford and his group of Black nationalists to be that army. Although the Buford/Persons interplay makes for interesting commentary on the state, and aspirations, of Black America at the time, Ben Buford somehow becomes a recurring bogeyman as the series progresses. Whether it’s a gang disguised as drag queens or Shaft getting dragged into political intrigue on the island of Jamaica, Buford’s name, and the specter of revolution, always lurks in the background.
Despite some of the drawbacks above, which could be dismissed as products of their time, all the Shaft novels are remarkable examples of taut, hardboiled crime novels. There’s nothing campy or satirical about them. Tidyman’s Shaft admirably captured the attitude and mindset of a Black man carving out his own niche in a very violent world, and in that regard it remains a unique and welcome addition to the ranks of detective fiction, but in actuality, there’s very little space between a classic fictional detective like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft. The differences are only skin deep.
- JEP
