Inhaltszusammenfassung

Lance Spearman, a.k.a. The Spear, is a nattily dressed detective whose trade mark is a fashionable straw hat, bow-tie and goatee. He likes cigars and scotch on the rocks, and is very fond of beautiful women. From 1968 to about 1972 the crime fighting adventures of ‘Africa’s top crime buster’ who ‘has a charming way with the girls’ and ‘a deadly way with thugs’ appeared weekly in African Film, a photo novel magazine published by South African Drum Publications Ltd. Through Drum Publications’ ...Lance Spearman, a.k.a. The Spear, is a nattily dressed detective whose trade mark is a fashionable straw hat, bow-tie and goatee. He likes cigars and scotch on the rocks, and is very fond of beautiful women. From 1968 to about 1972 the crime fighting adventures of ‘Africa’s top crime buster’ who ‘has a charming way with the girls’ and ‘a deadly way with thugs’ appeared weekly in African Film, a photo novel magazine published by South African Drum Publications Ltd. Through Drum Publications’ subsidiaries in Nairobi and Lagos, African Film had an almost pan-African circulation, at least in regard of Anglophone Africa, and was widely read in countries as diverse as Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, or Uganda. The main purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to this once famous character who is still remembered vividly by his former fans in Africa, who must range among hundreds of thousands, but so far doesn’t seem to have found its way into current scholarly investigations of popular African literature. The author begins by describing the historical background of the magazine’s production, and then takes a closer look at the type of characters and stories it featured. He argues that Lance Spearman, the African photo novel ‘crime buster’, has to be considered as a hybrid figure, both in terms of media and cultural background. Those who scripted and shot African Film – a hybrid medium in itself – clearly drew their inspirations from a variety of sources. Inspired by detective fiction of the American hard-boiled genre, James Hadley Chase thrillers, and early James Bond films alike, African Film introduced an African visual modernity and provided a stylish, streetwise character young urban Africans could readily identify with. In a later section the author introduces some voices of former readers of the magazine as an attempt to account for the magazine’s enormous historical popularity. In his conclusion, he raises the question of Lance Spearman’s legacy within contemporary African crime fiction.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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DDC Sachgruppe:
Comics, Cartoons, Karikaturen