Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes is "a fascinating guide to black mystery fiction and its subgenres from early in the century to the present" (Emerge magazine). Within these pages Paula L. Woods has gathered an outstanding array of new, long-lost, or never-before-published fiction, ranging from Pauline E. Hopkins' classic locked-room mystery story "Talma Gordon," originally published by Colored American Magazine in 1900, to a new piece of short fiction by bestselling author Walter Mosley. From the earliest mystery story written by an African American to fiction by modern mainstream authors such as BarbaraNeely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, and Aya de Leon, the pieces in this anthology comprise "a landmark collection no library of crime fiction should be without" (Kirkus Reviews).