The data for this project was collected through my reading of both contemporary crime novels, slave narratives, critical reviews, and scholarly criticism. In reading several slave narratives, I found almost identical literary tropes and structural elements. The purpose and audience for each narrative are the same: to shed light on the horrors of enslavement and for the use of the abolitionist to help promote freeing slaves by providing an audience, individuals who may have supported the abolitionist movement, with tangible proof of those horrors through the enslaved writer's experiences. The main purpose of the writing of crime novels may be to entertain an audience of crime/mystery lovers. But the African American crime novel does much more by providing the audience with a better understanding of the culture of the African American community, the tenuous relationship between the black community and the legal and justice systems, and provides the audience with a hero, the black detective, who is physically tougher and smarter than those characters who have committed a crime.

This information provided me with a much broader understanding of the history and fluidity in the development of the canon of African American Literature and how integral African American Literature is to the entire canon of American Literature. This material also supported to my own writing of the short crime novel, The Sweetest Mango, located on an island whose communities are surrounded by the physical vestiges of enslavement, of an imbedded colonial approach to administering law, of African religions and history, of economic hardships, but have the will to look to the future and to make a better life.