Detection in Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”: Stories, Escape and Discovery

Edward P. Jones first published “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” his only venture into the detective fiction genre, in The New Yorker on December 22 and 29, 2003. This essay focuses on the desire to get away from the confines of Washington D.C. of Jones’s unnamed African American veteran, a novice to investigation, who narrates the story of how he solved the murder of his boyhood friend. The essay traces echoes of the desire for escape in the stories that he must decipher, to use Peter Hühn’s terminology in “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction.” It establishes parallels with other works of detective fiction and considers the freedom Jones takes with the genre (the truth about the crime is revealed supernaturally, for example). It poses the question of whether the investigator’s discovery of the truth and his decision to stay in Washington can be interpreted as a liberation, or as the final disillusionment of hardboiled fiction, and assesses what Jones means by “growing up,” an objective that he set his detective protagonist.