ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on Joseph Nazel, a longtime Holloway House author and editor whose example of formulaic adjustment is representative of practices in the company and in 1970s African-American crime narrative more generally. His practice meant copying narrative structures, or formulas, that were in wide circulation in the mass-media marketplace. In order to highlight the formulaic basis of Nazel's writing, the author analyzes Nazel's major book series from the 1970s: Iceman and James Rhodes. In Black Cop, the denouement is more eventful, with Rhodes's disguise gaining him entry to a clandestine meeting among the Operation's key players. While Rhodes is sometimes spurred to action by the impression of racist opposition, the engine that actually propels both narratives is conspiracy's ability to represent "a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility; or in other words: the collective and the epistemological".
