Shaft

A first edition of Tidyman's famous novel, with a rare, long and affectionate inscription from the author to longtime Detroit News columnist Bill Noble.

• Ernest Tidyman (American).
• New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970.
• 188 pages.
• Inscribed by Tidyman on front free endpaper: "August, 1973 / For Bill Noble, who stood true and brave with me against the attack of the Dry Martinis, though they struck wave after undulating wave. A straight-up gentleman — with a twist of peel. Ernest Tidyman."
• Bound in the original red cloth, in the original unclipped ($4.95) dust jacket designed by Mozelle Thompson.

Shaft was the first in what became a seven-book series, inspiring the 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree and co-written by Tidyman, its two sequels and two later follow-ups starring Samuel L. Jackson. Despite the lurid jacket promise of a "bone-crunching, gut-heaving, sex-socking yarn," Tidyman created John Shaft to be a Black hero animated by "intelligence, courage" and "black rage," in opposition to the broad stereotypes of the day, and for his work in Shaft, Tidyman became one of relatively few white figures honored with an NAACP Image Award. In a later essay, his son wrote: "He just thought that it was time for a black hero [...] a superhero of sorts." Inscribed to journalist Bill Noble, who a month after this inscription would publish his profile of Tidyman entitled "Ex-Detroier Tidyman Tells Why and How He Created the Black Super-Sleuth... Shaft" in the Sunday magazine of the Detroit News.