Pop's barbershop book club
Luke Cage and Pop (Mike Colter, Frankie Faison) · Pop's Barbershop
Episode two opens with Luke in Pop's chair reading Walter Mosley's Little Green, and the shop turns into a book club. Luke admits he never got into Donald Goines. Pop answers that Goines invented Kenyatta, and he says it like the argument is over. (AAIHS wrote a whole essay on this exchange, which tells you how much is packed into it.) Tone shoots Pop later in the same episode, so a debate about crime novels turns out to be one of his last scenes.
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The stack · 2 books
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1Little Green
The twelfth Easy Rawlins novel, published in 2013, opens with Easy coming back from the car crash that ended Blonde Faith. Easy is a World War II veteran in Los Angeles who fixes problems for people who can't call the police. Swap Los Angeles for Harlem and that's Luke's job description, which Mosley wrote down in 1990.
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2Crime Partners
Donald Goines published Crime Partners in 1974 under the pen name Al C. Clark, and it introduced Kenyatta, a militant who goes to war with drug dealers and crooked cops. Goines wrote 16 novels in about four years, most of them for Holloway House. Pop's point is that a Black man cleaning up his own streets was a Goines idea long before it was a Netflix one.
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Sleuthed by @shelfsleuth · 2026-10-17
Spotted another book in Luke Cage? Drop the frame. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Paused Tuesdays
One still, one stack, every Tuesday morning.
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