Nichelle D. Tramble’s debut novel, The Dying Ground (Villard/Strivers Row), is subtitled “a hip-hop noir novel.” And the “noir” part is clear. Maceo Redfield, a 23-year-old Berkeley undergrad, becomes a black detective by circumstance when best friend Billy, an entry-level crack hustler, ends up dead at the corner of College and Alcatraz in Oakland. Billy’s girlfriend, whom Maceo has loved for years, flees the scene and the Bay, putting Maceo on a classic noir hunt for answers in a world that won’t give him any. As he says late in the novel, he runs a race he has no chance of winning — and he runs it amid the shadows and corpses of urban black Northern California, from televised funerals at the CME cathedral to manic drives on the 580 to the “Tombs” lock-up in downtown Oakland.

But what makes a novel hip-hop? Should it try to replicate the æsthetic practices of hip-hop culture — the flow of an MC, the beats of a DJ, the jagged curves of a graffiti artist, the attitude of a b-boy? Does it have to come with a Def Jam CD, plugs for Sony artists, and a PNB Nation marketing tie-in, the way Ronin Ro’s flimsy pulp flop Street Sweeper did last year? Must its characters be based on hip-hop icons, like the versions of Tupac, Biggie, and Suge Knight who fueled the West Coast manhunt of Gar Anthony Haywood’s excellent 1999 mystery All the Lucky Ones Are Dead?

Bertice Berry samples these tactics in her embarrassing new The Haunting of Hip-Hop (Doubleday), which tries to cash in on hip-hop’s profit clout while taking spiritual high ground against it — the hip-hop novel as anti-hip-hop novel. She gives us Harry “Freedom” Hudson, a successful hip-hop producer who is a slave (get it?) to the corporate skyscraper plantations of the rap industry. For Berry, a pop sociologist who doubles as an inspirational speaker and a stand-up comedian, hip-hop is “hollow” music that uses the sacred African drum to send “the wrong message” to the next generation.

Tramble’s relationship to the form runs deeper. It’s true that, save for neighborhood denizens Black Jeff and Mike Crowley quoting Eric B. and Rakim in their freestyles in front of landmark record store Rasputin’s, and real-life Oakland rapper Too Short showing up at Billy’s funeral, her book has little hip-hop. And The Dying Ground is not saturated in the form the way that Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s Straight Outta Compton was. Larry McCaffrey dubbed that 1992 work “the first major rap novel” because Cruz wrote like a DJ, fading and cutting between chunks of prose, sampling voices and singers, cross-fading narrative into a collage of rants, riffs, and paragraph ciphers on a post–Rodney King Compton block where palm trees had perms and kids “scratched music on cement.”

Tramble’s pacing is studied and she follows a traditional linear narrative arc — but it’s a hip-hop one all the same. The Dying Ground is set just two years after Too Short started building his empire selling Born To Mack tapes out of his trunk in East Oakland, but she resists employing hip-hop as a literary trick or marketing device. Like Craig Watkins in his Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema, she approaches hip-hop as a social movement lived out through popular culture, a generational consciousness defined by a litany of federal putdowns: the economic disintegration of American inner cities, the redistribution of funds away from public parks and schools, the massive deindustrialization campaigns that exported factory jobs away from urban workers. “Hip-hop is an African-American response . . . to the disposability of people,” Greg Tate writes in The Vibe History of Hip-Hop. “Hip-hop is the pop art of race politics.”

When Maceo Redfield goes down to the Oakland city jail to bail out a friend, he sees a photo of Huey P. Newton on the wall. Maceo thinks to himself that Huey’s death on an Oakland street corner “was representative of where we were and all that was yet to come for us. The night of his death he was out searching the streets . . . for drugs at a dangerous hour, in a dangerous city with a dangerously short memory.” A few years later, Newton would become an icon of hip-hop radicalism. But in the 1989 of The Dying Ground, he’s just another fallen hero reduced to the ash that covers the Oakland streets. This is hip-hop for Tramble: the urban ash that covers everything and everyone until it becomes a code for living, the only way possible to see enough of the world around you to make your place in it, both on and off the page.