Who is John Shaft? John Shaft is a private eye. John Shaft is a black man made of muscle and ice, and he has no prejudices. John Shaft will kill anyone... black or white. When the cloistered daughter of Harlem's crime boss discovers the true nature of her father's work, she runs off to be as bad as Dad. By the time she disappears, she's into sex, liquor, dope, and a few other scenes. Now, Big Daddy wants Shaft to get his baby back. The tough, take-no-guff detective goes to work... and the Mafia, the Black militants, the NYPD, and City Hall go to work on him. The original and unabridged Shaft novel by Ernest Tidyman, the 1970 tour de force of hardboiled crime fiction that introduced an unsuspecting world to a cultural icon.