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100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction Chester Himes Born: Jefferson City, Missouri; July 29, 1909 Died: Moraira, Spain; November 12, 1984 Type of Plot: Hard-boiled Principal Series: Harlem Domestic, 1957-1983. Principal Series Characters The famous detectives Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are husbands, fathers, and former residents of Harlem. They have their own personal interpretation of law enforcement and are highly respected, even feared. Possessing the usual traits of hard-boiled heroism (fearlessness, physical stamina, intellectual acuity, and a sense of fair play), they are characterized by the quickness and severity of their anger when protecting the “good colored people of Harlem” and are distinguished by their revolvers that “can kill a rock.” Contribution In his novels featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Chester Himes not only gave American literature its first team of African American detectives but also impressively imposed upon it a unique and memorable image of the social, cultural, racial, political, and economic dynamics of Harlem at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In a style which reveals an ever-increasing control of generic conventions (ending at the threshold of parody), Himes’s work gradually moves away from the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to make a trenchant commentary on the nature of American society as viewed through the joys and fears of black Americans. Mixing grotesque violence, comic exaggeration, and absurdity (what he later chose to identify as the quintessential element of American life) in a fast-paced, highly cinematic narrative, Himes created a distinctive brand of regionalism in the detective genre. Biography Chester Bomar Himes was born on July 29, 1909, in Jefferson City, Missouri, the youngest of three sons born to Estelle Charlotte Bomar and Joseph Sandy Himes, a professor of blacksmithing and wheelwrighting and head of the Mechanical Arts Department at Lincoln University. In 1921 Himes’s father obtained a position at Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Chester and his brother Joe were enrolled in first-year studies there (with classmates ten years their senior). In the same year Joe was permanently blinded while conducting a chemistry demonstration he and Chester had prepared. The local hospital’s refusal to admit his brother and treat his injury (presumably because of racial prejudice)—one of several such incidents experienced in his youth—made a lasting impression upon Chester and contributed to his often-cited “quality of hurt” (the title of the first volume of his autobiography). In the next two years Himes attended high schools in St. Louis, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing the loneliness, isolation, and violence frequently accorded the outsider in adolescence (in schoolyard battles he received chipped teeth, lacerations to the head and a broken shoulder which never healed properly). Himes was graduated, nevertheless, from Cleveland’s Glenville High School in January, 1926. Preparing to attend Ohio State University in the fall, he took a job as a busboy in a local hotel. Injured by a fall down an elevator shaft, Himes was awarded a monthly disability pension which allowed him to enter the university directly. Early enthusiasm for collegiate life turned quickly to personal depression and alienation, undermining Himes’s academic fervor and success. This discontent led to his flirtation with illicit lifestyles and his subsequent expulsion from the university. Returning to Cleveland, Himes was swept into the dangers and excitement of underworld activities which, as he noted in his autobiography, exposed him to many of the strange characters who populate his detective series. After two suspended sentences for burglary and fraud (because of the personal appeals of his parents for leniency), Himes was arrested in September, 1928, charged with armed robbery, and sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years of hard labor at Ohio State Penitentiary. His serious writing began in prison. By the time he was paroled to his mother in 1936, Himes’s stories about the frustrations and contradictions of prison life had appeared in Esquire and numerous African American newspapers and magazines. In 1937, Himes married Jean Johnson, his sweetheart before imprisonment. Finding employment first as a laborer, then as a research assistant in the Cleveland Public Library, Himes was finally employed by the Ohio State Writers’ Project to work on a history of Cleveland. With the start of World War II, Himes moved to Los Angeles, California. His first two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), were based on these experiences. Following trips to New York, back to Los Angeles, and then to New York, where his third novel, Cast the First Stone (1952), was published, Himes divorced Jean and left for Europe in 1953, sensing the possibility of a new beginning. Between 1953 and 1957, Himes lived in Paris, London, and Majorca while finishing work on The Third Generation (1954) and The Primitive (1955). Following the international success of his Harlem Domestic series, Himes moved permanently to Spain in 1969 and, with the exception of brief trips to other parts of Europe and the United States, lived there with his second wife, Lesley Packard, until his death on November 12, 1984. Analysis Chester Himes began his Harlem Domestic series with the publication of For Love of Imabelle (1957), following a suggestion by his French publisher, Marcel Duhamel, to contribute to the popular Série noire. Written in less than two weeks, while he was “living in a little crummy hotel in Paris” under very strained emotional and economic circumstances, the novel, when translated and published in Paris in 1958, was awarded a French literary prize, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Rescued from economic dependency and the obscurity of exile, Himes wrote the next four volumes in the series—The Crazy Kill (1959), The Real Cool Killers (1959), All Shot Up (1960), and The Big Gold Dream (1960)—all within the next two years. Each successive volume represents a significant expansion and development of essential aspects of Himes’s evolving artistic and ideological vision. Inspired by two detectives Himes met in Los Angeles in the 1940’s, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are serious and, as their nicknames imply, deadly enforcers of social order and justice. Maintaining balance through a carefully organized network of spies disguised as junkies, drunks, and even nuns soliciting alms for the poor at the most unusual times and places, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are aggressive, fearless, and genuinely concerned with the community’s welfare and improvement. They wage a relentless, unorthodox, and often-personal battle against Harlem’s criminal elements. Fiercely loyal to each other, they are forced to be “tough” and mutually protective: They operate in an arena where most people consider policemen public enemies. Honest, dedicated to their profession, and motivated largely by a moral conscience—tinged with a certain amount of cynicism—they possess a code of ethics comparable (although not identical) to those of the Hammett/Chandler heroes. Only in the first book of the series is there any implication of venality or dishonesty: They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—gamekeepers, madams, streetwalkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. Except for this brief reference—explained perhaps by the fact that Himes had not fully developed their characters, a possibility suggested by their absence in almost the first half of the novel—all the subsequent narratives are explicit in emphasizing their honesty and integrity as detectives. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are often brutal in their search for the guilty; this aspect of their characters, however, is directly related to the principal issues of the series and to Himes’s vision of the essence of American life: violence. In a discussion of his perception of the detective genre with the novelist John A. Williams, Himes shed some light on the reasons for the pervasive presence of often-hideous forms of physical violence in his works: It’s just plain and simple violence in narrative form, you know. ’Cause no one, no one, writes about violence the way that Americans do. As a matter of fact, for the simple reason that no one understands violence or experiences violence like the American civilians do. . . . American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. Indeed, more than one critic has attacked Himes’s novels on the basis of gratuitous physical violence. When practiced by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, however, brutal outbursts are, more often than not, justifiable: Caught between the dangers inherent in their quest for a better community and the long arm of the white institution which supposedly protects them, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are forced to be coldly effective through the only means at their disposal. Certainly their role as black representatives of the white power structure defines the very tenuous nature of their relationship to the Harlem community and accounts for most of the novels’ uncertainties and much of their suspense. On another level, however, the excessive physical violence in Himes’s novels is related to another aspect of the author’s artistic and ideological perspectives—namely, the concern for place, real and imaginary. Harlem represents the center and circumference of the African American experience: It is the symbolic microcosm and the historical matrix of Himes’s America. Isolated, besieged by the outside world and turning inward upon itself, Harlem is, on the one hand, a symbol of disorder, chaos, confusion, and self-perpetuating pain and, on the other, an emblem of cultural and historical achievement. The duality and contradiction of its identity are the sources of the tension which animates Himes’s plots and propels them toward their often-incredible resolutions. At the core of Harlem’s reality, moreover, is violence—physical and psychological. In a speech delivered in 1948 and subsequently published as “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the U.S.” in Beyond the Angry Black (1966), a compilation edited by John A. Williams, Himes noted: “The question the Negro writer must answer is: How does the fear he feels as a Negro in white American society affect his, the Negro personality?” Not until this question is addressed by the writer, Himes went on to say, can there be the slightest understanding of any aspect of black life in the United States: crime, marital relations, spiritual or economic aspirations—all will be beyond understanding until the dynamics of this fear have been exposed behind the walls of the ghetto, “until others have experienced with us to the same extent the impact of fear upon our personalities.” It is this conception of fear and its psychological corollary, rage, that sustains Himes’s detective stories and links them ideologically to his earlier, nonmystery fiction. (It is significant that the first novel in the series, For Love of Imabelle, was published in the United States as A Rage in Harlem.) The connection between the image of Harlem and the violence which derives from fear is particularly apparent in The Crazy Kill. The Harlem of this novel is a place, in the words of Coffin Ed, “where anything can happen,” and from the narrative’s bizarre opening incident to the very last, that sense of the incredibly plausible pervades. When the theft of a bag of money from a grocery store attracts the attention of Reverend Short, Mamie Pullen’s minister and a participant at the wake held across the street for Mamie’s husband, the notorious gambler Big Joe Pullen, the storefront preacher leans too far out of a bedroom window under the influence of his favorite concoction, opium and brandy, and falls out. He lands, miraculously, in a basket of bread outside the bakery beneath. He picks himself up and returns to the wake, where he experiences one of his habitual “visions.” When Mamie later accompanies Reverend Short to the window as he explains the circumstances of his fall, she looks down and sees the body of Valentine Haines, a young hood who has been living with Sister Dulcy and her husband Johnny “Fishtail” Perry, Big Joe’s godson. The earlier vision has become reality: a dead man with a hunting knife in his heart. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are summoned to discover who murdered Val and, with Detective Sergeant Brody, an Irishman, begin questioning all possible suspects. Perhaps it was Johnny, whose temper is as infamous as his gambling prowess. Perhaps it was Charlie Chink, whose girlfriend, Doll Baby, appeared to be the recent target of Val’s affections. Still, why the exotic hunting knife? Why the basket of bread? What conspiracy of silence connects Reverend Short, Johnny’s girl Sister Dulcy, and Mamie Pullen, forcing Johnny to travel to Chicago before returning to Harlem and murdering Charlie Chink? After the initial several hours of questioning, Sergeant Brody, despite his years of experience, is too dumbfounded to explain the web of illogical complications in this case. Grave Digger tells him, in a statement that recurs throughout the novel and the entire series, epitomizing Himes’s vision of the city: “This is Harlem. . . . ain’t no other place like it in the world. You’ve got to start from scratch here, because these folks in Harlem do things for reasons nobody else in the world would think of.” The plot unravels through a series of mysterious events, including scenes of rage and violence that are the physical consequences of emotional brutalization. Johnny wakes up to find Charlie Chink wandering around nude in his apartment and shoots him six times, stomps his bloody body until Chink’s teeth are “stuck in his calloused heel,” and then leans over and clubs Chink’s head “into a bloody pulp with his pistol butt.” These explosions, Himes’s work suggests, derive from the most sublimated forms of frustration and hatred; the same forces can be seen in the degree of murderous intent which accompanies Coffin Ed’s frequent loss of equilibrium. The repeated examples of “murderous rage” and the number of characters in the series whose faces are cut or whose bodies are maimed are related to this vision of Harlem as a dehumanizing prisonlike world. Even the apparently comic purposes of character description tend to underscore this perspective (Reverend Short, for example, is introduced as having a “mouth shaped like that of a catfish” and eyes that “protrude behind his gold-rimmed spectacles like a bug’s under a microscope”). Himes’s evocation of a sense of place, however, is not limited to bizarre scenes of physical violence and rage. Beyond the scores of defiant men who are reminders of the repressed nature of manhood in the inner cities, the author gives abundant images of Harlem’s social life (rent parties, fish fries, and wakes), its cultural past (Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstein, the Apollo Theatre), its economic and political hierarchies (civil servants, politicians, underworld celebrities), and its peculiar life-styles and institutions (street gangs, professional gamblers, numbers runners, the homosexual subculture, the heroin trade, evangelists’ churches, and soapbox orators). All of this is done with the aplomb of a tour guide whose knowledge of the terrain is complete and whose understanding of the cultural codes of behavior permits explanation to the uninitiated. A bittersweet, tragicomic tone alternating with an almost Rabelaisian exuberance characterizes Himes’s descriptions of the sights, rhythms, and sounds of life in Harlem. Even the diverse enticements and rich peculiarities of African American cooking are a part of Harlem’s atmosphere, and the smells and tastes are frequently explored as Himes moves his two detectives through the many greasy spoons that line their beat (at one point in Crazy Kill the author duplicates an entire restaurant menu, from entrees to beverages, from “alligator tail and rice” to “sassafrasroot tea”). Humor (if not parody) is reflected in the many unusual names of Himes’s characters: Sassafras, Susie Q., Charlie Chink Dawson, H. Exodus Clay, Pigmeat, and Fishtail Perry; it is also reflected in the many instances of gullibility motivated by greed which account for the numerous scams, stings, and swindles that occur. Himes accomplishes all of this with a remarkable economy of dialogue and language, an astute manipulation of temporal sequence, and a pattern of plots distinguished by a marvelous blend of fantasy and realism: a sense of the magically real which lurks beneath the surface of the commonplace. “Is he crazy or just acting?” asks Sergeant Brody about Reverend Short’s vision. “Maybe both,” Grave Digger answers. The last three novels in the series—Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), The Heat’s On (1966), and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)—continue the character types, stylistic devices, and thematic concerns of the earlier novels. Each one represents a deepening of Himes’s artistic control over his material; each one further enhanced his reputation in the genre and increased his notoriety and popularity among the American public. The first two of these were adapted for the screen—Cotton Comes to Harlem (1969) and Come Back Charleston Blue (1972)—and the third, reissued in the United States as Hot Day, Hot Night (1970), was received as the “apotheosis” of Himes’s detective novels. Its author was described (on the jacket cover) as “the best black American novelist writing today.” Principal Mystery and Detective Fiction Series: Harlem Domestic: For Love of Imabelle, 1957 (also as A Rage in Harlem); The Crazy Kill, 1959; The Real Cool Killers, 1959; All Shot Up, 1960; The Big Gold Dream, 1960; Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1965; The Heat’s On, 1966 (also as Come Back Charleston Blue); Blind Man with a Pistol, 1969 (also as Hot Day, Hot Night); Plan B, 1983. Other Novels: Run Man Run, 1966; Une Affaire de Viol, 1968. Other Major Works Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945; Lonely Crusade, 1947; Cast the First Stone, 1952; The Third Generation, 1954; The Primitive, 1955; Pinktoes, 1961; A Case of Rape, 1980. Nonfiction: The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume I, 1972; My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume II, 1976. miscellaneous: Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings, 1973. Bibliography Freese, Peter. The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman. Essen, Germany: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1992. Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. Margolies, Edward. “Race and Sex: The Novels of Chester Himes.” In Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968. Milliken, Stephen F. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Sallis, James. Chester Himes: A Life. New York: Walker, 2000. ___________. “In America’s Black Heartland: The Achievement of Chester Himes.” Western Humanities Review 37 (Autumn, 1983): 191-206. Soitos, Stephen. “Black Detective Fiction.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998. Williams, John A. “My Man Himes.” In Amistad I, edited by John A. Williams and Charles H. Harris. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1970. Roland E. Bush |
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