Chester Himes
The comments on the previous entry, “The Unsung Hero of the 1970s,” reveal a divergence of opinion — to put it mildly — about the merits of Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye. (One commentor calls it “one of the greatest films ever made”; another writes that Altman’s crime film “was an actual crime in itself.”) The debate got me thinking about movies made from detective novels, and about detective novels themselves. And that made me think of the African-American writer Chester Himes.
Himes (1909-84), who began writing while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery, was an odd guy. One thing that struck me about the two volumes of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1973) and My Life of Absurdity (1976), and his non-genre novels, including If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), is that he had one of those minds that give equal weight to many things. As a result those two otherwise well-crafted novels alternate between stretches of tight, tense writing and passages drier than the minutes from a board meeting.
BUT Himes seemed to understand that that approach wouldn’t work with detective fiction, and his works in that genre — his best novels, to my mind — were as lean and mean as a welterweight boxer, not to mention funny. They all feature the black Harlem police detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.
I quote from a piece I wrote years ago for an obscure little magazine called Paperback Parade:
“These partners, big, mean, dedicated, and in many ways indistinguishable, serve as the link between Harlem and the police department — products of the former, they continually demonstrate their (unspoken) allegiance to the latter. Or perhaps the reverse is true: cops to the bone, not above busting heads (to get information, or out of mere irritation, or both), they protect the citizens of these tough streets by being tougher still. . . . [They are not] sentimental about the community they serve. They are, as detectives must be, skeptical of everything.”
Himes writes about their adventures in books including The Crazy Kill (1959), The Real Cool Killers (1959), All Shot Up (1960), The Heat’s On (1966), and the transcendent Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).
Two movies were made from Himes’s Grave Digger/Coffin Ed novels in the 1970s: Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back Charleston Blue, both starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques. I haven’t seen those in years, but I liked t hem as a kid. (A side note: the gifted, forgotten Cambridge was very good as the lead in The Watermelon Man, Melvin Van Peebles’s movie about a white racist who wakes up one day to discover that he has turned black.) In A Rage in Harlem, released in 1991, Digger and Ed are relegated to minor parts, while the main story focuses on a poor dumb guy (played by Forest Whitaker) and the beautiful, dangerous woman he loves (Robin Givens).
If only Spike Lee would make a film from one of Himes’s novels, and cast Samuel Jackson and either Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx…
One Response to “Chester Himes”
Chester Himes was actually a modernist who worked in genre. Like Jim Thompson he destroyed the genre he used, extending it in the process. As genre writers they never received the acclaim they deserved in this country. Though both, naturally, were taken up by the French.
Blind Man With A Pistol is a masterpiece of 20th Century literature. (Additionally, the title is a fitting epitaph for the recently departed Bush administration.) Told not in linear narrative but in the modernist fashion of juxtaposing unrelated chapters that allows the reader to make the connections between them, Himes creates an absurdist, yet jaundiced, portrait of a society in perpetual collapse.
Fans of this book might also want to read Plan B. It is an unfinished novel Himes started prior to Blind Man With A Pistol that also interleaves seemingly unrelated chapters until they finally cohere at the end in the apocalpyse of a black nationalist revolution. It is just as brutal in its depiction of America with the added virture of being cold-eyed in the rendering of its history. It was published by the University of Mississippi Press in 1993. I have no idea if it is still in print but it is a worthy addition to the Coffin Ed-Grave Digger Jones novels complete with a surprise ending.
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