Chester Himes is the bomb, he's the shit, he's a genius. You're into crime and you ain't read him, you're missing out. You're into the African-American experience and you ain't read him, you're really missing out. You think some lowly thriller-writer's beneath you? Chester Himes can write. The style is half the fun: baroque hip gritty black humour ramped up to eleven in the service of thrills and satire. Check this:With a flourish like a stripteaser removing her G-string, she took off one shoe and tossed it into his lap. He knocked it violently aside. She took off the other shoe and tossed it into his lap. He caught himself just in time to keep from grabbing it and biting it. She stripped off her stockings and garter belt and approached him to drape them about his neck. He came to his feet like a Jack-in-the-box, saying in a squeaky voice, 'This has gone far enough.''No, it hasn't,' she said and moved into him.He tried to push her away but she clung to him with all her strength, pushing her stomach into him and wrapping her legs about his body. The odor of hot-bodied woman, wet cunt and perfume came up from her and drowned him.'Goddamn whore!' he grated, and backed her to the bed. He tore off his coat, mouthing, 'I'll show you who's a pansy, you hot-ass slut.'But at the last moment he regained enough composure to go hang his holstered pistol on the outside doorknob out of her reach, then he turned back towards her.'Come and get it, pansy,' she taunted, lying on the bed with her legs open and her brown-nippled teats pointing at him like the vision of the great whore who lives in the minds of all puritanical men.First Himes I ever read, The Heat's On, opened with the best action sequence I've seen in print ever - made me realise action is a glorious thing. In All Shot Up a motorcycle rider is decapitated by a pane of glass off a glass repairer's truck and keeps riding, while Grave Digger and Coffin Ed (the anti-heroic detectives who feature throughout Himes's Harlem crime novels) watch through the frosted-over windscreen of Ed's jalopy.Thing is, Himes can do 'literary'. His first novel, Cast the First Stone, clearly part-autobiographical, is an acute analysis of homosexuality in prison (or bisexuality, since most of the characters were straight when they were free), with desperation, confusion and pride-versus-shame centre-stage. For 1950s America, coming from a black man, it must have been shocking, but (unlike Burroughs, say) it's not played for shock value. It's touching, it's true, it draws you in. But it didn't sell, and after 4 or 5 such professional misfires Himes moved to Paris, where he was convinced by translator and Serie Noir publisher Marcel Duhamel to try his hand at the crime novels which ultimately made him famous.Harlem through the eyes of a Parisian emigre encouraged to write the black humour that always goes over better in France than the States. This is one-of-a-kind cult noir par excellence, the type of writer who obsesses you, fully the equal of Hammett or Chandler or Jim Thompson or David Goodis. Yeah (like Chandler's) the plots can be stupid, but try Cotton Comes to Harlem for the tightest of them, and for a healthy dose of race relations Chester Himes-style. Himes, man! If I haven't reviewed him until now it's cos I didn't know where to start. But, pulp writer though he may be, he's one for the canon.Other classics: A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, Blind Man With a Pistol. Oh yeah, and most of the Harlem novels were re-released by Penguin in 2012.
Cotton Comes to Harlem, is an enjoyable and fast-paced detective thriller that reads almost like a screenplay due to its taut plotting, constant action, and a near constant focus on visuality. Of course, Himes does not sacrifice any of his sharp perspective the racial politics of America in the mid-twentieth century in service of genre approachability, though he takes a more vaudevillian, high entertainment approach when compared to the seething psychology of If He Hollers Let Him Go. For the record, I find the earlier novel to be a far more emotionally engaging and soulful work, though I can't deny this one is more immediately satisfying in many ways. Perhaps the most apt comparison would be between the endings of each work. The end of Cotton Comes to Harlem feels entirely pat to the point of almost appearing to be the last thirty seconds of another episode of "Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson Lay Down the Law," whereas If He Hollers Let Him Go packs a gut punch of an ending that wrenchingly twists the book's emotional and political faultlines into a wiry ball of perfect madness.But you have to hand to Himes for illustrating characters as indelibly as he does here. Harlem feels so richly populated, and Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were dirty long before Harry. Of course, their moral ambiguity deals with the complex questions that arise in the politics of an oppressed community rather than being an avatar of proto-fascism, Clint Eastwood-style. They crack wise and banter in a manner that predicts the interactions of so many later movie and TV cops, though it feels fresher and thicker in this more original context.Altogether, it's a fun, slick read, though I'm not sure how many details with stick with me in the long run.
Do You like book Cotton Comes To Harlem (1988)?
So, while I was reading Mosley, Easy Rawlins and a friend of his get into a discussion as to who is the greatest African American novelist, Chester Himes or Ralph Ellison. One or the other of them opts for Himes because he wrote more books and also because he wasn't afraid to show all society's shit. Whatever, I figured I should check out Chester Himes. I think he might be the African American equivalent of Raymond Chandler, i.e. a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction, albeit from an African-American perspective. In this book, I've been introduced to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Apparently, this is the 7th book about Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, but the first I've read. Anyway, they are two New York Detectives who mostly work the Harlem beat. The only cops the people of Harlem would ever trust would be black cops. This book involves fraudsters, both black and white, robbing from each other. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed find a way to ensure justice for the defrauded poor people, in a way that doesn't involve white courts, which would likely punish the criminals without ensure reparations. Something like that. Whatever, it was rather an interesting, if rough, story and I'll likely take another fly or two at Himes. He'll teach me about a whole different world that the one in which I've lived for the last many decades. Interesting that as I read this book, and the one by Walter Mosley that prompted me to read this book, the blow up in Ferguson, MO was going down. It seems that the African American community still can't trust white cops to protect them and provide justice to their communities.
—Larry Piper
Another slick entry in Himes' Harlem cycle. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones investigate the theft of $87,000 from a "Back-to-Africa" organization and discover white racists, black hustlers, a murderous gun moll and her lesbian squeeze, and all the other types of high-living lowlifes we've come to expect from this master of noir in the darkest shade of black.Himes' characters hop off the page (and into your lap in a couple of cases) and his dialog is tough, believable and laced with larcenous humor. No doubt Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are by-the-book detectives -- how else would they have become the aces of the Harlem precinct? -- but the book they go by has some pretty loose rules. But forget the book they go by and go buy this one: it has a surprise ending that will leave you grinning.My recommendation? If you like tough detectives, murderous punks and even tougher women, grab a copy of "Cotton Comes to Harlem," sit back, "straighten up and count off."
—William
Chester Himes once again mines the street life of mid century Harlem for the setting in which to unspool a great thriller. Like all writers who endure beyond their time, Himes' observations are about human traits, frailty and strength, greed and generosity, here emerging from the crucible of poverty and violence. His writing is gripping, eloquent and funny. Himes captures a moment and renders it immortal as he conveys the moment and puts us there. Here is how he describes the music at a the Cotton Club, famous Harlem jazz club, "A piano was playing frenetically, a saxophone wailing aphrodisiacally, the bass patting suggestively, the horn demanding and the guitar begging".The recurring characters, African-American police officers Grave Digger Johnson and Coffin Ed Jones are tough guys that are still believable as they approach near mythic status. One can see how the community in Harlem and their fellow officers, see them this way but they never see themselves this way. It will be a sad day for me when I read the last of these books. Luckily I have a poor memory which frees me to re-read!
—Lemar
