The story goes – and this is the real-life story not the novel – that after Chester Himes left the United States in the early 1950s to escape racism, he settled in France and, starting to build a good reputation as a writer, was commissioned by a publisher of detective paperbacks to try his hand at such a book set in Harlem, the notorious black district of New York City.
By one account, Himes had boarded the ship Ile de France, landed at Le Havre and taken a boat train to Paris, arriving on April 9, 1953. Another telling is that he spent a year travelling around Europe before deciding to settle in the French capital, finding community there with the likes of fellow expatriate African-American writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright.
They showed him a better way of literary life without the Damocles’ sword of American racism hanging overhead. It wasn’t perfect but Paris was free enough to offer Himes the breathing room he needed to create. However, freedom doesn’t pay the bills and although Himes was happier in Europe he still needed to earn much more.
In one of his autobiographies he says it was in 1957 when, taking the manuscript for another novel to the offices of Gallimard, his French publishers, he ran into Marcel Duhamel, the editor of their imprint La Series Noire (The Black Series), and the suggestion about the detective story was made. Duhamel knew Himes was always short of the readies.
initially Himes said no. He hadn’t written any crime novels before and he didn’t know if he could. He also didn’t know if it was something he was even interested in pursuing. But the publisher kept insisting, and after Himes considered the 40 cents in his bank account he decided to give the novel a try. Duhamel advised him:
“Get an idea. Start with action, somebody does something – a man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down the hall… Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don’t give a damn who is thinking what – only what they are doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another. Don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages.”
Himes reluctantly took the challenge and thus the Harlem Detectives series was born, ultimately to comprise eight hard-boiled novels between 1957 and 1969, There was a ninth but it was unfinished when Himes died aged 75 on November 12, 1984 in Moravia, Spain.
That first crime book Himes “tried” to write was called “For Love of Imabelle”, also known as “A Rage in Harlem”, and In 1958 it won France’s Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière, a prestigious honour for the Best Detective Novel of the year. The further titles were each translated first into French and then published in English.
The series featured two black detectives named Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and it is these books for which Himes has become best remembered, out of some 20 he wrote in total. According to one count, the Harlem Detectives series has been published in at least 132 editions around the world in eight different languages.
Set in the 1950s and early 1960s, Himes referred to them as his “domestic” novels because he says he “put the slang, the daily routine, and complex human relationships of Harlem into [the] detective novels… This is a world of pimps and prostitutes who don’t worry about racism, injustice, or social equality. They’re just concerned with survival.”
Three of the eight novels were just re-issued by Penguin Random House in November 2024: “The Crazy Kill”, third in the series (1959); “The Big Gold Dream”, fourth in the series (1960) and “Blind Man With a Pistol”, the eighth (1969). These follow a re-issue of the other five in 2021: “A Rage in Harlem”, the debut (1957); “The Real Cool Killers”, the second (1959); “All Shot Up”, the fifth (1960); “The Heat’s On”, sixth (1961) and “Cotton Comes to Harlem”, seventh (1965). “Cotton Comes to Harlem” even got a further outing with another new cover in 2023 as part of Penguin Random House’s 30 “Crime and Espionage” reissues.
The current page-turner at The Budapest Times is “The Crazy Kill”, in which Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson seek the killer of Valentine Haines. Reverend Short is at a wake for Big Joe Pullen when he falls out of a third-floor window but is saved by landing in a bread basket left outside a shop. But then Haines too is found in the basket, knifed in the heart.
The fourth of the novels re-issued in November was Himes’ debut effort, “If He Hollers Let Him Go”, from 1945, and the difference between that book and the Harlem Detectives series is immediately apparent. It’s the proverbial chalk and cheese, two different sides of a thing.
“If He Hollers Let Him Go” is a much better read, we suggest, penned with all the white heat of anger by a black man suffering extreme racism. Although fictional it’s drawn from Himes’ own oppression and is agreed to have autobiographical elements. What’s more, it grips.
The Harlem Detectives books, including “The Crazy Kill” have a lighter touch and are even absurdist in their way. Although Harlem is a rough place, these stories aren’t so much hard-boiled as sunny-side-up. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed have a comedic edge, even though they belt suspects and bust in places, disdaining niceties such as search warrants.
Well, with names like that… When Dulcy Perry is tied spread-eagled to a bed with a knife sticking straight up from the crevice between her breasts and asks if she is “bad hurt”, Grave Digger says, “I doubt it. You’re too pretty to be bad hurt. Only ugly women ever get hurt bad.” The wound does prove to be superficial. The knife thrust was stopped by her sternum.
Police questioning is conducted in a soundproof room without windows on the first floor at the 116th Street precinct station. This room is known to the Harlem underworld as the “Pigeon Nest” – no matter how tough an egg, if they kept someone there long enough he would hatch out a pigeon. For instance, Coffin Ed chops Chink Charlie Dawson across the neck then the two cops handcuff his hands and ankles, and hang him upside down from the top of the door. Each puts a heel into his armpits and pushes down gradually. Chink spills.
From home in Paris in 1959, Himes was ramming home how crime-ridden Harlem was. Detective Sergeant Brody from Central Homicide: “And all I’ve learned so far is that the folks here in Harlem are so respectable their fingers don’t stink.” Grave Digger: “This is Harlem, where anything can happen.” Grave Digger again: “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.”
Himes brings his memory into play: “It was a street of paradox: unwed young mothers, suckling their infants, living on a prayer; fat black racketeers coasting past in big bright-colored convertibles with their solid gold babes, carrying huge sums of money on their person; hard-working men, holding up the builidngs with their shoulders, talking in loud voices up there in Harlem where the white bosses couldn’t hear them; teenage gangsters grouping for a gang fight, smoking marijuana weed to get up their courage; everybody escaping the hotbox rooms they lived in, seeking respite in a street made hotter by the automobile exhaust and the heat released by the concrete walls and walks.”
Don’t worry about it making sense, Marcel Duhamel of La Series Noire told the impoverished Chester Himes back then. Perhaps the advice was taken a little too much to heart.
