(1909-1984)
Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, Chester Himes was the son of educated, middle-class parents who raised him well and sent him off to college, which in that era was still a rare opportunity for many young Americans. A decent and substantial life should have been Himes’s future but for a violent temper, wide antisocial streak, and the critical fact that his skin was black. He ended up a criminal, serving a long sentence at Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery. He spent part of the sentence learning to write, and in 1934 he sold a prison story, “Crazy in the Stir,” to Esquire magazine. Other sales to the magazine followed. Himes worked on a novel but had difficulty selling it. He wandered to California and took factory and menial jobs. Life remained tough and embittering. Out of his experiences in World War II-era Los Angeles he wrote another novel, his first to be published: If He Hollers Let Him Go. The topic with its unblinking account of racist America, read like an open wound. Himes followed it with several other grimly autobiographical novels, all painful, enraged works.
Chester Himes created the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.
After many years of failing to overcome or come to terms with the humiliation of being non-Caucasian in the United States, and thinking to follow in the footsteps of other restless American artists, including Richard Wright (1908-1960), the acclaimed black novelist (Native Son) to whom he was sometimes compared, Himes set off for Europe. He wandered from France to Spain and elsewhere and wrote another angry topic that drew heavily from his own experience (The Primitive), then, in the mid-1950s, settled for a long stay in Paris. Badly in need of income, Himes jumped at the offer of a sympathetic French editor named Marcel Duhamel for him to write a detective story for the developer Gallimard’s line of hard-boiled, mostly American crime fiction. He came up with a setting—Harlem, the legendary heart of black America, and the one Negro neighborhood the average European was likely to have heard about. He came up with his ostensible crime solvers, two ferocious, cynical but honest black detectives he named Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. And he came up with a plot, an intricate series of cons and crimes laced with scenes of caustic humor and even outright farce. The result was a pop fiction masterpiece, called, in America, For Love of Imabelle, and the start of one of the greatest of all crime fiction series.
Following his editor’s suggestions (“Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. . . . We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what—only what they’re doing. . . . Don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages. . .”) Himes wrote in a straightforward, cinematic prose style that could be easily and quickly translated into French, giving each scene a fast pace with little introspection or digression. Imabelle and the topics that followed were hard, brutal, and viciously funny, with some of the most vivid and exciting action sequences ever written. Himes himself was not very familiar with the real Harlem, but created through his imagination an outlandish, teeming setting of larger-than-life characters and life-and-death situations, with Coffin Ed and Grave Digger like a dour Greek chorus following the absurd and dangerous developments and then stepping in just as chaos reaches epic proportions. Himes’s “serious” novels had been filled with evidence of his greatness as a writer, but the author’s anger sometimes got the better of his art. Writing escapism under the imposed limitations of the French Serie Noir crime line, Himes was necessarily cut off from the ordeal of autobiography and the responsibility of explicit sociological truth-telling (although these action thrillers were full of offhand critiques of American realities). His humor, talent for satire, and storytelling skill were unleashed. The series was fantastic.
Himes stuck with the Harlem detective novels for 10 years or so, publishing no other novels except for a delightfully raunchy comic sex novel for Olympia Press, Pinktoes, a kind of interracial version of Candy (1964), by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. The crime novels gave him fame and a degree of financial security, although the series remained much better known in Europe than in America—at least until a moderately successful film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem was released in 1970. In the mid-1960s, by which time Himes had had several return visits to his homeland and America had become engulfed in a violent civil rights struggle, Himes found it more difficult to sustain the fun and exhilaration of the early topics in the series. In Blind Man with a Pistol, the two strands of his writing career—the crime pulp and the novels of social protest and autobio-raphy—came together as one. A final, unfinished work, posthumously published as Plan B, took things even farther, with an apocalyptic civil war between blacks and whites and the careers of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger ended in blood and madness.
Himes spent his last years in coastal Spain, and a street near his final residence was named in his honor.
Works
- (dates of first English-language publication) All Shot Up (1960);
- Black on Black (1973);
- Blind Man with a Pistol (1969);
- Case of Rape, A (1980);
- Cast the First Stone (1953);
- Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965);
- Crazy Kill, The (1959);
- For Love of Imabelle (1959), also published as A Rage in Harlem;
- Heat’s On, The (1966);
- If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945);
- Lonely Crusade (1947);
- My Life of Absurdity (1976);
- Pinktoes (1965);
- Plan B (1993);
- Primitive, The (1955);
- Quality of Hurt, The (1972);
- Real Cool Killers, The (1959);
- Run Man Run (1966);
- Third Generation, The (1954)
