Himes, Chester (1909-1984)

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Himes, Chester (1909-1984)

College dropout, pimp, bootlegger, and convicted armed-robber, Chester Himes began writing his acclaimed "Harlem Cycle" of crime novels in Paris in 1957. His most famous creations, the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones work as a team and deal with transgressors in a ruthless, violent way, brandishing and using huge guns to settle disputes. The absurdity of the level of violence the two detectives both mete out and suffer is presented as representative of the wider absurdity of the lives of African Americans, and perhaps the absurdities of Himes's own life. Whatever Coffin Ed and Gravedigger do, they cannot end the cycle of crime and violence that grips black city life, just as, in Himes's view, whatever African Americans do, they cannot escape the cycle of racism that controls their lives.

The "Harlem Cycle" crime thrillers describe life among the struggling poor of Harlem in such vivid detail as can only come from experience, but Himes was born into a respectable, middle-class family in Jefferson City, Missouri. His father was a college professor who was head of the mechanical department of the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson and later worked at Alcorn College in Mississippi. His mother was a descendent of wealthy southern whites and made a point of declaring the family's superiority whenever she could, often criticizing her husband for his dark skin. This contrast between his father's dark skin and his mother's pride in her pale almost-whiteness reappears in Himes's novels as a dynamic of good and evil; evil characters in his work tend to have light-colored skin. After his father lost his job at Alcorn, the Himes family moved to St. Louis and later to Cleveland, Ohio, where the relationship between his parents deteriorated. Himes graduated from high school in Ohio and, after recovering from falling down an elevator shaft, began studying at Ohio State University.

Himes's university career did not last long. In his own way he began to resist the discrimination he experienced even among young African Americans by rejecting what he called the "light-bright-and-damn-near-white" social clique at the university in favor of friends he made among gamblers, pimps, and prostitutes in the ghetto. As a result he was forced to resign his college place, and began a short but formative career as a criminal, selling bootleg whiskey during Prohibition and taking part in robberies. After his parents' divorce, and his father's decline into menial, low-paid jobs, Himes was eventually involved in an armed robbery, for which he was given a twenty-year prison sentence. With encouragement from his devoted mother, he began to write in prison, and published stories in magazines such as Abbott's Monthly, owned by and marketed to African Americans. He also managed to sell occasional stories to the more lucrative Esquire magazine, from which he concealed his racial origins.

Himes served seven and a half years in prison and, when he was paroled in 1936, began trying to earn a living from his writing. He continued to write for the magazines, but when he and his first wife, Jean, moved to California during the war, he worked in the shipyards and began to write his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, which he completed in 1945. Himes had a difficult time with the autobiographical protest novels he wrote in the following seven years, all of which struggled to find publishers. His parents died, his marriage to Jean failed, and his various affairs with white women, most notably with Vandi Haygood, ended in disaster. In 1953, with money from the advance on Cast the First Stone, he bought a ticket to France. He lived briefly in London and Mallorca, co-wrote a novel with a woman he had met on the ship from New York, and finally moved to Paris.

In 1957, he met Marcel Duhamel of the publishing house Gallimard, which published American hard-boiled novels under the famous imprint, "La Série Noire," and was recruited to write detective stories. The first of these, published in America as For Love of Imabelle (1957), and now known as A Rage in Harlem, won the "Grand Prix de la littérature policiére" in France and made him famous overnight. He wrote a total of ten detective novels, nine involving Gravedigger and Coffin Ed, one of which, Plan B, was published posthumously in 1993. The "Harlem Cycle," as these novels have become known, allowed him to address the themes of racism and violence that had made his earlier novels unpopular. As Stephen F. Soitos states, in Himes, racism is present among both blacks and whites, and as such his novels represent the growing awareness among African Americans in the 1950s of race and class, though his attitude towards women is far from progressive. His detectives are only too aware of the absurdity of their real task. They must protect whites and white society from black criminals and the latent chaos of Harlem so that they do not become too afraid to go there. If that should happen, black criminals and con artists would be deprived of their income.

Although his Harlem crime novels won awards and sold well from the start, it is only since the 1980s that they have been given the critical attention they deserve. Like James Baldwin, another African American writing in France about life in New York, Himes looked back at America with the clarity of an exile's eye. His elaborate hierarchies of good and evil characters, signaled by their skin color, and his experiments with nonlinear time and simultaneous plot events in his novels have informed the work of later novelists such as Ishmael Reed. Although they were written for commercial reasons, Himes's crime novels are an angry continuation of his early challenges to America, and a significant contribution to the development of American detective fiction.

—Chris Routledge