Chester Himes (Magill Book Reviews)

Chester Himes is usually known, if he is known at all, as the author of a series of Harlem-based crime novels featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, African American cops who have one foot on each side of the imaginary “thin blue line” that is supposed to separate order from anarchy and, as an ineradicably racist society sees it, justice from jungle. In his thoroughly researched and deeply felt biographical and critical study—one senses throughout that the author and his subject are kindred spirits—James Sallis establishes the substantial artistic and cultural value of these novels, which not only earn Himes a place in the company of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain as a master of the hard- boiled style and existential fable but add a literal and vital African American blackness to a noir tradition that has been for the most part short-sightedly color-blind.

This renewed appreciation of his late works is set in the context of a rediscovery of earlier works that confirm Himes’s lifelong serious literary claims and ambitions. Sallis meticulously traces Himes’s artistic versatility and development—his characteristic blend of violence and comedy, for example, and his move from realism to an exaggerated stylization necessary to capture his vision of an irrational and unjust world—even as he outlines a basic unity in Himes’s work, seen in a recurrent focus on explosive violence, alienation, self-hatred, and destructive intimacy, all identified as consequences of living in a racist society.

Sallis does not shy away from the fact that in many ways Himes was personally unlikable: evidently abusive, manipulative, and jealous in his personal relations, and perennially frustrated and angry at his lack of commercial and critical success. And Sallis’s description of much of Himes’s work may seem as much of a warning as an invitation: we should expect shrillness, untameable wildness, and an uncompromising assertion that centuries of racism will inevitably lead to frightening and often indiscriminate violence. But at the same time he documents Himes’s remarkable success in the terms that he set for himself: to be more than a mere storyteller and to tell the truth, as he saw it, of the American experience, especially the African American experience.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 97 (February 15, 2001): 1100.

Library Journal 126 (January 1, 2001): 108.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 18, 2001, p. 2.

The New York Times Book Review 106 (March 18, 2001): 11.

Publishers Weekly 247 (January 8, 2001): 58.

The Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2001, p. W9.