Chester Himes's literary career has traditionally been divided into three distinct parts, corresponding to, and partly influenced by, the three different countries of his residence. His first writings date from between 1933 and 1953, while he was living in the United States. They include short stories, written while in prison, and, after his release, longer fictions that have been termed "protest novels." These novels offer sharp and often violent political commentaries about black life in a deeply racist white America. Though he received immediate success and publicity after his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, his later works from this period proved too harsh for the American public and his popularity abated. When they were translated into French, however, they were received in a more positive way; in fact, The Lonely Crusade was chosen as one of the top five American books in France in 1952. It was in part this recognition that induced Himes to move to France in 1953. While in France, he launched the second phase of his writings, the detective fiction. Perhaps because they belong to a "popular" genre, these novels are perceived to have been motivated by the need to make money rather than by a will to make serious political statements. They were inspired in 1956 by Marcel Duhamel, editor of Gallimard's Série Noire, the prestigious French collection of hard-boiled mysteries. Under his guidance, during the next twelve years, Himes wrote eight detective novels set in Harlem. In 1958, he was awarded the Grand Prix de la littérature policière. Though achieving considerable success as a writer of polars, both in France and in the United States, Himes abandoned the series in 1969, moved to Spain and resumed "serious" writing, this time in the form of an autobiography. It is my contention that, despite the superficial genre change, and contrary to the prevailing opinion, a clear continuity can be seen in all of Himes's writing. His detective fiction does not break with his earlier politically committed works; rather, it channels the same protest in another form. In fact, as I shall try to show, it is this overall perspective that accounts not only for the main structural tension in the eight mysteries but also for a dramatic transformation of that tension.

There are two reasons why Himes's Série Noire stories are viewed as the first black detective fiction. First, their two detectives are indeed black policemen. Second, all the novels are set within the boundaries of black Harlem during the late nineteen fifties and sixties, where "anything can happen." They explore social relations of blacks and offer a vivid portrayal of racial conflict and shocking violence of power at play. Himes's Harlem, a space inhabited primarily by blacks, represents an extreme form of a society gone crazy because of racial madness: "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." Particularly striking in this special place is its "otherness" of language as well as the subversion of gender and race identity by transvestites, transsexuals, albino blacks, and people who play on various gradations of "blackness" which determine social and cultural status.

To this "crazy" world, Himes brings his two hard-boiled black detectives, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones (Ed Cercueil and Fossoyeur), and that insertion creates the basic structural tension in all the novels. Because of their profession, Jones and Ed are forced to mediate between the white world of law and the black world of the streets. While at the police precincts, their language is generally conventional and nonviolent, conforming to the rules of social discourse necessary for their acceptance by the white society; but once on the streets, their language and code of conduct follow a diversity of other rules prevailing in mad Harlem. Eventually, their participation in the two worlds leads to their rejection by both blacks and whites. As Coffin Ed puts it at the end of The Heat's On:

What hurts me most about this business is the attitude of the public toward cops like me and Digger. Folks just don't want to believe that what we're trying to do is make a decent peaceful city for people to live in, and we're going about it the best way we know how.

But that ultimate failure only caps a dramatic evolution of their mediating function and the various strategies they adopt to fulfil it.

Initially two main strategies appear to be at their disposal for their constant move across the racial (and social) border: they can adjust their language in order to deal effectively with each group, and they can disguise their appearance in order to blend with the group or to manipulate it. But neither Coffin Ed nor Gravedigger Jones is given to disguise. Their blending ability rather stems from their indistinguishable appearance: except for Ed's scarred face (from an acid burn which melted it), they appear alike both to whites and blacks: "tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men." They do not play any role beyond their functional role, that of black cops. By the same token, however, they set a contrast with the other inhabitants of Harlem, who seem obsessed by disguises. A Rage in Harlem was originally titled The Five Cornered Square after a particularly gullible character who is conned by everyone and hence so square that he seems to have five corners. This Jackson is also a failure at disguises; when he tries to disguise his voice over the phone when calling his landlady, she has no trouble hearing right through his muffled voice: "I know who you is Jackson. You ain't fooling me." In contrast, Jackson's identical twin brother, Goldy, is a master at disguises and fools everybody. Goldy spends his days dressed as Sister Gabriel, much to the indignation of Jackson: "There's a law against impersonating a female." Goldy's costume allows him to move about freely and to carry out his secret activities without arousing suspicion. He lives by his "wits" not only in the world of the streets but also in the world of the cops. For Goldy, like Ed and Jones, also straddles two worlds: a criminal among Harlem blacks, he is an informer for the police. His disguise works for both roles, but, in his dealings with the detectives, he also has recourse to the second strategy: a special language adjusted to that of his interlocutors. When Jones greets him with "What's the word, Sister?" he responds with "And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon," that the black detective understands readily. In a later passage, he uses this same biblical talk to evade a white policeman for "he knew the best way to confuse a white cop in Harlem was to quote foolishly from the Bible." Eventually, it is Goldy's language that kills him and restores the social order: he "Talked himself into the grave."

No such dangers are faced by the two detectives. While indifferent to disguises, they are masters at language strategy. Though they do not yet play as central a role as they will in later novels (no doubt because Himes brought them into A Rage in Harlem at Duhamel's request), Ed and Jones demonstrate from the start their linguistic versatility. Jones has no problems understanding Sister Gabriel, and he controls a potentially explosive situation with a simple voice imitation trick: "'Straighten up,' he shouted in a big loud voice. And then, as if echoing his own voice, he mimicked Coffin Ed, 'Count off.'" Rather than highlighting rational deductive power as the essential function of the detective, Himes shows that rationality is itself a function of language and that it is language which determines the exercise of authority and power. As James Baldwin writes, "A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey." The power of the two detectives derives from their mastery of communication rather than from a display of brutal force. In fact, Ed and Jones are not very violent in A Rage in Harlem: they put their trust in words, when dealing with blacks or with whites.

To that extent, and despite its title, this first novel written in France is rather optimistic. Perhaps Himes identified his second career (a black American writer's mediation between a French white audience and a black Harlem) with the mission of his two black detectives who must similarly mediate between a white American society as represented by the police and the same black Harlem. Himes's earlier "serious" novels failed to communicate the urgency of the black problem in his own society; he might have now entertained the hope that, in France, his skills at a different form of communication, adjusted to the norms of the Série Noire's readers, would succeed to bridge the racial and social gap. For Himes, as for many others, writing fiction and detecting may have seemed to be a similar verbal attempt to bring out a believable truth; a hopeful double undertaking.

But violence and frustration return in The Real Cool Killers. It opens when a white man is attacked by a black man in a bar in Harlem, then shot apparently by a group of Muslims. But Digger manages to see through their costumes and identifies them as black youths (while the white policemen remain confused and ignorant). A series of interrogations make it clear that the two black detectives have the potential to extract more information from the inhabitants of Harlem than the white authorities. Digger and Ed command respect and fear because their police badge symbolizes a white man's law, but it is only their dark color of skin that enables them to overcome suspicion and to gain some trust among the blacks. Yet, at the same time, they also generate among them a good deal of contempt and resentment. In contrast, their status as officers of the law encourages communication with white people who approve their role of protecting white society: "Maybe I can help you, the white man with the blond crew cut said to Grave Digger. 'You're a detective, aren't you?'" The Real Cool Killers also suggests that the two detectives are not as indistinguishable as is generally believed. In fact, Digger proves to be a better problem solver and language master, while Ed is more prone to violence: he loses his cool and shoots one of the punks. This episode provides the first instance of the blind violence that will occur with increasing frequency in Himes's detective novels, eventually dominating them. The solution of crimes will result less from deductive reasoning and language skill than from their own brutality and violence. Even Digger abandons his language skills and partakes in violence, as if contaminated by the madness of his partner and the general crazy fatality of Harlem.

This turn toward increasing violence has however a more specific reason. It is not Harlem that is changing, but Himes's vision of Harlem. And this evolution cannot be explained by the influence of changes in the detective genre. True, other contributors to the Série Noire, such as Chandler and Hammett, featured strong and hard-boiled detectives. But Marlowe and Sam Spade, however coarse, solve their problems through intellect and deductive reasoning. I rather believe that, on the level of the plot, the violence of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones is a direct consequence of their difficult role as black detectives maintaining a white law in the black world of Harlem. As Digger explains, "colored hoodlums had no respect for colored cops unless you beat it into them or blew them away." In contrast to A Rage in Harlem, where they still commanded respect, in the last novel of the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, Jones and Ed will almost completely lose their authority among the blacks. In fact, they are threatened and attacked by a group of teenagers with a racial agenda: "'We're the law,' Coffin Ed said…. 'Then you're on whitey's side.'" The two detectives justify their violence against blacks—men and women—by a paradoxical double argument: their brutality is necessary to curb crime, but it is also excusable because they belong themselves to the very people they brutalize. They think that it is the only way for them to gain respect because their official title no longer holds any weight and the traditional means of questioning are no longer effective. For them, violence is an "innocent" feature of their profession as detectives in contrast to "the white men on the force who commit the pointless brutality." Yet, by the end of the series, they fail not only the citizens of Harlem who reject them, but also the white world of the police precincts which also rejects them:

Now after twelve years as first-grade detectives they hadn't been promoted. Their raises in salaries hadn't kept up with the cost of living … when they weren't taking lumps from the thugs, they were taking lumps from the commissioners.

The direct cause of their failure seems to be a double alienation, from both blacks and whites. Which means that they experience a growing double gap in communication or, more generally, a double collapse of their mediating function between the two worlds.

The question is: what motivated Himes, from novel to novel, to undermine and finally negate his early trust in mediation? Was it because his own mediating function as a novelist was also progressively collapsing? A distinction must be made here between the process of mediation and its content. On the one hand, over the twelve years, Himes's novels remained successful, and the faithful French readers continued to enrich their image of Harlem. On the other hand, however, it is quite likely that Himes himself was increasingly moving away from his earlier light vision of Harlem, and his somewhat hopeful perspective on the solution of the problems of blacks in America. In other terms, I think that Himes was coming to doubt any possibility of navigating between the two incompatible worlds of white and black. The solution to divisive racism could not be found in mediating the white man's law. The strained atmosphere culminating in Blind Man with a Pistol testifies in that sense to Himes's growing impatience with the mounting racial tension in America and its echoes in Europe. His novels illustrate, one after another, the progression of that tension among the characters of his fictional Harlem.

A Rage in Harlem concerned itself exclusively with the lives of blacks, barely alluding to the white outside world. Then, already in The Real Cool Killers, racial tension becomes a mainspring of the plot. When a white man in a black bar in Harlem is believed to be murdered by a group of black punks, the white police chief is mainly afraid of racial comments; he tells Jones and Ed: "You want it said the New York City police stood by helpless while a white man got himself killed in the middle of a crowded nigger street?" Jones and Ed must solve the crime in order to preserve the face of the white police force. They are frustrated by this policy but, as Digger explains, still willing to accept it: "If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it's my job to see that you are safe." And why is this mission reserved for Jones and Ed? Because the white detectives, with a white perspective, cannot distinguish between different members of the black population: to them all blacks look, act, and think alike:

Do I think we'll find him? Do you know who we're looking for?… [they are] just like eighteen thousand or one hundred and eighty thousand other colored men, all looking alike. Have you ever stopped to think there are five hundred thousand colored people in Harlem—one half of a million people with black skin. All looking alike.

They appear to them as an indistinguishable mass of blackness, invisible as individuals. To make this point clear, Himes's portrayal of Harlem characters stresses, in contrast, the gradations of skin color, clothing, body type, and other distinguishing signs that mark individual identities: "brownskin," "olivebrown," "high-yellow," and their variations. These classifications by degree of color further serve, in all of Himes's novels, to make subtle distinctions between social classes among the blacks.

In The Crazy Kill, the third novel of the series, the main players remain black, but a new outsider appears as the "Chink." Also, more scenes take place at the police precinct, where Ed and Digger act as mediators between blacks and whites. Only they have the authority and the ability to bring in the black mob leader Johnny and his wife, since Johnny will trust them because of their common bond of skin. In contrast, when the old black dame Mami shakes hands with the white sergeant, the latter is at a loss: "Sergeant Brody wasn't used to it. He was the law." Later, "Grave Digger saw that Brody didn't get it, so he explained." The same Brody then insults the black mobster by telling him: "'Okay, boy, you can go now.' 'Fine,' Johnny said, getting to his feet. 'Just don't call me boy.'" For Brody any black is an "other." For Ed and Jones blacks are "us": they know and understand them. Like in A Rage in Harlem, they have black stool pigeons, including a drug addict whom Jones and Ed manipulate by controlling when and where he will get a fix.

In The Heat's On, as implied in the title, racial tension is getting hotter, reaching the boiling point. The value of skin color and the mobility it affords are openly discussed. Sister Heavenly has been dyeing her skin for years to try to become white and gain respect; conversely, and more grimly, the albino Pinky is too white to be allowed to go to Africa, and, in frustration, murders his stepfather: "He said I was too white. He said all them black Africans wouldn't like colored people white as I is, and they'd kill me." Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are losing their patience with the prejudices of white society and bring up the matter of skin color to the white sergeant in the form of an innocent nursery rhyme: "'If you're white, all right,' he recited in the voice of a school boy. Coffin Ed took it up, 'If you're brown, stick around….' Grave Digger capped it, 'If you're black, stand back….'" Eventually, unable to control their violence, they punch a white drug dealer who has come into Harlem, cause his death, and are suspended from the force because, as they claim, "It's all right to kill a few colored people for trying to get their children an education, but don't hurt a mother-raping white punk for selling dope."

The message becomes even clearer in Cotton Comes to Harlem. The story now centers on an outside white man who tries to penetrate the black world of Harlem. Unlike the secret and personal motives of the Greek in The Heat's On, who cruised Harlem bars in order to find young black girls he wanted to beat up, Colonel Calhoun's intentions are openly social and economic from the start. He chooses Harlem as the best place from which to draw black workers and to sign them up as slaves for his cotton plantation in the South. On a parallel track, the black Reverend Deke O'Malley also plays on Harlem's poverty to try to con black families with a "Back to Africa scheme." Both O'Malley and Calhoun have chosen Harlem as the ideal hunting grounds because of the total despair of its population, cut off from any future by the whites:

They had not found a home in America. So they looked across the sea to Africa, where other black people were both the ruled and the rulers…. Everyone has to believe in something; and the white people of America had left them nothing to believe in.

The rhetoric grows in speeches and impassioned pleas from all sides. Whereas the dialogue was minimal in A Rage in Harlem, with a focus on fast-paced action, Cotton Comes to Harlem subordinates the action to philosophy and commentary. The opening scene has a spokesperson for the Back to Africa movement trying to gather mass support: "These damn southern white folks have worked us like dogs for four hundred years and when we ask them to pay off, they ship us up to the North…. And these damn northern white folks don't want us." At which point he is silenced with machine-gun shots. Violence takes over the function of words. Yet, the attempts at communication multiply, both among the novel's characters and from the novel to the reader. Thus Digger, departing from his role as a neutral upholder of the law, offers social commentary that expresses frustration with purely legal solutions to crimes. He tells the police sergeant, as well as the readers, that:

We got the highest crime rate on earth among the colored people of Harlem. And there ain't but three things to do about it: Make the criminals pay for it—you don't want to do that; pay the people enough to live decently—you ain't going to do that; so all that's left is let 'em eat one another up.

Echoing Digger's inability to remain silent are the black masses who give vent to their frustrations by calling for racial violence. Passive resistance is no longer satisfactory and immediate solutions are sought. For, as Himes points out, a black man will never be able to change the color of his skin unlike a "Puerto Rican [who] becomes white enough he's accepted as white, but no matter how white a spook might become he's still a nigger."

Furthermore, it is not only in the world of Harlem that the situation is heating up. In the white world of the police precinct, intolerance has increased. Earlier efforts at masking racial prejudice or sparing the feelings of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are given up. The atmosphere is almost as tense as that on the streets. Captain Brice blames all black men for the problem of racism and threatens: "I'll arrest every black son of a bitch in Harlem," and Coffin Ed responds: "Including me and Digger?" Brice then sends his two "ace" detectives on a virtually hopeless and fatal mission: in his mind, they have become expendable. He thus fulfills Digger's earlier prophecy that the people in Harlem "will eat one another up," including him and Ed. Because they are black, Ed and Jones are now locked outside the white police precincts and only called in when their skin color may be useful. And while they agree to stay on their jobs, it is only because of a higher duty to their own race, not because of the duty of law enforcement: "I wouldn't do this for nobody but my own black people." At the end, when Digger and Ed finally catch Calhoun, they let him go free, instead of arresting him, in return for the money he stole from the black families. For, had he been turned over to the law, the families would never have seen that money again. This illegal action is justified by the ironic ending which shows that, once back in the South, Calhoun is protected by the law from extradition since in Alabama "killing a Negro did not constitute murder."

In the last novel in the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, Himes's frustration leads him to innovations in structure and in content. He adds both a preface and a foreword that refer directly to violence and chaos in the entire world. Furthermore, within the body of the text, there are several authorial asides or "interludes," one of which discusses the geographical, social, economic and political features of Harlem which, though populated by blacks, is actually still owned by whites. This interlude also evokes historical figures of the Harlem Renaissance: black political leaders, intellectuals and artists. In addition, Blind Man with a Pistol also comments on the Detroit race riot of 1943, World War II, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, represented in the novel by a Black Muslim character named Michael X. These insertions of fragments of History were surely intended by Himes, as a literary device, to impress on the readers that the fiction they are reading is grounded in reality and that the problems it depicts are real and urgent problems. Indeed, in a Brechtian spirit, Himes moves the readers to distance themselves from the illusion of fiction, to take over from the now ineffective detectives the function of solving problems, to realize that these problems are not simply criminal but racial and social. It is not surprising then that, after Blind Man with a Pistol, Himes abandons fiction writing altogether and concentrates on writing his autobiography.

The main plot illustrates the mounting tension. Following the pattern set in earlier works, violence again comes to Harlem in the form of a white man entering a black space. In this instance, he is a homosexual looking for black men to satisfy his needs. He is brutally murdered during the sexual act, though for no apparent reason. And, unlike what happened in the preceding works, this crime is never fully clarified. For finally no one really cares. An inversion of goals has occurred: instead of Harlem being a backdrop for a fictional detective story, the detective story becomes the backdrop for the real racial problems in Harlem.

Blind Man with a Pistol does suggest several solutions to the "Negro Problem," but none are very satisfactory. One is embodied by Reverend Sam, who has twelve wives and is trying to have as many children as possible in order to combat racism by increasing the black population of the earth. Another character, Dr. Mubuta, invents a longevity tonic because his "solution for the Negro problem was for Negroes to outlive the white people." For Marcus Mackenzie, the solution lies in brotherhood and interracial marriage, while for Michael X it is only through violence that white racism can be overcome. All are presented as dreamers.

Racism thus becomes the basic topic of the novel. It is dramatized in many ways. In the twelfth chapter, a racial demonstration culminates in a riot when supporters of peaceful brotherhood, very white and very black men marching arm in arm, come up against the militant separatists of Michael X. Meantime, within the police precincts the peaceful coexistence of black and white policemen has come to an end: "Yes, these black sons of bitches were going to take a lot of getting along with, the sergeant thought." No longer complacent, Ed and Digger can no longer operate successfully as detectives. And their lieutenant states, "Once upon a time you guys were cops—and maybe friends: now you're black racists." Grave Digger has a different but also militant view:

But the difference is that by the time we'd fought in a jim-crow army to whip the Nazis and had come home to our native racism, we didn't believe any of that shit … we had learned the only difference between the homegrown racist and the foreign racist was who had the nigger.

Blind Man with a Pistol ends with a cynical dialogue between Lieutenant Anderson and Grave Digger, between white and black: "'That don't make any sense.' 'Sure don't.'" The situation has become absurd with no solution in sight.

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed ultimately fail in their function as mediators. Introduced reluctantly in the first story, though with some timid optimism, they progressively realize that the black and white worlds cannot be reconciled through communication, that a hopeless violence always prevails. And they disappear. Himes himself leaves France for Spain. Tired of fiction, or as disappointed with its impact as when he left the United States for France, he turns to autobiography to tell his story: a story of frustrations. A story of his hopes and failures to write mediating fiction, to try to communicate with words the need to understand the "other" and to resist violence. He finally acknowledges that his fiction accomplished nothing against the reality of racism. Not only in Harlem, and racist America, but also, with an increasing urgency, all over the globe, including France—in short in the world transformed into a violent blind man with a pistol:

I thought, damn right, sounds just like today's news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.