SOURCE: Muller, Gilbert H. “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Detective Fiction.” In Chester Himes, pp. 80-105. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

[In the following essay, Muller traces the development of Himes's detective fiction.]

Following his three novels tracing the vagaries of interracial sex—The Primitive, Pinktoes, and A Case of Rape—Himes abandoned both the confessional mode and conventional novelistic genres to erect a radically new fictive universe. Refining the absurd elements inherent in his confessional fiction, Himes created a series of novels centered almost exclusively in Harlem and dealing with the criminal world. With the gradual development of his archetypal black detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, he would devise an entirely new crime fiction genre—or antigenre—that places the black experience in America in a new ideological context.

When Jesse in The Primitive observes, “Good thing I read detective stories; wouldn't know what to do otherwise” (160), he offers an uncanny prophecy of the fictive mode that Himes would embark upon for Marcel Duhamel's famous “La Série noire.” Himes himself had read crime and detective fiction since his days as a young convict. In the early 1930s he had published his crime stories in Esquire and Abbott's Monthly. And he had subscribed to Black Mask, the foremost detective pulp of the era.¹ Thus when Duhamel suggested to Himes that he read Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose early work had appeared in Black Mask, Himes knew what the editor meant. By 18 January 1957, Himes had completed his first novel in a new genre, titled initially The Five Cornered Square, in French La Reine des pommes (Gallimard, 1958), and finally in English, For Love of Imabelle (Fawcett, 1957). For more than ten years, the expatriate author would have Harlem on his mind, creating a unique cycle around what he laconically termed on the dust jacket of the best-known novel in the series, Cotton Comes to Harlem, his “Harlem domestic stories.”

STARTING FROM HARLEM

Harlem begins where Central Park West becomes Eighth Avenue at 110th Street, the junction known as Frederick Douglass Circle. For years a signpost at this junction was misspelled Frederick Douglas Circle—the dropped second s providing an ironic twist to a visitor's entrance into the “black capital of the world.” Central Harlem, bounded by 110th Street on the south, Third Avenue on the east, the parks along St. Nicholas, Morningside, and Manhattan avenues on the west, and the Harlem River on the north, was a world that Chester Himes would re-create from memory. Out of the “pure homesickness” of the exile, Himes went back to both a real and an archetypal realm of America, happily creating “all the black scenes of my memory and my actual knowledge.”²

How did the real and mythopoetic landscape of Harlem come to dominate the literary imagination of Chester Himes? Returning to New York in 1955 at the age of forty-six to reedit The Primitive for New American Library, Himes had resided at the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village. He visited often with Van Vechten at his apartment on Central Park West. One night at Van Vechten's, he met the Jamaican writer George Lamming, author of the contemporary classic The Castle of My Skin, and from there they went to the Red Rooster restaurant on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. He reports: “I discovered that I still liked black people and felt exceptionally good among them, warm and happy. I dug the brothers' gallows humor and was turned on by the black chicks. I felt at home and could have stayed there forever, if I didn't have to go out into the white world to earn my living” (My Life of Absurdity, 23). Randomly Himes absorbed the typography of Harlem—its streets and sections, from the bleakest ghetto in the “Valley” to elegant Edgecomb Avenue in Sugar Hill and Strivers Row on 138th and 139th streets, its cultural landmarks like the Hotel Theresa (Harlem's Waldorf Astoria), Blumstein's Department Store, and Small's Paradise; the haunts of its legendary figures like Father Divine and Marcus Garvey. Even the mundane bars, beauty parlors, tenements, police precinct houses, nightclubs, theaters, churches, funeral parlors, offices, and stores seemed to raise a question of identity for Himes. “Inadvertently, it was then I learned so much about the geography of Harlem, the superficiality, the way of life of the sporting classes, its underworld and vice and spoken language, its absurdities, which I was to use later in my series of Harlem domestic stories” (My Life of Absurdity, 25).

In My Life of Absurdity, Himes confessed that he “really didn't know what it was like to be a citizen of Harlem.” He had “never worked there, raised children there, been hungry, sick or poor there.” He then underscores a crucial point: “The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books” (126). Focusing on Harlem, Himes sensed an ideological shift as he explored a largely black universe, not with any intention of offering a slice of life or conventional artistic verisimilitude but rather with the goal of uncovering the absurdity that he had come to believe was the essence of the black condition. “Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks,” asserts Himes, “one cannot tell the difference” (109).

The Harlem that Himes began to explore in The Five Cornered Square (subsequently For Love of Imabelle), the first of the crime novels that he wrote concurrently with Mamie Mason (Pinktoes), has its recognizable geography, but the author is far more interested in the metaphysical dimensions of his grotesque landscape. Himes declares in My Life of Absurdity, “It was not Mamie Mason but The Five Cornered Square that was the logical follow-up to The End of the Primitive” (111). The strange, violent, unreal world of For Love of Imabelle is the arena or perhaps corollary for equally grotesque inhabitants of this locale. From the onset of his crime fiction, Harlem is a world where pandemonium reigns, whether at the Savoy Ballroom (which would be closed in 1958 and subsequently torn down to accommodate an urban renewal project), inside a precinct house, on the street, or in a sleazy bar. It is a world of distortions, dissolution, and chaos: “Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of the sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts, stick in a hand and draw back a nub.”³ This is not so much a faithful rendering of scene as an expressionistic reconstruction of reality designed to uncover the bizarre and macabre mechanism of an inner city.

A similar cannibalism pervades the settings of Baby Sister, a film scenario that Himes wrote in 1961 “while living in a one-room penthouse atop a five-floor walk up overlooking the Ramparts in the ‘old town’ of Antibes.”⁴ Termed by Himes a “black Greek tragedy” but in actuality a contrived, maudlin, and melodramatic tale of an archetypal teenager, Baby Sister, the stereotypical symbol of black female sexuality, and her ability to create sexual chaos among her black and white suitors, the scenario is set in a primordial urban jungle: “This is Harlem, U.S.A., a city of contradictions. A city of Negroes isolated in the center of New York City. A city of incredible poverty and huge sums of cash. A city of the meek and the violent. A city of brothels, bars, and churches. Here is the part called Sugar Hill, where the prosperous live—the leaders, the professionals, the numbers barons. Here is the part called the Valley, where the hungry eke out an existence and prey upon one another. The Valley is like a sea filled with cannibal fish” (Black on Black, 7). Baby Sister is a “juicy, tasty lamb in a jungle of hungry wolves,” fit prey to be devoured.

The strict demarcations of this infernal Harlem landscape are apprehended by the white detective Brock in Run Man Run (1966), originally published as Dare-Dare by Gallimard in 1959, and a grim, superlatively conceived crime novel that is unique in that it does not feature Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones:

As Brock drove slowly in the stream of northbound traffic he had a fleeting image of the city in the stomach of a cloud. It was a clean and peaceful and orderly city being slowly consumed.

But when he came into Harlem at 110th Street and turned west on 113th Street the image suddenly changed, and now it was the image of a city already consumed with only bits of brick and mortar left to remind one that there ever had been a city.

(Black on Black, 11)

Here the cannibalism inherent in the earlier description from For Love of Imabelle is replicated with the pictorial playfulness of a Chagall canvas, the apocalyptic emptiness of Ensor.

In fact, the sense of apocalypse—whether in fire or ice—is the most dominant impression generated by Himes's Harlem universe. The climate of his nine Harlem crime novels does not admit any relief or moderation in violent extremes of weather. Four novels in the cycle—For Love of Imabelle (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), All Shot Up (1960), and Run Man Run (1966)—transpire in frozen urban terrain. In counterpoint, five of the “domestic” novels—The Crazy Kill (1959), The Big Gold Dream (1960), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), The Heat's On (1966), and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)—are set in the sweltering, claustrophobic months of summer, typically July. The physical landscape of Harlem seems infernal. For example, in The Heat's On, one of the most outrageously grotesque novels in the series in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger search for ＄3 million worth of heroin, there is no escape from the demonic heat: “Even at past two in the morning, The Valley, that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was like the frying pan of hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt, and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.”⁵ In Himes's Harlem, the weather is an expressive vehicle that heightens the hellish pandemonium typifying a nihilistic world.

Climate in Himes's Harlem novels merely confirms the chaotic disruptions in the inhabitants' lives. Landscape and climate mirror and flatten an alienating culture. Describing in Cotton Comes to Harlem a grim area on Eighth Avenue near 112th Street, Himes writes:

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whiskey heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem, the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Bland-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn't anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal—always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go.⁶

Himes's two detectives would pave over this Hogarthian scene and turn white people—the perpetrators of a repressive bourgeois culture—to hogs for having produced it. This is the landscape of nightmare, of hell, far removed from Edgecombe Avenue, not to mention white Manhattan, that Coffin Ed and Grave Digger must mediate their way through and attempt to subdue. It is a demonic world, a dark ghetto confirming Kenneth Clark's astute observation: “the ghetto is ferment, paradox, conflict, and dilemma.”⁷ More like bedraggled wild men than rational detectives, enraged exiles within their own community, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson seek meaning in a strictly absurd and ludicrously disruptive community.

GENRE AND ANTIGENRE

That Himes breaks new ground by setting his detective fiction in Harlem makes it impossible to read his work in this genre without apprehending that he transforms conventional reader expectations. He asserts in My Life of Absurdity that when he began writing the first of his crime novels, For Love of Imabelle, he felt “that this wasn't a detective story,” that he “didn't know how to write a detective story” (111). Indeed the famous Harlem detective team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones does not appear until the eighth chapter of the novel, and then only after Himes's editor, Marcel Duhamel, had told him, after perusing the first eighty pages of the manuscript, that Himes could not write a policier novel without police. Nevertheless, Himes realized that he was breaking new ground in a world of crime fiction that previously “had been the strict domain of whitey” (120). Himes was thus somewhat disingenuous when he told John Williams that with his crime fiction he was “just imitating all the other American detective story writers,” that he simply took the “straightforward violence” of the genre and its plain narrative form and “made the faces black.”⁸ In essence, Himes took the critique of culture inherent in the tough-guy or hard-boiled detective fiction of Chandler, Hammett, and other writers of the 1930s and 1940s and transformed the genre into an absurdist parody of the search for order and values in a capitalist and racist world.

In this connection, we must acknowledge that classic hard-boiled American detective fiction emerged from the turbulence of the Great Depression. Similarly Himes began his detective series at a point in American history when the absurdities of racism and oppression would give rise to the civil rights movement, black nationalism, and the urban riots of the 1960s. Himes's two detectives descend from the hard-boiled tradition of the 1930s popularized first by Hammett's Sam Spade, a cynical, unsentimental detective swimming in a sea of urban crime. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade becomes a prototype for many later outsiders who attempt to reestablish justice in a chaotic cultural period, notably Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Himes, however, refined and heightened certain contradictions inherent in the genre. As Edward Margolies asserts, “The hardboiled genre is a peculiar mix, celebrating American individualism while at the same time denigrating the corruption of American society.”⁹ More than his predecessors, Himes uses his two detectives not so much to solve crimes and preserve order as to test the impossibility of sustaining meaning in a sociocultural world that is inherently irrational and absurd. Thus Himes's detective fiction appears in a new critical light as a comic antigenre in which the “crime” derives from a capitalist world fragmented by racism and economic exploitation. In the end, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, antiheroic cultural agents, are damaged and deracinated by this systemic absurdity.

Absurdity is central to Himes's crime fiction precisely because the citizens of Harlem, including Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, have a contradictory relationship to white power structures. Bruce Franklin shrewdly places the logical absurdities of the antiheroes' dilemma in broad cultural perspective: “Himes's Black killer-detectives protect the people of Harlem by enforcing upon them the law and order of white capitalist America, doing this with a brutal and often literally blind violence their white colleagues can no longer employ with impunity, often committing more crimes than they solve. They embody what they represent, the ultimate stage of social disorder masquerading as order.”¹⁰ Crimes committed in Harlem therefore are not exclusively temporal but mythic. For Himes, only a radical social vision combined with grotesque artistic technique could illuminate the problematics of ideology in a world governed by capital.

The sense of evil pervading Himes's Harlem universe arises typically from the pursuit of money—that archetypal incarnation of capitalist values. The clear absence of honest capital in Harlem activates the absurd pursuit of money in any form by Himes's dedicated villains, who would simply imitate their more sedate white counterparts in the pursuit. Clearly the dividing line in this Harlem universe is between the select and corrupt haves and the disenfranchised mass of have-nots. Ideological conflict, expressed in the absurdist action writing Himes perfected, occurs across this line or chasm separating the poor, a sprawling lumpenproletariat, and the amoral criminal rich, who attain their financial advantage or power through a series of ruses, thefts, con games, and deceptions.

This frantic pursuit of money so central to bourgeois ethics can be traced in many of Himes's detective plots. In For Love of Imabelle, several preposterous scams—including the classic raising of money by turning ten-dollar into hundred-dollar bills, and the selling of fraudulent gold stock, as well as the search for a trunk of gold (which turns out to be fool's gold)—animate the action. In The Heat's On, pursuit by contesting criminals and various law enforcement agents of a lost heroin shipment worth ＄3 million results in outrageous, grotesque parody of the spirit of capitalism. Similarly, a bale of cotton containing ＄87,000 misappropriated from Harlem residents by Reverend Deke O'Malley in a phony back-to-Africa scheme triggers the conflict in Cotton Comes to Harlem. In The Big Gold Dream, the very title suggests the omnipotence of money—in this case, a maid's substantial numbers winnings and the criminal pursuit of it—that dictates the savage action. In All Shot Up, eight lives are extinguished for ＄50,000 in political payoff money. Within a culture ruled by such materialist pursuits, the ludicrous spirit of capitalism manifests itself in the frenetic, violent, criminal pursuit of money.

If mock capitalist intrigue is the source of the essential conflict between good and evil in Himes's Harlem crime fiction, the author seems more intent on exploring the absurdist implications of this phenomenon than in lodging a protest about it in the spirit of Richard Wright. “I wasn't showing the Negro as an oppressed, downtrodden people,” he states in My Life of Absurdity, “but simply as an absurdity” (173). Creating almost implausibly grotesque action in an equally absurd world, Himes turned time and again to a rereading of Faulkner—specifically Sanctuary and Light in August—to sustain the harrowing comedy of his crime fiction. “I could lift scenes straight out of Faulkner and put them down in Harlem and all I had to change was the scene” (169). Faulkner, Himes's “secret mentor,” suggests the extent to which Himes was shifting the boundaries of the world of detective fiction, bringing into focus through a range of comic devices a world in which evil and anarchy can scarcely be restrained.

Traditional crime fiction posits an essential chaos at the root of culture and then, if only cynically, reasserts forms of poetic justice; Himes focuses persistently on the divorce, as Camus would have it in The Myth of Sisyphus, between any unifying principle of justice and the irrational and meaningless nature of existence. Even when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed succeed in rescuing culture temporarily from chaos, they still see the world and themselves as fantastical and absurd. As black detectives upholding justice in Harlem, they apprehend that they are parodies of their white counterparts and are exceedingly self-conscious about their ambiguous roles. So consumed by violence and existential restlessness, they rarely retreat to their families and homes in Queens; indeed they rarely sleep. They are the yin and yang of violent retribution, oversized twins of mayhem who slap, beat, and shoot their way through Harlem, continually engaged in an archetypal chase.

Himes in The Real Cool Killers, a tightly plotted thriller, the second in the series, in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger have to discover who killed a sadistic white man, Galen, who frequented Harlem bars in search of teenage girls, describes his two detectives in terms that would become ready-made for subsequent novels: “The two tall, lanky, loose-jointed detectives hit the pavement in unison, their nickel-plated.38 specials gripped in their hands. They looked like big-shouldered plowhands in Sunday suits at a Saturday night jamboree.”¹¹ They are distinguished from each other only by Coffin Ed's horribly disfigured face, the result of an acid attack by hoodlums in For Love of Imabelle. Deriving partially from two middle-aged detectives in a story, “He Knew,” that Himes had published in 1933 in Abbott's Monthly Magazine, they are most fully described in All Shot Up:¹²

Coffin Ed's hair was peppered with gray. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown in his face. That had been more than three years ago, and the acid scars had been covered by skin grafted from his thigh. But the new skin was a shade or so lighter than his natural face skin and it had been grafted on in pieces. The result was that Coffin Ed's face looked as though it had been made up in Hollywood for the role of the Frankenstein monster. Grave Digger's rough, lumpy face could have belonged to any number of hard, Harlem characters.¹³

Operating out of the 116th Street precinct under the apprehensive but understanding eye of their white superior, Lieutenant Anderson, these two detectives, whose very names symbolize death, are the apostles and explicators of the absurd inner world of Harlem violence.

Unlike most of their detective predecessors, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are legendary figures in their community. They instill respect and a certain amount of terror in the populace. In For Love of Imabelle, Himes writes in his typically laconic style that “folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing in a straight line” (52). Local humor also permeates another legend in All Shot Up: “The story was in Harlem that these two black detectives would kill a dead man in his coffin if he so much as moved” (30). They are defined existentially by their paradoxical roles. Grave Digger, somewhat more philosophical than his companion, relishes the thought that a killing in Harlem, as he expresses it in The Real Cool Killers, is “the greatest show on earth” (151). Yet in the same novel, Grave Digger senses their limitations: “This is Harlem. Nobody knows all the connections here” (44). Both detectives push at the limits of meaning, experiencing the exhilaration and terror of the absurd. Antiheroes centered in Himes's antigenre, they are fantastical, Herculean figures, native sons struggling with sensational and peculiarly indigenous forms of American violence in an effort to protect their culture from chaos.

GALLERY OF GROTESQUES

Seen through the distorting lens of the absurd, the characters in Himes's detective novels often seem like comic monsters at a masked ball. Julian Symons, in his historical study of crime fiction, states, “The humans among whom the detectives move are credulous, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and savage.”¹⁴ In Himes's fiction, they are monstrously grotesque in their outlines, tending toward caricature—metaphorical extensions of a desolate and depleted human landscape.

Himes had a rare talent for populating his demonic world with grotesques. These deformed figures, who constitute a gallery of absurd humanity, help to explain Himes's radical social vision, for their exaggerated deformities are emblems of the absence of orderly arrangement in the culture they inhabit and prey upon. Himes began to populate his world with grotesques in his first Harlem crime novel, For Love of Imabelle. The protagonist, a young man named Jackson, steals money from his employer, the celebrated Harlem undertaker H. Exodus Clay, who appears in several of the Harlem novels. Jackson also is in love with Imabelle, who has stolen a trunk of fool's gold from her husband, a con artist who is a member of a vicious three-man gang that has been selling false gold stock to black people across America.

Jackson has a twin brother, Goldy, who impersonates a nun named “Sister Gabriel” and lives with two other female impersonators, Big Kathy and Lady Gypsy, the triumvirate known collectively as “The Three Black Widows.” (Tricks and disguises, linked to the criminals' attempting to outwit criminals, is a common motif in the Harlem novels.) When Goldy involves himself in the search for the gold, a member of the gang cuts his throat and stuffs him in Clay's 1947 Cadillac hearse. Crammed in the hearse with other paraphernalia, Goldy projects an end that is grim, grotesque, and wild:

Underneath the trunk black cloth was piled high. Artificial flowers were scattered about in garish disarray. A horseshoe wreath of artificial lilies had slipped to the back. Looking out from the arch of white lilies was a blackface. The face was looking backward from a head-down position, resting on the back of the skull. A white bonnet sat atop a grey wig which had fallen askew. The face was a horrible grimace of pure evil. White-walled eyes stared at the four gray men with a fixed, unblinking stare. Beneath the face was the huge purple-lipped wound of a cut throat.

(149)

Pandemonium erupts as Jackson drives the runaway hearse through the stalls of the Harlem market, with both his brother's corpse and the trunk of ore toppling out. Following another round of grotesque violence in which two members of the gang are killed, order is restored, with Jackson getting both his old job back and his girl, Imabelle. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, somewhat peripheral figures, seem almost overwhelmed by the terrifying absurdity of the situation, and indeed Grave Digger, disoriented by the acid attack on his partner, is left “riding the crest of a rage” (189) as he attempts to square justice with a persistently chaotic and paradoxical situation.

Himes's predilection for grotesque caricature continues at the outside of his second crime novel, The Crazy Kill. Originally entitled A Jealous Man Can't Win and in French Couché dans le pain, Himes began the novel in January 1957 after rereading Faulkner's Sanctuary; he finished it 1 May. He based the novel on a café tale told by his friend the cartoonist Ollie Harrington “about a man falling out of a window in Harlem in the early hours of morning during a wake, and landing unhurt in a basket of bread. … It was a simple domestic story which involved a couple of killings and my two detectives, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed” (My Life of Absurdity, 120).

Himes begins with multiple plot threads and grotesque mystification as the Reverend Short, presiding over the wake of a famous Harlem gambler, Big Joe Pullen, leans too far out of the third floor window while observing a man stealing a bag of money from the automobile of an A& P manager and plummets into a loaf of bread. The Reverend, a “short squat midget” with a fondness for drug-laced alcohol, falls in cinematic slow motion: “Slowly his hips leaned out. His buttocks rose into the light like a slow-rolling wave, then dropped below the window ledge as his legs and feet slowly rose into the air. For a long moment the silhouette of two feet sitting upside down on top of two legs was suspended in the yellow-lighted rectangle. Then it sank slowly from view, like a body going head-down into water.”¹⁵ Reverend Short's fortunate fall or benign immersion in bread invites a comic contradiction that rapidly turns sinister, for shortly after he picks himself up from the “mattress of soft bread” and returns to the wake, another body, that of Valentine Haines, is found stabbed to death on the same soft, mortal bed.

As it turns out, the famous gambler whom Haines worked for, Johnny Perry, is as responsible for solving the crime as are Grave Digger and Coffin Ed—another involuted technique that Himes employs in his experimental detective fiction. In fact, Grave Digger serves as a worldly philosopher framing Johnny's own efforts at detection. At one point, Grave Digger observes, “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” (56). Starting from scratch, Johnny undertakes “to straighten out some of these mysteries” (134). His inquiries parallel those of the two detectives. Ultimately it is the deranged grotesque, Reverend Short, a holy roller whose nearsighted eyes are described as “bulging like bananas being squeezed from thinskins” (78), who is uncovered as the murderer, largely out of perverse passion for Dulcey, Johnny's mildly licentious, highly manipulative wife.

Johnny himself is smart, tough, dignified, even generous as he throws change to the kids of Harlem, but he too is lethal. Himes's description of the gambler also shows the destructive element implicit in the grotesque: “In the center of his forehead was a puffed, bluish scar with ridges pronging off like immobilized octopus tentacles. It gave him an expression of perpetual rage, which was accentuated by the smoldering fire that lay always just beneath the surface of his muddy brown eyes, ready to flame into a blaze” (29). While Coffin Ed and Grave Digger ultimately arrest Reverend Short, Johnny must kill Chink Charley, who had been trying to blackmail Dulcey for ＄10,000. It is implied that his lawyer will extricate him from any criminal charge. Johnny, his humane impulses thwarted by jealousy for Dulcey, nevertheless mediates his way, as do Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, through a grotesque universe where the craziest of kills never conform to normal distinctions and expectations.

By the time he started his third crime novel, The Real Cool Killers, whose original title was If Trouble Was Money and in French Il pleu des coups durs, Himes had perfected a grotesque descriptive technique that ranged broadly from the playful to the most sinister and terrifying and embraced both central and peripheral characters. Often even the peripheral grotesques are central to the action in ways that are only slowly apprehended by both the reader and Himes's two detectives. Thus, at the outset of The Real Cool Killers, a small, aging black man at Harlem's Dew Drop Inn accosts a white soda salesman, Ulysses Galen, with a knife, forcing the bartender to lop off the black man's arm with an axe: “The severed arm in its coat sleeve, still clutching the knife, sailed through the air, sprinkling the nearby spectators with drops of blood, landed on the linoleum floor, and skidded beneath the table of a booth” (8). The elderly assailant, who has accused the white man of “diddling my little girls,” searches frantically for his severed arm in order to continue the fight, before fainting from loss of blood. The white man, in turn, upon leaving the bar is chased down 127th Street in a Keystone Cops scene involving dozens of Harlem's citizenry, a “grotesque silhouette” who ultimately is killed. The little black man was onto a “crime” perpetrated by Galen—the procurement of young women for sadistic sexual purposes—which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger will learn about only slowly. As for Galen, his true murderer remains undetected almost until the end of this bizarre narrative.

Contributing to the ominous and fantastic world of this novel is the presence of a teenage gang, the Real Cool Moslems. Himes was almost prescient in sensing, in the late 1950s, the emergence of the Black Muslim movement as a force in Harlem life and typically cynical in his treatment of this phenomenon. Early in the novel, the eight “real cool” Moslems taunt Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, with lethal results:

“Praise Allah,” the tallest of the Arabs said.

As though performing a ritual, the others said, “Mecca,” and all bowed low with outstretched arms.

“Cut the comedy and straighten up,” Grave Digger said. “We're holding you as witnesses.”

“Who's got the prayer?” the leader asked with bowed head.

“I've got the prayer,” another replied.

“Pray to the great monster,” the leader commanded.

The one who had the prayer turned slowly and presented his white-robed backside to Coffin Ed. A sound like a hound dog baying issued from his rear end.

(19)

Compounding this flatulent insult, another Arab attempts to sprinkle sacred scented holy water on Coffin Ed, who, mistaking it for acid, shoots him dead. Within the early chapters of The Real Cool Killers, a gallery of grotesques bent on careless but murderous “fun” creates a world that breaks apart for the two detectives. Coffin Ed is suspended, and Grave Digger, like “a dangerous animal escaped from the zoo” (66), rages through Harlem, “solving” the crime and even discovering that Ed's daughter, Sugartit, had been involved with the Moslems and almost with Galen. Gravedigger figures correctly that Sissie, another gang member, had killed Galen in order to protect Sugartit, and although the power structure decides to bury this information, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed have gone mildly berserk, killing off Moslems in order to rescue Ed's daughter. Despite an anticlimactic resolution restoring order, the dominant impression in the novel is one of mounting emotional and mental disorientation, a “macabre pantomime” (35) involving dangerous rogues bent on driving Coffin Ed and Grave Digger deeper into hell.

Adding to this dissolution into a grotesque state of being is Himes's penchant for splitting the action and scenes within a simultaneous time frame so that sequences of the conflict parallel and confound each other. For example, in chapter 9, Digger visits a whorehouse seeking information, while in chapters 8 and 10 the police are checking an apartment inhabited by the Moslems. A standard narrative technique in Himes's crime fiction, this tracking of the conflict tends to heighten Digger and Coffin Ed's disorientation by leaving them partially in the dark and continually subject to the vagaries of grotesque existence.

The crimes committed by Himes's early rogues and villains render them grotesque and also force Coffin Ed and Grave Digger to contend with their absurdly violent behavior. Such comic villains, however, do not inspire the sort of dread that hovers over Himes's fourth crime novel, Run Man Run (1966), originally published by Gallimard in 1959 as Dare-Dare. The harrowing power of darkness in this novel comes not from black criminals operating beyond the fringes of the law but rather from a white murderer—a police detective—operating within the establishment. Matt Walker is the archetypal white murderer run amok, and Himes's perspective on him and his main quarry, an educated black man named Jimmy who has witnessed Walker's senseless murder of two fellow porters at a midtown automat, is unique. (Himes had worked temporarily at a Horn and Hardart automat restaurant in New York in 1955 in order to earn money for passage back to Paris.)

Himes uses the mazes and passages under midrown Manhattan as a counterpoint to Walker's monomaniacal search for Jimmy Johnson, first at the scene of the crime and then through Harlem. Walker is the emblem of grotesque evil, forcing awareness of a racist culture on Jimmy. He is sadistic and amoral, operating in a “maniacal trance,” killing black people dispassionately. Himes reveals Walker's absurd destructiveness in the shooting of a porter, Fat Sam: “He fell forward, pulling the tray from the rack along with him. Thick, cold, three-day old turkey gravy poured over his kinky head as he landed, curled up like a fetus, between a five-gallon can of whipping cream and the wooden crate of iceberg lettuce” (17). Walker is both mad and nihilistic. The anarchic blindness of his violent behavior cannot be checked by a suitably armed Johnson but only by his brother-in-law, a cop named Brock, who shoots Walker dead at the end of the novel. Walker is not, however, seriocomic. He is pure demonism, pure dread, turning the world grotesque for Jimmy.

With The Big Gold Dream, Himes retreats from his savage critique of white power structures to a more characteristic satire on the religious dimension of Harlem life. Here, Himes's gallery of grotesques typically includes preachers, fanatics, and born-again converts who prey on each other and the community. In The Big Gold Dream, the grotesque Sweet Prophet Brown ministers to the “black, brown and yellow people” of Harlem. He is a fantastic con artist, a “fabulous” man who can mesmerize thousands. At his revival meetings on Harlem's streets, he exchanges sacred bread crumbs for one-to twenty-dollar donations from each convert. Himes describes Sweet Prophet in bizarre terms: “His tremendous bulk was impressive in a bright purple robe lined with yellow silk and trimmed with mink. Beneath it he wore a black taffeta suit with white piping and silver buttons. His fingernails, untrimmed since he first claimed to have spoken with God, were more than three inches in length. They curled like strange talons, and were painted different colors. On each finger he wore a diamond ring. His smooth black face with its buck teeth and popping eyes was ageless; but his long grizzly hair, on which he wore a black silk cap, was snow-white.”¹⁶ The Prophet, who believes that “faith is a big gold dream,” is like “a carnival on the loose” (86). His obsession with money—“It takes a lot of money to be a prophet these days. It's the high cost of living” (204)—is an index to the similar fixations of his congregation, as well as the strictly secular representatives of the Harlem community, who will kill for their own big gold dream. Moreover, as with Johnny in The Real Cool Killers, the Prophet shrewdly takes the pulse of the Harlem community, figuring out who had stolen numbers winnings from one of his parishioners (and taking the ＄36,000 from her in turn) before Coffin Ed and Digger arrive at a similar discovery.

APOCALYPSE

By 1959, as Himes began All Shot Up, he admitted that he “was having great difficulty keeping [his] detective stories absurd” (My Life of Absurdity, 196). He was now “the most celebrated writer in France who couldn't speak French” (199), and also the most famous “Série noire” writer. With the Algerian War at its greatest intensity and serving perhaps as a subliminal impulse, Himes in All Shot Up turned to the political arena to fashion another mayhem novel in which absurdly violent action claims eight lives. Here Himes's obsession with sex, violence, and political depravity can scarcely be contained within a complex comic structure. His primary world is now unredeemably evil and apocalyptic in its grotesque outlines, more profoundly sinister than in his earlier crime fiction.

One of the early victims is a transvestite pimp named Black Beauty, who is hit so violently by thieves driving a gold Cadillac that he is hurled through the air and crucified against a wall of a convent: “They discovered an iron bar protruding from the wall at a point about six feet high. Below and above it there were deep cracks in the cement; and, at one point above, the crack had been dug out to form a long, oblong hole. The face of the corpse had been thrust into this hole with sufficient force to clamp it, and the end of the bar was caught between the legs, holding it aloft” (41). However comical this tableau might be, the comedy is overwhelmed by a sense of violent transgression. In fact, as Coffin Ed and Digger begin to investigate the merging worlds of homosexual and political manipulation (Himes's homophobia and essentially negative political anarchism fuel his vision), they find the early deaths that animate All Shot Up a special order of viciousness.

Within the sexual and political superstructure of evil dominating All Shot Up, most forms of violence are bizarre. In one tour de force of grotesque mayhem, the thief, who is attempting to escape from Digger and Coffin Ed, is decapitated by sheets of steel protruding from a truck:

The three thin sheets of stainless steel, six feet in width, with red flags flying from both corners, formed a blade less than a quarter of an inch thick. This blade caught the rider above his woolen-lined jacket, on the exposed part of his neck, which was stretched and taut from his physical exertion, as the motorcycle went underneath. He was hitting more than fifty-five miles an hour, and the blade severed his head from his body as though he had been guillotined.

The truck driver glanced from his window to watch the passing truck as he kept braking to a stop. But instead he saw a man without a head passing on a motorcycle with a sidecar and a stream of steaming red blood flowing back in the wind.

He gasped and passed out.

His lax feet released the pressure from the brake and clutch, and the truck kept on ahead.

The motorcycle, ridden by a man without a head, surged forward at a rapid clip. …

The truck carrying the sheet metal turned gradually to the right from faulty steering mechanism. It climbed over the shallow curb and started up the wide stone steps of a big fashionable Negro church.

In the lighted box out in front of the church was the announcement of the sermon for the day.

Beware! Death is closer than you think!

The head rolled off the slow-moving truck, dropped to the sidewalk and rolled out into the street. Grave Digger, closing up fast, saw something that looked like a football with a cap on it bouncing on the black asphalt. It was caught in his one bright light, but the top was turned to him when he saw it, and he didn't recognize what it was.

“What did he throw out?” he asked Coffin Ed.

Coffin Ed was staring as though petrified. He gulped. “His head,” he said.

After digressing into an account of the two detectives' problems when a truck hits them from behind, Himes returns to conclude his account of the headless motorcyclist:

Gradually the taut headless body on the motorcycle spewed out its blood and the muscles went limp. The motorcycle began to waver; it went to one side and then the other, crossed 125th Street, just missing a taxi, neatly circled around the big clock atop a post at the corner and crashed into the iron-barred door of the credit jewelry store, knocking down a sign that read:

We Will Give Credit to the Dead.

(84-85)

This passage is an extraordinary evocation of the apocalyptic drama that has been building in Himes's detective fiction. The frantic narrative pace, grotesque description, terse irony, and pungent dialogue are concomitants of the jumbled and disintegrative world that Coffin Ed and Grave Digger hustle through. Such an extravagant style gives rise to the creation of grotesque characters and a grotesque landscape. In this tableau, the disparate elements of comedy and horror brought together at the point of violent death are the penultimate frame for Himes's evolving vision of an absurd, malignant, apocalyptic world.

Perhaps Himes never felt comfortable with the affirmative vision that underpins the successful solution of crimes in detective fiction, for he consciously parodies the genre from the outset and progressively explodes it with apocalyptic delight. Thus the violent deaths in Himes's infernal novel The Heat's On, running to twelve (with additional beatings and maimings), exceeds even the relentless killings in All Shot Up. From the outset of The Heat's On, first published in 1961 by Gallimard as Ne nous enverons pas, Coffin Ed and Digger are in a labyrinth of enigmatic violence. A monstrous, idiotic giant, Pinky, whom Himes's describes as “a milk-white albino with pinkeyes, battered lips, cauliflowered ears and thick, Kinky, cream-colored hair” (7), has put in a false fire alarm at Riverside Church in order to alert detectives not to a fire but to a conflagration of another order—the robbery and murder of his father, Gus, by an African and his step-mother. As the two detectives begin to check out Pinky's story (Gus's body, stuffed in a truck, is not found until the end of the novel), they do so with a bizarre sense of impending apocalypse. Ed observes, “It'd be a hell of a note if somebody was being murdered during all the comedy we're having,” to which Digger replies in laconic hermeneutic code, “That would be the story” (20). The comedy the detectives allude to is the fruitless attempt by squads of police and firefighters to beat and shoot Pinky into submission for having called in the false fire alarm. Yet his alarm is an ironic prefiguration of the catastrophes awaiting people, including Ed and Digger, in the novel.

As is typical of Himes's other crime fiction, the logical-temporal realm of The Heat's On is explosively compressed. The action begins at 1:20 a.m. on a viciously hot Harlem summer night and concludes with Aristotelian intensity the same day. Thus the virtual hecatomb of bloodletting that spills from this constricted time frame seems to feed inversely on the very framework of detective fiction. In a brilliant study of detective fiction, Dennis Porter observes that “it is a genre committed to the act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back. The detective encounters effects without causes, events in jumbled chronological order, significant clues hidden among the insignificant. And his role is to reestablish sequence and causality.”¹⁷ Yet the sheer magnitude of the murders in The Heat's On, these multiple crimes against the community, seem to parody the ability of Himes's detectives to restore order through discovery.

As the novel unfolds, the apocalyptic element is scarcely contained. Ed and Grave Digger have to break up a half-dozen fights along Seventh Avenue before getting back to their precinct. Later, at 5:27 a.m. (Himes fixes action at precise times and then shatters this mosaic by creating overlapping temporal frames involving other characters), they stop for gumbo at a nightclub on 125th Street, where “the tight close air was churned to a steaming bedlam” (37). By early morning they are charged with unwarranted brutality in the death of Jake Kubansky, a dwarf who had been arguing with Pinky at the outset of the novel. Jake had been a drug pusher, and Digger had punched him once in the stomach, exploding pouches of narcotics that he had swallowed to avoid detection. Observes Digger of their suspension by the commissioner, “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” (68). Himes's allusion to the civil rights movement compounds the ambiguities the two detectives perceive as they try to “make a decent peaceful city for people to live in” (220).

Harlem, however, diverges radically in The Heat's On from any image of a peaceful city. Crime provides the dramatic tension as criminals and police frantically pursue heroin worth ＄3 million that Gus had hidden. Even the law of entropy seems to govern the apocalyptic landscape. For instance, in one remarkable scene, the house of the grotesque Sister Heavenly, an aged but lethal faith healer who is Pinky's aunt, is inadvertently blown up with nitroglycerin by her faithful employee Uncle Heavenly, who has been trying to pick her safe:

Strangely enough, the house disintegrated in only three directions—forward, backward and upward. The front went out across the street, and such items as the bed, tables, chest of drawers and a handpainted enamel chamber pot crashed into the front of the neighbor's house. Sister Heavenly's clothes, some of which dated back to the 1920's were strewn over the street like a weird coverlet of many colors. The back of the house, along with the kitchen stove, refrigerator, table and chairs, Uncle Saint's bunk and lockbox, crockery and kitchen utensils, went over the back fence into the vacant lot. … While the top of the house, attic included, along with the old upright piano, Sister Heavenly's throne and souvenir trunk, sailed straight up into the air, and long after the sound of the blast had died away the piano could be heard playing up there all alone. …

But the floor of the house remained intact. It had been swept clean of every loose scrap, every pin and needle, every particle of dust, but the smooth surface of the wood and linoleum went undamaged.

(116-17)

The world that Himes incarnates in grotesque description and action in this novel moves irrevocably toward extinction. Even the final irony has an apocalyptic resonance, for the cretin, Pinky, admits that he has thrown three eel skins stuffed with the heroin into an incinerator and burned the object of so much pursuit.

Himes modulates the violence in his next novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem, in which he achieves fine formal control in adjusting the apocalyptic element to a vision of social manipulation and disintegration. Published initially by Plon in 1964 as Retour en Afrique and in English by Putnam's in 1965, Cotton Comes to Harlem fixes on the back-to-Africa movement popularized initially by Marcus Garvey and in the 1960s by the black power movement. Himes stated in his interview with John Williams that he wrote Cotton Comes to Harlem in order to expose the absurdity of contemporary back-to-Africa movements. “It probably didn't make sense even then, but it's even less logical now, because the black people of America aren't Africans anymore, and the Africans don't want them.”¹⁸ Himes in the novel parodies the millenarian promise of the Reverend Deke O'Malley, a “Communist Christian” preacher who steals ＄87,000 from eighty-seven Harlem families, as well as the homestyled promise of Colonel Robert L. Calhoun's “back-to-the-South” crusade. Caught between perverted white and black dialectics of deception, the people of Harlem find themselves in a demonic rather than a promised land. Cotton Comes to Harlem, which was released as a film in 1970, is notably successful in Himes's detective series because of its satiric portrait of white and black tricksters' preying on people's lost dreams.

The opening sequence once again hurls the reader into a perilously grotesque and contradictory world where pandemonium rules. Deke's barbecue and rally to boost his back-to-Africa movement, which takes in ＄87,000, is in turn held up violently by southern-styled white men who escape in a meat truck; these con artists are pursued in turn by Deke and his bodyguards in a hail of machine-gun bullets. The death of one of Deke's recruiters reveals Himes's genius for bizarre description: “There was a burst from a machine gun. A mixture of teeth, barbecued pork ribs, and human brains flew through the air like macabre birds” (13). The tense stylistic virtuosity of Himes's clashing images and metaphors suggests his maturing ability to evoke a comic volcano as the essence of Harlem life.

In this novel, Grave Digger returns to his Harlem beat after six months of recuperation from his near-fatal shooting by Benny Mason's men in The Heat's On. Both Digger and Coffin Ed continue to resemble, to their superior Lieutenant Anderson, “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town” (18). Anderson, trying to subdue the apocalyptic element in Harlem life, wants the two detectives to reduce their brutality in their handling of the crime. The apoplectic Digger responds: “We got the highest crime rate on earth among the colored people in 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” (20). Digger's philosophical ruminations are inherently nihilistic at this point in Himes's Harlem cycle.

Even Anderson senses that this world is breaking apart. As he leafs through the day's reports, Digger and Ed provide tersely grotesque glosses on the contents:

“Man kills his wife with an ax for burning his breakfast pork chop … man shoots another man demonstrating a recent shooting he had witnesses … man stabs another man for spilling beer on his new suit … man kills self in a bar playing Russian roulette with a.32 revolver … woman stabs man in stomach fourteen times, no reason given … woman scalds neighboring woman with pot of boiling water for speaking to her husband … man arrested for threatening to blow up subway train because he entered wrong station and couldn't get his token back—”

“All colored citizens,” Coffin Ed interrupted.

Anderson ignored it. “Man sees stranger wearing his own new suit, slashes him with a razor,” he read on. “Man dressed as Cherokee Indian splits white bartender's skull with homemade tomahawk … man arrested on Seventh Avenue for hunting cats with hound dog and shotgun … twenty-five men arrested for trying to chase all the white people out of Harlem—”

“It's Independence Day,” Grave Digger interrupted.

(20-21)

The mounting metaphysical disorientation that everyone senses on this sweltering Fourth of July guarantees more violent disruptions. One reviewer of Himes's detective fiction observes, “Against such a landscape, the violent opening of each novel constitutes less a crime to be solved than an overture promising more mayhem to come.”¹⁹ In fact, Digger and Ed, assigned to protect Deke, now an informer, try as much to subdue the grotesque as they do solve crimes. What they bring to the light in Cotton Comes to Harlem is the chaotic absurdity at the center of peoples' crazed pursuit of a single bale of stolen cotton containing Deke's criminal spoils.

The universe of Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of total deception. Deke, for instance, both is and is not what he seems, utilizing his multiple disguises to outwit unsuspecting Harlem residents, stay ahead of the Syndicate out to kill him, elude the police, and seduce women. Digger and Ed manage to apprehend him, but they still know that they are “missing something.” As Himes cuts and shifts the action, they cannot unmask all of the ludicrous deceptions keeping them from the bale of cotton.

At the end of the novel, the grotesque auto-de-fé in Deke's church as the detective's tracer bullets literally ignite two thugs is symptomatic of the uncanny apocalyptic element that persistently erupts in Himes's later detective fiction. Digger shoots one criminal in the leg, watching it “break off like a wooden stick” and the trousers catch on fire. Two more bullets set the howling thief totally aflame. “The dying man clawed at the book rack above him, breaking the fragile wood, and a prayer book fell on top of his burning body” (202). Digger and Ed then turn to the second thief and systematically pump bullets into him, igniting him until he slumps “across the bench in a kneeling posture, as though praying in fire” (203). By now, the church is an apocalyptic inferno: “Now the entire platform holding the pulpit and the choir and the organ was burning brightly, lighting up the stained-glass pictures of the saints looking down from the windows. From outside came a banshee wail as the first of the cruisers came tearing down the street” (203). Fire, carnage, and inhuman sounds combine to transform Deke's church into an infernal realm rendered alien by the rush of events.

The apocalyptic sphere of violence of Cotton Comes to Harlem dissipates only when Ed and Digger capture the colonel and demand ＄87,000 from him to return to Harlem's conjured families. The original ＄87,000 had been discovered by the junkman, Uncle Bud, who presciently had gone back to Africa, where he bought 500 cattle and exchanged them for 100 wives. The parodic element comes full circle but not before a sinister world has been erected and destroyed by Himes.

Chester Himes's last novel in his Harlem crime cycle, Blind Man with a Pistol, confirms his preoccupation with an apocalyptic universe while playing havoc with conventional expectations of the detective genre. Himes began the novel in Holland in 1967 after hearing the true story of a blind man with a pistol shooting up Brooklyn from his guest, Phil Lomax. Himes in My Life of Absurdity confesses that the story signalled something to him, forcing him back to the beginnings of his earlier detective stories: “It worried me because it was telling me something” (347). At the same time, Himes was enjoying international celebrity status and relative affluence from film options on his detective fiction, following Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.'s., decision to adapt Cotton Comes to Harlem. Nevertheless he delayed traveling to Hollywood and concentrated on Blind Man with a Pistol, which he acknowledges “was not a customary type of detective story” (348). Himes's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the manuscript “wild, bawdy, shocking and very exciting” (350), selling it to William Morrow. What so gripped Himes as he wrote his last novel was his apprehension that any solution to “crime” in Harlem remains inaccessible, for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger in their final appearance preside over a highly politicized world that breaks apart.

At the outset of Blind Man with a Pistol, Himes immediately destroys any conventional expectations readers might have of detective fiction by providing not one but three forewords and a bawdy poem, each revealing the absurdities of the Harlem condition. One concise anecdotal prologue captures the grin lurking behind Himes's murderous universe:

“Blink once, you're robbed,” Coffin Ed advised the white man slumming in Harlem.

“Blink twice, you're dead,” Grave Digger added drily.

(Blind Man with a Pistol)

Indeed actions and events are so swift and disjointed in the novel that characters—notably the two detectives—find themselves on a grotesque rollercoaster. Demonic forces are operative in this universe that wit and satire can scarcely contain.

The world of Blind Man with a Pistol is totally estranged from human and social norms. Action begins at a dilapidated three-story brick house on 119th Street that is the church site of Reverend Sam (who claims to be one hundred years old), his eleven Mormon wives, and teeming progeny. Sam is the embodiment of human grotesquerie: “He was clean shaven, and his sagging parchment-like skin which seemed but a covering for his skeleton was tight about his face like a leather mask. Wrinkled lids, looking more like dried skin, drooped over his milky bluish eyes, giving him a vague similarity to an old snapping turtle” (18-19). The squalor that surrounds the reverend and his tribe is a surrealist metaphor for the chaotic, collapsed world of Harlem. Reverend Sam's fifty naked children, for example, assume subhuman shape as they settle in for lunch, observed by police from the Harlem precinct who have been called to the tenement by a sign hanging outside advertising for a fertile woman: “At the time of their arrival the children were having lunch, which consisted of the stewed pigsfeet and chitterlings which Bubber, the cretin, had been cooking in the washing pot. It had been divided equally and poured into three rows of troughs in the middle room on the first floor. The naked children were lined up, side by side, on hands and knees, swilling it like pigs” (21). Both the banality and the heightened illusion of surreality that the scene projects contribute to Himes's immediate construction of a precarious world gone slightly mad.

Himes's reductionist and absurdist techniques in two initial chapters, which James Lundquist rightfully evaluates as “the strangest in American literature,” are juxtaposed against the first “Interlude” or interchapter.²⁰ These interludes, which Himes spaces throughout the novel much in the collage-like fashion of John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy, move from a vision of an earlier, ordered world of Harlem existence to a grotesque and ambiguous world of appearances. Yet the first interlude—a geographic and historical tour of Harlem as the mecca for black people—is almost pristine in its normalcy. The author zooms in on the old Theresa Hotel where everyone from Booker T. Washington to Louis Armstrong stayed in the old days. Here is a version of urban pastoral that is poignant as it contrasts jarringly with the more dominant impression of the absence of order and meaning in Blind Man with a Pistol.

A great deal of the action occurs around the Theresa, located on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and if the splendor of the hotel was once a norm for the vitality of Harlem, Himes cunningly contrives apocalyptic episodes to reveal how far Harlem had deviated from the norm in the 1960s. Nowhere does contemporary history weigh more heavily on Himes's artistic consciousness than in this novel—an absurdist critique of a volatile American decade that the author largely was viewing from afar as an exile. The satiric power of Himes's apocalyptic vision obliterates the millennial hopes that characterized the 1960s. With cataclysmic glee he attacks communal life as typified by the Reverend Sam, interracial sex, gay liberation, black power, Black Jesus, the Black Muslims, an assortment of evangelical enterprises, civil rights, and integration. A great comic disaster lurks in virtually every chapter of this grotesque novel, a cataclysm that ultimately swallows the apostles of law and order, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed.

By the time that Coffin Ed and Digger appear in their dilapidated car in chapter 3, passing along “practically unseen, like a ghostly vehicle floating in the dark, its occupants invisible” (43), they are just trying to take it easy on a sweltering Harlem night. Already, however, a white homosexual has been killed by a black man wearing a fez, and Marcus Mackenzie, a new black Messiah preaching sexual brotherhood with his Nordic goddess Birgit, has starred on an orgiastic march with his disciples:

When the marchers came abreast of the 125th Street station on upper Park Avenue, a long straggling tail of laughing, dancing, hysterical black and white people had attached itself to the original forty-eight. Black and white people came from the station waiting room to stare in popeyed amazement. Black and white people came from nearby bars, from the dim stinking doorways, from the flea bag hotels, from the cafeterias, the greasy spoons, from the shoe shine parlors, the poolrooms—pansies and prostitutes, ordinary bar drinkers and strangers in the area who had stopped for a bite to eat, Johns and squares looking for excitement, muggers and sneak thieves looking for victims. The scene that greeted them was like a carnival. It was a hot night. Some of them were drunk. Others had nothing to do. They joined the carnival group thinking maybe they were headed for a revival meeting, a sex orgy, a pansy ball, a beer festival, a baseball game. The white people attracted by the black. The black people attracted by the white.

(41)

Surrounded by progressive sequences of grotesque action, the two detectives know that an easy time for them is ephemeral.

Solving the crime of the murdered white homosexual and a potentially related multiple murder and theft of a Gladstone bag filled with money from a quack, Dr. Mabuta, who poses as an African witch doctor promising eternal life through his youth elixir, is what interests Digger and Coffin Ed. Instead they are assigned to monitor and investigate numerous demonstrations and riots that are erupting in Harlem, for the outgoing precinct captain, Brice, sees a subversive pattern behind them. In fact, Captain Brice and Lieutenant Anderson do not want their two best detectives working on homicides—an ironic inversion of what they do best. Thus the detectives are diverted from the primary crime by a more tenuous criminal investigation of conspiracy. The bizarre rush of events and their new job description as political agents or detectives renders them incapable or blind before forces that they only dimly apprehend.

The motif of blindness framing the novel permits Himes to explore in comic fashion some major political and eschatological themes that had been building in his crime fiction for a decade. All of the radical disruptions of the 1960s center symbolically on Harlem in Blind Man with a Pistol, giving rise to a variety of prophets who would strip away the political blindness of the populace. Yet each prophet in turn parodies his apocalyptic vision by engaging in trickery and manipulation.

Marcus MacKenzie suffers from megalomania and a compulsive desire to be loved by white women. Dr. Mubuta is an avatar of Uncle Sam. His elixir—a grotesque concoction of baboon testicles, feathers, eyes, mating organs of rabbits, eagles, and shellfish—is designed to grant blacks extended life so that they can outlast the white race. Similarly, the black power advocate, Doctor Moore, is merely a pimp who provides high-priced prostitutes to a white clientele at the Americana Hotel. And then there is the ludicrous General Ham, a fake prophet who would draft Christ for the cause of black militancy, turning Him into a revolutionary Black Jesus in order to destroy the white race. Yet even as Himes satirizes the various messianic crusades of the 1960s, he continues to probe those political mysteries that define historically the nature of power and powerlessness in contemporary America.

Even the two detectives are subjected to Himes's satirical point of view. Toward the middle of the novel, unable to function as they once did, they must scrutinize the absurdity of their earthly condition:

The two black detectives looked at one another. Their short-cropped hair was salted with gray and they were thicker around their middles. Their faces bore the lumps and scars they had collected in the enforcement of law in Harlem. Now after twelve years as first grade precinct detectives they hadn't been promoted. Their raises in salaries hadn't kept up with the rise of the cost of living. They hadn't finished paying for their houses. Their private cars had been bought on credit. And yet they hadn't taken a dime in bribes. Their entire career as cops had been one long period of turmoil. When they weren't taking lumps from the thugs, they were taking lumps from the commissioners. Now they were curtailed in their own duties. And they didn't expect it to change.

(24-25)

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are anachronisms in the 1960s, superannuated cops overwhelmed by political and medical disruptions. Crime is now a pretext permitting Himes to explore comically his vision of an urban apocalypse.

Digger and Coffin Ed, deflected from their primary quest, cannot hope to cover the twists and turns unfolding on Nat Turner Day in Harlem. Himes brings the disparate strands of action together in a controlling design as various marching factions converge on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street in chapter 12: “It was all really funny, in a grotesque way. The lynched black Jesus who looked like a runaway slave. The slick-looking young man with his foreign white woman, riding in a car built for war service, preaching brotherhood. And last, but not least, these big Black Power people, looking strong and dangerous as religious fanatics, making black thunder and preaching black power” (130). When these lines of marchers collide in a chaotic tableau, Ed and Digger are engulfed in the ensuing violence. Himes lingers over the strange fighting, plucking his detectives from it as looting breaks out in 125th Street.

As Blind Man with a Pistol increasingly assumes the form of a political odyssey across the landscape of the 1960s, Himes permits his two detectives a measure of revelation. Apocalyptic history is revealed to them when they question the Black Muslim leader, Michael X, who tells them prophetically that the cause of the Harlem rioting is “Mister Big.” Armed with the cryptic knowledge—that racism has turned even their lives grotesque—Ed and Digger lose all capacity to restore order, much less justice. The blind man who “didn't want anyone to know he was blind” (222) materializing near the end of the novel to create pandemonium on a subway train is no more grotesque than the detectives in the last chapter of the novel.

In chapter 22, which with formal elegance returns to the metaphysical architecture Himes created in the first chapter, buildings are being razed on the north side of 125th Street between Lenox and Seventh avenues to make way for an urban renewal project. In this half-savage terrain of poisonous air and crumbling walls, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger idly shoot oversized rats trying to escape into the street. The blind man erupting from the subway exit kills a white cop and in turn is gunned down by three white associates. Again there is rioting, catastrophe without end.

This last of Himes's novels is a sardonic chronicle of the moral corruption and cultural evil that linger over Harlem. The catalog of disasters in Blind Man with a Pistol, the razing of a symbolic part of Harlem at the end of the novel and the civil chaos throughout, is a testament to Himes's talent for grotesque art. If much of the comic viciousness of the earlier detective novels has been replaced by stranger and more subtly sinister forms of evil, this is only because the author's maturing vision wanted to focus satirically on the totality of a malignant American power system. Himes had moved from the ethos forced on him by his French publishers who “wanted me to write a Harlem story—‘put plenty of comedy into it … just an action packed funny story about Harlem.’”²¹ From the sweet, steaming exotic Harlem of For Love of Imabelle, Himes moved progressively through a dialectical balance of good and evil in the early detective fiction into arresting apocalyptic terrain that permitted him to explore and understand his—and Harlem's—special relationship to American history.

Notes

1. See Edward Margolies, “The Thrillers of Chester Himes,” Studies in Black Literature (June 1970): 10.

2. Williams, “Chester Himes—My Man Himes,” 315.

3. Himes, For Love of Imabelle (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1973), 111. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

4. Himes, Run Man Run (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 7. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

5. The Heat's On (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1966), 3. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

6. Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1965), 48-49. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

7. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 11.

8. Williams, “Chester Himes—My Man Himes,” 314.

9. Edward Margolies, Which Way Did He Go? (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 2.

10. Franklin, The Victim as Criminal and Artist, 224.

11. Himes, The Real Cool Killers (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1973), 15. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

12. Margolies, “Thrillers,” p. 59.

13. All Shot Up (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1973), 17. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

14. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 201.

15. Himes, The Crazy Kill (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1973), 6. Subsequent page references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

16. Himes, The Big Gold Dream (New York: New American Library, 1975), 9. Subsequent references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

17. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 29.

18. Williams, “Chester Himes—My Man Himes,” 306.

19. Fred Pfeil, “Policiers Noirs,” Nation, 15 November 1986, 524.

20. Lundquist, Chester Himes, 117.

21. Himes to Carl Van Vechten, 16 December 1954, Beinecke Library.