Chester Himes: An Appreciation (part one)

The Mark Twain of detective novelists?

Why didn’t anyone tell me about Chester Himes?

Discovering his writing at my somewhat advanced age is a gift. I came to Himes, who’s best known for his “Harlem detective” novels written in the 1950s and ‘60s, because I asked a book editor to teach me about pacing and using dialogue to reveal character and advance plot. He had me start with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, then The Maltese Falcon, and so on.

My first Himes was Run Man Run, set in New York City in the late 1950s. From the first page, with a blind-drunk cop stumbling through Midtown Manhattan on a freezing night just after Christmas, it felt fresh and clear, making the other books I’d read seem kind of musty. To my eye Run Man Run is founded on Blacks’ bitter experience of white police in the city. As one character says, eyeing a police detective, “He’s got a sad look, and I don’t trust cops with a sad look about them. They ain’t sad for nothing.”

Himes’s treatment of race relations reminded me of Mark Twain’s in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Some of the writing in Run Man Run could have come straight from that earlier work. A showgirl retorts to her numbers-running boyfriend, “You ain’t as funny as you think you is.” A bartender is seen stalking away from a customer “like an offended rooster.”

In Huck Finn, Twain at times pauses to lovingly describe Southern food, as when Jim brings Huck a meal of “corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage, and greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good, when it’s cooked right.”

In Run Sam Run, Himes lays it on even thicker and South-ier. At one key point his protagonist feels “a yen for some good home cooking, southern style: pig’s feet and lye hominy; hog maws and collard greens; stewed chitterlings with black-eyed peas and rice; roasted opossum and candied yams; crackling cornbread; fried catfish and succotash; and some blackberry pie; or even just plain buttermilk biscuits with blackstrap sorghum molasses.” (For what it is worth, no possum is consumed in Huck Finn.)

Twain’s delight in describing an old-time camp religious revival, with people crowded under canvas, and lemonade, gingerbread and watermelons for sale, and teenagers courting on the sly, is matched by Himes’ loving portrayal of a Harlem nightclub. “It was another world,” he writes. “The atmosphere was both sensual and animal, thick, dense, odorous, pungent and perfumed. . . . It was a hangout for people whose business was vice—pimps, gamblers, racketeers, madams and prostitutes. And from the Negro middle class, they were the only ones who could afford it. . . . The entertainment was good, but it was adapted for colored people. It had to be good.”

What Himes novel should I read next? I like the title Blind Man with a Pistol but I’m open to suggestions.