Chester Himes Biography and List of Works

African-American author who was nearly fifty like Raymond Chandler when he started to write detective novels. Himes created a violent and cynical picture of the black experience in America and paved the way for such writers as Walter Mosley. Most of his books were set in Harlem, New York City. After 1953 Himes lived in Europe.

"I would sit in my room and become hysterical thinking about the wild, incredible story I was writing. But it was only for the French, I thought, and they would believe anything about Americas, black or white, if it was bad enough. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference."
(from My Life of Absurdity, 1976)

Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. His father taught industrial skills at southern black colleges. The family later moved to Cleveland. Himes entered in 1926 Ohio State University with the intention of studying medicine, but he was expelled for taking fellow students to one of the gambling houses he frequented. He was an errand boy for the pimps and hustlers, and after numerous encounters with the law, Himes was imprisoned for armed robbery in Ohio State Penitentiary (1928-36). The sentence was 25 years - Himes was just 19. Learning the art of creative writing in prison, Himes produced stories for black newspapers, and in 1934 Esquire magazine published one of his works. He also sold stories to Coronet.

"We're a wonderful, goddamned race, I thought. Simpleminded, generous, sympathetic sons of bitches. We're sorry for everybody but ourselves, the worse the white folks treat us the more we love 'em."
(from If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945)

After his release Himes married Jean Lucinda Johnson in 1937 and worked for the WPA Writing Project (1938-41). He wrote briefly for Cleveland Daily News, and moved to California where he continued writing while working in various shipyards. Even with the sponsorship of Pulitzer Prize-winner Louis Bromfield, Himes was unable to find a publisher for his novel BLACK SHEEP. In 1945 appeared Himes's first novel IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO, a story of racism in the defence industry. It was followed by LONELY CRUSADE (1947) and THE THIRD GENERATION (1954) - all dealing with the themes of black bourgeois life or the American labour movement, interracial sex, and the psychological importance of the degree of blackness.

Tired of racism Himes moved to Paris in 1953 and later to the south of Spain. In 1953 appeared CAST THE FIRST STONE, which was based on Himes's prison experiences. THE PRIMITIVE (1955) was an autobiographical work and related a love affair of a black failed author and a white woman executive. In 1957 Himes was invited by Marcel Duhamel to write detective novels for the French. He had read Dashiell Hammett and set out to do something similar. These novels became an instant success and established his reputation as one of the most original talents of hard-boiled detective fiction. However, in France Himes was taken more seriously than in the US, where his books were marketed as commercial 'sex and violence' stories.

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Himes's famous series characters, made their first appearance in FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (1957). Coffin Ed's face is disfigured by thrown acid in the first of the novels, Grave Digger has an oversized frame, and people believe that they would shoot a man stone dead for not standing in a line. Himes created an imaginary cityscape of Harlem, which served as a colourful background for commentaries on race and class in both black and white worlds. He often used a simultaneous time frame, in which parallel stories take place at the same moment. The fractured plots pitched white against black and black against black in an absurd comedy of racism and poverty. In COTTON COMES TO HARLEM (1964) thieves steal from thieves as everyone runs after a bale of cotton, a hiding place for a large sum of money. Humoristic dialogue, based on vernacular, becomes bitter in the last novels. In PLAN B. (1983) the detectives are no longer able to keep peace in Harlem when black revolution catapults the community into total upheaval.

Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones also appeared on screen. Cotton Comes to Harlem was directed by Ossie Davis (1970), starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St Jacques, and Calvin Lockhart. A Rage in Harlem (1991) was a tongue-in-cheek thriller, starring Gregory Hines and Danny Glover.

Himes was awarded in 1958 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and Columbus Foundation award in 1982. His was married twice, the second time with Lesley Packard. During much of the 1970s Himes was ill, living in Spain. He wrote a two-volume autobiography, THE QUALITY OF HURT (1973) and MY LIFE OF ABSURDITY (1976). Himes died in Moravia, Spain, on November 12, 1984.

"When I could see the end of my time inside I bought myself a typewriter and taught myself to touch type. I'd been reading stories by DASHIELL HAMMETT in Black Mask and I thought I could do them just as well. When my stories finally appeared, the other convicts thought exactly the same thing. There was nothing to it. All you had to do was tell it like it is."
(from Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly, 1985)

- See also police procedural fiction: Lawrence Treat - Other American writers living in Paris in the 1950s: Richard Wright, James Baldwin - Other major African-American mystery writers: Donald Goines, Walter Mosley, John B. West - For further reading: Chester Himes by James Lundqvist (1976); Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal by Stephen F. Milliken (1976); Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes by Robert E. Skinner (1989); The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman by Peter Freese (1992)

YESTERDAY WILL MAKE YOU CRY, (1937)