On the streets of Harlem

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two black police detectives, have a tough shift on the streets of Harlem in New York.

Sean Sheehan

Their task is to try and administer justice in a place and a time when the odds are stacked against them. They give it their best shot even if, as their nicknames suggest, their methods are not always the most orthodox.

The neighbourhood in which they work is described as ‘a street of paradox’ and, though set in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the novels of Chester Himes that explore this locale is not unrecognisable: Unwed young mothers, suckling their infants, living on a prayer; fat black racketeers coasting past in big bright-coloured convertibles with their solid gold babes, carrying huge sums of money on their person; hard-working men holding up the buildings with their shoulders, talking in loud voices up there in Harlem where the white bosses couldn’t hear them.

In “The crazy kill”, there has been a murder outside an apartment on Seventh Avenue (‘as dark and lonely as haunted graves’ at 4am when the crime is committed) where a wake is taking place. One of the chief characters involved, a godson of the man whose wake was taking place, is Johnny Pullen and he is incandescent with rage over Chink Charlie whom he suspects of lusting after his wife.

Pullen’s appearance is described in a way that brings to mind a kind of portrayal that Denzel Washington has perfected on the screen: He was wearing a powder blue suit of shantung silk; a pale yellow crepe silk shirt; a hand-painted tie depicting an orange sun rising on a dark blue morning; highly glossed light tan rubber-soled shoes; a miniature ten-of-hearts tie pin with opal hearts; three rings…. His cuff links were heavy gold squares with diamond eyes.

The amount of gold in his dress is not an expression of his vanity: he was a gambler and “it was his bank account in an emergency”.

“The crazy kill” is one of the four novels that make up “The essential Harlem detectives” in the handsome Everyman’s Library series. The first novel written by Chester Himes, “If he hollers, let him go”, was neither set in New York or about police detectives but his Harlem police stories are better known and the first that he wrote, “ A Rage in Harlem” – and which he considered his best – is included in this Everyman Library volume. He went on to write more when he was living in Paris and needed some money to get by and eventually completed nine of them.

The influence of the American crime writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler is plainly evident in the style of Himes’ police stories but he brings to the writing a black consciousness that sears them with his own experiences of racism and dispossession.