The Last Chester Himes Movie?

Sometime back in the late '70's or early '80's, I stumbled across a paperback edition of one of Chester Himes' Harlem crime novels featuring his two cop characters, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.

It was a revelation for me, a finger poppin' pulp roller coaster ride through a crazy quilt crime narrative that was part Damon Runyon, part Raymond Chandler, part Langston Hughes and part The Reverend Jeremiah Wright; political, sociological, ribald, violent, poetic, colorful and musical - in short, the voice of a man who started writing while in prison as a jewel thief, and later became a Parisian expatriate and developed a cult following in both highbrow (for social novels like Lonely Crusade and Cast The First Stone) and lowbrow (for crimes novels like For Love of Imabelle and Blind Man With A Pistol) literary circles.

Himes seems to be one of those writers whose early, more serious work, was met with criticism, or worse, indifference, and little remuneration. It was only when he was urged to try his hand at genre fiction by a French publisher, that he discovered both a wide audience, and many feel, within the constraints of genre, a deeper, freer expression of his political and social views on race and the urban black American experience.

Many of his early books have only been sporadically reprinted, but by the mid '80's, most of his Harlem crime books were back in print in these British editions from publisher Allison and Busby, with their catchy cover art, by Edward Burra.

Himes was still alive then (sadly he died in 1984, before I ever got to meet him) and he was represented by his New York literary agent Roslyn Targ.

Targ is a legend in New York publishing circles (her husband William Targ bought the rights to a little novel called "The Godfather" from then unknown author Mario Puzo when he ran G.P Putnam) and she is still alive and working today, although the literary/publishing world she was at the center of in the 20th century is so vastly altered and diminished.

I was able to beg, borrow and steal some small amount of money and negotiate an option on Himes' first Coffin Ed and Grave Digger novel, "A Rage In Harlem", and I set out, completely improbably, to develop it as a feature film.

If folks knew anything about Himes' work then, or now, it was most likely because they had heard of his book "Cotton Comes To Harlem" which was made into a movie at the height of what became known as the "blaxploitation" movement in the early 1970's. The movie starred Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques, and was directed by the great Ossie Davis.

In Tom Nolan's review for the SF Chronicle of James Sallis' biography "Chester Himes: A Life", he wrote:

Imprisoned in the Ohio State Penitentiary for burglary at the age of 19, Himes came out of prison seven years later a published writer, having sold stories to Esquire. By the 1950s, Himes had produced several novels in more or less the social-protest mode, including the L.A. classic "If He Hollers Let Him Go," recently excerpted in the UC Press anthology "The Literature of California." Among his contemporaries or friends were Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, all of whom appear in Sallis' book.

But Himes' early fiction, while earning notice, did not please conventional readers of any stripe. One Himes book, Sallis writes, was "assaulted by communists, fascists, white racists, black racists, and practically every reviewer within those extremes." Himes, "never had much luck fitting his work to others' standards. . . . He'd aim his ship for India and hit America every time."

One of the sins supposedly committed by Himes' first books was that they "aired black sentiments largely unspoken in public, any public, at the time." Later revered as a sage and a prophet, the young Himes seemed out of step and out of line -- "always there at the station too early, taking the train alone."

His salvation as a writer came in France, where a publisher commissioned him in 1956 to write detective fiction in the hardboiled manner of Dashiell Hammett. ("Don't worry about it making sense," the publisher counseled him on creating a mystery. "That's for the end.") Himes looked to William Faulkner's "ripe violence and absurdist view of life" to complement his own perceptions and memories of America.

The detective form did for this sensitive and self-conscious author, Sallis says, what it did for Ross Macdonald and many other fiction writers: It "freed Himes from autobiography," paradoxically allowing him to forge his most personal vision.

The result was a series of "ferociously idiosyncratic" novels involving New York police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, books unlike any detective stories written before them and influential on most written after. Himes' semi-surrealistic "Harlem cycle" (including "A Rage in Harlem," "The Crazy Kill," "Cotton Comes to Harlem" and "Blind Man With a Pistol") blended horror and comedy in ways one critic thought constituted "an unraveling of the mystery genre."

The books were French best-sellers and prize-winners. In America they proved greatly important for a new generation of mainstream and crime-fiction authors including Ishamel Reed, Walter Moseley and Gary Phillips. 

Late in life, Himes claimed, "The only time I was happy was while writing these strange, violent, unreal stories."

How to make the "unreal", real? 

Hmm. I would what Himes and his peers like Hughes and Baldwin, fiery poets of the searing pain of the 20th century black American experience, would have made of the "unreality" of last night's 21st century election? 

Tomorrow, more on the making of the first feature film I was ever involved in, an adaptation of Chester Himes' "A Rage In Harlem"!

william

Comments

[Marguerite Horberg]

who is/are the artists of these covers- Can we get rights to make posters?

[Logan Lamech]

I have not been familiar with this writer but now I'm intruiged, have to check him out.

Logan Lamech
www.eloquentbooks.com/LingeringPoets.html