Chester Himes and the Capacities of State

Chester Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) is a detective novel that climaxes in despair and then stays there. "All we're doing is losing leads," confesses Grave Digger Jones, one of the two black cops whose Harlem crime-solving efforts organize the novel. "We're as bad off as two Harlem prostitutes barefooted and knocked up."¹ At this point in the story Detective Jones and Detective Coffin Ed Johnson are pursuing two or three different mysteries, depending on how you count, and all of them have gotten dramatically out of hand. When Grave Digger lists off some of the figures involved in the three interwoven plots—Lucas Covey, Henderson, John Babson, an unnamed knife-toting lesbian, Fats Little—the list functions both as an aid to the reader, who is more than likely having some difficulty keeping the plots and the players straight, and as an index of impotence, a catalogue of the parties to whom Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are forbidden, by the bureaucracy that employs them, from speaking. Grave Digger's sense of frustration, of obstruction and chaos and vexation, is tangible. It is matched by the novel's chaotic narrative structure, which seems to be fracturing further with every scene rather than drawing toward any traditional kind of closure. Who is Lucas Covey again? Which one is John Babson, and is he the same John Babson that the knife-toting lesbian cut to death? And what about all these riots that keep exploding onto the page, only to disappear? Will these threads ever come together, be resolved, be solved?

In fact they will not. Most detective novels put their readers through some temporary confusion and frustration before they conclude; in some other detective novel, Grave Digger's thwartedness, and the reader's, might have been a temporary way station on the narrative road to revelation and resolution. But not in this one. "Blind Man with a Pistol is less a novel," one contemporary reviewer observed, "than a series of dramatic incidents"; to another early critic, Blind Man represented a "disintegration of the detective novel form," an experiment in the "deterioration of narrative logic," in which "none of the plots go anywhere."² The critic Eyal Segal uses Blind Man as an object lesson in the "unconventionally open ending," noting that it refuses to provide what Frank Kermode called the "sense of an ending" or what Barbara H. Smith described as "stable conclusiveness, finality, . . . 'clinch.'"³ Michael Denning notes simply that here "nothing is solved, and the genre appears to break down."⁴ That Blind Man does not resolve in the way we expect detective novels to resolve gives it something in common with Himes's next and final novel, Plan B—a "disaster of a manuscript," as Himes's friend and fellow novelist John A. Williams would put it, that Himes left unfinished during the last decade and a half of his life.⁵ Blind Man technically has an ending, which is more than Plan B has going for it. But like Plan B, it mostly just falls apart.

So why can't those late Himes detective novels resolve the traditional way—with reference to the rest of their stories, in ways that make narrative sense?⁶ Why do their plots unravel before they can begin to conclude? Himes's earlier detective fiction had been praised by reviewers as "well-plotted."⁷ His first crime novel had won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the country's most prestigious prize for that most traditionally plot-centric genre that is crime fiction. He knew how to build a detective story. What happened in those last few years?⁸

Venturing an answer to that question requires glancing back at how the earlier novels' plots work. Himes's Harlem Detective novels are cast in what Sean McCann and others have identified as the political-narratological mold of the classic midcentury American hard-boiled crime story: they stage disorder's clash with the rule of law, and they make it their detectives' task to "bring a savage world," as...