The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Novel by Pim Higginson (review)

Early in his 1985 novel Cercueil et Cie. (Coffin and Co.), the Cameroonian writer Simon Njami introduces two protagonists, the Harlem police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Their names sound familiar; indeed, as the story goes, Njami’s detectives have been posing for nearly thirty years as the real-life sources for the characters in novels by another author, the expatriate African American writer Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime thrillers began appearing in France in 1957 for the renowned Série noire at Gallimard. Njami’s characters are of course impostors, appropriating Himes’s radically absurd fiction as thinly veiled documentary biography. The premise of their scam was a timely one: by the early 1980s, Himes’s iconic characters had entered into rocky imaginative territory. Himes, their creator, died in 1984 after a series of strokes. Yet rather than setting his detectives loose upon the world, so to speak, his death and failing health locked them in a deadly embrace. Himes’s last, incomplete novel, Plan B, kills them off.

The unfinished novel was published in French in 1983. In Njami’s novel, published two years later, the two “real-life” impostors catch wind of Plan B and quickly come up with their own. Fearing that news of their literary demise might expose them as frauds, they travel to Paris to visit the ailing Himes. Njami’s novel thus begins with the two ersatz detectives [End Page e-17] tracking down the author of the novels whose exploits they had adopted as their own, in order to convince him to suppress the English-language publication. Mayhem ensues.

As Pim Higginson notes in his important and eminently readable study of the “noir Atlantic,” the terrific irony of Njami’s metafictional crime novel lies in the fact that the impostors’ plan worked. Though it had little to do with either their or Himes’s agency, Plan B was late to arrive on American shores; even the English translation of Njami’s Cercueil et Cie. preceded the U.S. publication of Himes’s Plan B by six years. Whereas Njami’s novel first appeared (in its original French) while Himes’s novel and subsequent death were still newsworthy, the U.S. publication of Plan B (in its original English) would not occur until 1993, ten years after its French publication.

This curious publication history—easily as tortuous as the metafictional premise of Cercueil et Cie. itself—epitomizes the playful interplay between the works of Njami and Himes, which, as Higginson notes, “deliberately undermine[s] any notion of authenticity, choosing instead to focus on the playful cooptation and adaptation that ultimately [made] Himes a French writer” (81). From the late 1950s through the 1980s, indeed, Chester Himes was best known in France; his later works typically appeared in French translation well before their U.S. release and to far greater fanfare. Yet in founding Cercueil et Cie. on the ironies of Himes’s career as a writer of ersatz francophone novels, Njami does more than highlight the lag or décalage between his French and U.S. reception. Rather, as Higginson argues, the Cameroonian author exploits the resonance of Himes’s status in francophone letters as a diasporic black writer whose literary politics yielded a body of intense, darkly humorous crime thrillers.

Along with its iconic pair of detectives, in other words, Cercueil et Cie. also co-opts the American author’s literary project toward its own, making use of Himes’s characteristic destabilization of linguistic, racial, and political claims to authenticity. It is not by accident that the author according to whose works Njami’s protagonists model their (fictional) lives would be Chester Himes. As Higginson demonstrates, Njami’s co-optation is consistent with a broader movement within contemporary francophone African literature that likewise looks to noir fiction, and to Himes’s work in particular, for access to a mode of politically charged...