Lying for Kicks: Queer Cross-Dressers and Hardboiled Squares in Chester Himes's All Shot Up

In 1929 in the pulp magazine black mask, dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon, a novel about a quintessentially hardboiled detective named Sam Spade. At the time, Spade was a groundbreaking character, often cited as the first in a long line of tough hardboiled detectives and a now ubiquitous fantasy of heterosexual white masculine power. Also in 1929, at the age of twenty, soon-to-beauthor Chester Himes was in a prison cell, killing time by reading about Spade in Black Mask and being encouraged by his boyfriend to write his own stories. In his autobiographical novel about his time in prison, Himes's protagonist praises the toughness of Dashiell Hammett's "slick stud, Sam Spade," in "a hell of a good serial called the 'Maltese Falcon.'" (Chester Himes Papers 38).¹ After being released from prison and writing naturalistic protest novels in the United States, he moved to Paris in 1955 and found greater fame and financial security as the author of absurdist detective novels,² often called his Harlem Cycle. Nine of those ten novels feature NYPD detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, whose wisecracking brilliance and uncompromising toughness do indeed place them in a literary tradition of hardboiled detectives made famous by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the 1930s and 40s, respectively. In the 2007 Pegasus Books edition of his 1960 crime novel All Shot Up, the most prominent blurb on the back of the book places Himes firmly within that tradition, declaring him "the greatest hardboiled novelist since Raymond Chandler." The publisher's brief summary lower down on the back cover states that Grave Digger and Coffin Ed "attempt to maintain some kind of order on the streets of Harlem," continuing that "Harlem's toughest detective duo, must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare." In short, masculine "toughness" is the best hope for the Black community of Harlem to combat absurdity and "chaos" and reestablish "order." Such interpretations (often echoed by academic scholarship) depend on placing detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger at the center of critical analysis. Robert E. Skinner specifically views Coffin Ed and Grave Digger as "his most appealing protagonists" because they are "virile and utterly masculine" (22). According to Leonard Cassuto, "The only hope of redemption in Himes's carnival of violence lies in his detective heroes" (229). Indeed, on the surface All Shot Up is a hard-boiled novel about heroically heteronormative male detectives striving to establish or restore meaning and order in the wake of crime, much like the earlier work of white writers of pulp crime like Hammett in Black Mask.

Given the ways that the Harlem Cycle has long been framed by publishers and scholars, the first-time reader would be surprised by just how queer much of his detective fiction is. The series has often been referred to, whether derisively or admiringly, as pop fiction written for the escapist pleasures of the masses, both French and American (Higginson 4, 9). How striking, then, that the pleasures of many of these novels consist of titillating scenes of drag, same-sex flirtation, and barely contained, occasionally unrestrained, homoerotic desire. This prevalence and power of queer characters in All Shot Up is perhaps not so surprising, given Himes's own same-sex relationships during his seven years of incarceration in his youth, and the fictional treatment of those relationships in his first fully drafted novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1952/1998).³ Taking my cue from this understudied prevalence of queer and cross-dressing characters in the Harlem Cycle,⁴ I suggest that decentering the detectives in critical analysis illuminates a very different reading of All Shot Up, one in which the "chaos" and "absurdity" of Harlem is not as "hopeless" as it seems, and indeed, one possible hope for Harlem lies quite outside the kind of "order" that Coffin Ed and Grave Digger can offer.

I reframe both the novel All Shot Up and criticism on Himes's crime novels by placing my focus on the...