Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World

4. Ethnography of the Absurd: Chester Himes’s Detective Fiction and Counterimages of Black Life

4 / Ethnography of the Absurd: Chester Himes’s Detective Fiction and Counterimages of Black Life For my part, judging from what I have so far seen (and I don’t think anything I shall see henceforth will change it) I like America best; I like it despite its faults, and there are many; perhaps I like it because of them. I am what America made me, and the longer I stay away the more I discover how much of America is in me and how much of me is in America. chester himes1 In January 1957, Marcel Duhamel2 approached Chester Himes to write a crime novel for the Gallimard publishing house’s Série noir.3 Himes, who, like so many of his African American contemporaries ,4 hadlefttheUnitedStatesfouryearsearliertolivein Europe, was finding it difficult to sustain himself financially and agreed to write for the Série noir because the publisher advanced him a thousand dollars on the novel.5 And while Himes had no qualms about writing strictly for money, the success in France of the novel La reine des pommes6 encouraged him to continue writing in the genre. Ultimately Himes came to believe that the genre of detective fiction offered him, and other African American writers as well, the optimal outlet for expressing the violence of black life in the United States: “American violence is public life,” he wrote, “it’s a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I would think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form. As a matter of fact, I feel that they could be very competent. Anyway, I would like to see a lot of them do so.”7 More importantly, because the series was both written for a French audience and first published by French publishers, ethnography of the absurd / 127 the detective series delivered Himes from the same American publishing industry that made it impossible for Richard Wright to exercise full creative control over his artistic vision. And more than delivering Himes from the same fate of Wright, financially and creatively, writing in France allowed Himes to move away from the stagnant genres of realism and protest that he took up in his early novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). The French, in turn, were drawn to Himes’s Harlem novels because the novels fed them the “spectacle” and “sensationalistic details about U.S. race relations and African American urban life” that had historically fascinated French intellectuals.8 His generic distance, coupled with this ability to continue to be financially solvent due to his representation of a version of urban black American life for a French audience hungry for hyperbole, marks Himes’s detective writing in interesting ways that I will take up throughout this chapter. So in addition to the literal distance separating Himes from the United States, Duhamel’s invitation to Himes freed him to create some of the most interesting and rich African American–authored crime fiction of the twentieth century. While Himes did not invent African American detective fiction,9 his work within the genre makes him one of the most prolific and committed African American writer before Walter Mosely’s rise to the helm of black detective fiction. As the most well-known mid-twentieth-century African American detective writer, Himes had his detective novels cover varied topics, themes, and characterizations concerning urban black life. From rogue police officers and cross-dressers to dope and sex fiends, the men and women who populate Himes’s literary accounts offer readers a version of the black experience that is grim and dirty, but always vibrant and moving. Moreover, the fabric of life that Himes weaves into his depiction of an unremitting black Harlem is complex. It is a complexity that depends on Harlem’s local color. Or, as Himes more aptly states, “I put the slang, the daily routine, and complex human relationships of Harlem into my detective novels, which I prefer to call ‘domestic novels’ for that reason.”10 In other words, creating Harlem as a 128 / ethnography of the absurd domestic space, a space of “home,” a space where inhabitants can be themselves, is crucial to Himes. And Himes’s Harlem cycle—his “domestic novels”—which consists of eight novels11 written between 1957 and 1969 with Harlem as a primary setting , depict a very intimate space. Like any domestic space, then...