A Rage in Harlem

Chester Himes (1909-84) has been described as the first writer to use the crime story for political reasons. He was a dedicated black Protest novelist who brought a new quality to the American detective story with his series of books about two Harlem policemen, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Despite being born into a middle-class Missouri family, Himes fell into criminal ways and it was as he neared the end of a seven-year prison sentence in Ohio State Penitentiary that he decided to try writing crime fiction in the style of his hero, Dashiell Hammett, and ‘tell it like it is’. His first mystery novel, ‘A Rage in Harlem’, was published in France in 1959 and became an immediate bestseller. Himes’s subsequent exploits of the two black detectives won him a wide circle of admirers who believe him to be the man who launched the sociological crime novel with his ‘violent and amusing microcosm of black criminal activities in New York’. For his part, Himes insisted on referring to these books ironically as ‘Harlem domestic detective stories’. Violence in American society was, though, the most enduring theme in his work and Himes invariably wrote about this as a detached observer making no distinction between good and evil-although he was not above introducing elements of the grotesque and the absurd. For some years, Himes planned to end the Coffin Ed and Grave Digger series with both of them getting killed while trying to prevent a black revolution. Although he finally gave up the idea, he did confess that in his opinion, ‘The only way the American Negro will ever be able to participate in the American way of life is by a series of acts of violence-it’s tragic, but it’s true.’ In ‘Prediction’, Chester Himes has turned his vision into a short story to relate what is surely the most uncompromising account of an assassin that has ever been written...