Harlem’s answer to Agatha Christie: these haywire crime stories will haunt your dreams

Reading the Harlem crime novels of Chester Himes is such a vivid experience that certain passages have found their way into my dreams, and it’s a 50-50 chance whether I wake up laughing or screaming. There’s the chase in A Rage in Harlem, in which a hearse pursued by the police scatters its contents from its back doors, culminating in the loss of a corpse; the encounter in Blind Man with a Pistol with a centenarian Mormon preacher whose 50 children feed from troughs like pigs; or the leisurely description in All Shot Up of the aimless journey of a motorcyclist who, while fleeing from the cops, has been decapitated by sheets of steel on a passing truck.

It’s all a long way from Miss Marple’s haunt of St Mary Mead. But Himes (1909-84) deserves a place alongside Agatha Christie in the crime fiction pantheon. The eight novels in his Harlem Detective cycle – several of which have just been reissued as Penguin Modern Classics – obey, to some extent, the traditional formula of the detective story. But really the point of each book is not to follow the steps by which Himes’s African-American cops “Grave Digger” Jones and “Coffin Ed” Johnson edge closer to catching a murderer; it is to pursue them through a series of escalating calamities that culminate in some supreme outburst of chaos – such as a riot, or a shoot-out in which a complex geometrical arrangement of rival gangs try to finish each other off.

With their extreme version of zero-tolerance policing, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed often cause more mayhem than they prevent in their zealous pursuit of wrongdoers. When their white commanding officer, the long-suffering Lt Anderson, suggests that they try not to kill quite so many criminals, Grave Digger is furious: “Make the criminals pay for it – you don’t want to do that; pay the people enough to live decently – you ain’t going to do that; so all that’s left is let ’em eat one another up.”

The books were published over a dozen years from 1957, coinciding with the rise of the Civil Rights movement. The difference in the way the police treat black and white people is a regular theme, notably in The Heat’s On, in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are suspended after punching a white drug dealer in the stomach, causing the pouches of narcotics he has hastily swallowed for safe-keeping to burst and kill him. “It’s all right to kill a few coloured people for trying to get their children an education, but don’t hurt a mother-raping white punk for selling dope,” moans Digger. And yet it is the novels’ surreal quality, the almost demented slapstick violence, that Himes regarded as his most urgent response to racism. “Not only does racism express the absurdity of the racists, but it generates absurdity in the victims […] Racism generating in whites is, first of all, absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defence mechanism. Absurdity to combat absurdity. So it was with me,” he once wrote.

Himes had written a few realistic novels – drawing on the complications of his relationships with white women – before he changed direction in his late 40s. “My mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery,” he recalled. “Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought.” It is hard, though, not to see some connection between Himes’s haywire crime fiction and his life – which he once described as “weird, grotesque, a drunken Walpurgisnacht”.

Himes was born in 1909, the son of a college professor who was once fired because his car was deemed too fancy for an African-American. When Chester was in his teens, his brother was blinded in an accident with a chemistry set for which Chester partly blamed himself. The family were refused entry to the whites-only hospital they took him to. At 16, while working as a lift attendant, he fell down an empty shaft and suffered chronic injuries.

At Ohio State University he was so incensed by the behaviour of the other black students – “very proper, young black people who were trying so hard to ape white people” – that he took a group of them to his favourite brothel, and was expelled. He fell into petty crime and burglary, and at 19 was sentenced to 20 years at the Ohio State Penitentiary, where he began to write; his account of the 1930 Easter Monday fire in which 330 inmates died was published in Esquire. Released after seven years, he wrote novels too scornful of American communism to be accepted by the literati, and he joined other African-American self-exiles, such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, in Paris.

There he began the offbeat policiers that made him “the most celebrated writer in France who couldn’t speak French”; but he earned little from his French contracts, while the books failed to take off in the US. His finances improved after the 1970 film of Cotton Comes to Harlem – cited as the first blaxploitation movie – and a “Welcome Home, Himes” party, at which he was serenaded by the Jackson Five, marked his first trip back to the US in years. Even so, he died in 1984, his greatness still unrecognised.

This was partly because he was ahead of his time, producing weird versions of the crime caper before Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard had made it popular, and partly because many white Americans did not want to read a book written by a black man. Others would have preferred the uncomplicatedly noble African-American sleuth Virgil Tibbs, hero of John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965). And as an equal-opportunity satirist, Himes did himself no favours with the African-American literary scene by guying the Black Power movement.

But there is no excuse now for denying Himes’s pre-eminence among 20th-century crime writers. Above all, his books have a truly unique exuberance. “I wanted to break through the barrier that labelled me as a ‘protest writer’. I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism,” he once said. “We did not suffer, we were extroverts. We were unique individuals, funny not clowns, solemn but not serious, hurt but not suffering, sexualists but not whores in the usual sense of the word; we had tremendous love of life, a love of sex, a love of ourselves.” It’s that flavour – a love of life that extends even to taking gleeful pleasure in violence and death – that makes the Harlem novels such an unforgettable insight into what Himes called “the American black’s secret mind”.

Chester Himes’s The Heat’s On, All Shot Up, Cotton Comes to Harlem, A Rage in Harlem and The Real Cool Killers are published by Penguin Modern Classics at ￡9.99 each. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop