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S A M P L E C H A P T E R

Chapter One

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from crossing the street”: Chester Himes and the Fictions of Hard-Boiled Detective

Literature

Introduction

At the height of his fame in France as America’s first popular black detective fiction

novelist, Chester Himes published Run Man Run (1959), his only Harlem Domestic novel

that did not feature his black detectives Coffin Ed Jones and Grave Digger Johnson.i A

dramatic departure from Himes’s more famous farcical novels, Run Man Run is the grim

story of white detective Matt Walker, who hunts down a black porter named Jimmy

Johnson, after Jimmy has witnessed Walker’s murder of two fellow porters. Mostly

ignored by the public at the time of its U.S. publication in 1966 and by critics in the years

since then, Run Man Run is generally passed over as the anomaly of Himes’s otherwise

successful career as a detective novelist.ii Michael Denning is representative of critics

who dismiss the novel when he writes: “This is not in the least comic and is very

different from the Grave Digger/Coffin Ed series. It becomes a sort of belated version of

Native Son and, without the naturalistic detail, is largely unsuccessful.”iii Going against

the grain of contemporary scholarship, this chapter argues for Run Man Run’s

significance for rethinking Himes’s complex relationship to the popular literary tradition

that made him famous. It is precisely because Run Man Run is such a profoundly

different enterprise than Himes’s more openly satirical Coffin Ed and Grave Digger

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novels that it invites our critical scrutiny. The story of a white detective who relentlessly

chases his black suspect across Manhattan, Run Man Run showcases how racist violence

and the containment of urban minorities underwrite the apparently disinterested art of

detection and city planning.

While literary and cultural scholars have passed over Run Man Run in favor of

studying Himes’s slapstick racial carnivals, I argue that renewed attention to the novel

reveals its unsuspected importance for rethinking black crime literature’s relationship to

the intersecting issues of race, urban planning, and popular literature in America.

Examining Run Man Run as Himes’s most self-conscious parody of the racial ideologies

undergirding the hard-boiled detective narrative, this chapter repositions Himes as more

ambivalent toward popular literary forms than critics have traditionally recognized.

Although he is regarded in many critical circles as the heir to the hard-boiled literary

tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, this introductory chapter explores

Run Man Run as an emblem of Himes’s contentious relationship to the emerging literary

marketplace of black crime fiction. Although critics as recent as Sean McCann have

argued that “Himes’s ‘Harlem Domestic’ novels are easily the most significant

innovation in the postwar American crime novel, and the last serious attempt to use the

form to split the difference between popular literacy and literary expertise” (McCann

252), my analysis allows us to rethink Himes as a transitional figure, bridging the hard-

boiled detective literature of the early twentieth century and the incredibly popular

African American street literature that has emerged in the past few decades.

A seemingly minor moment in middle of Run Man Run exemplifies how Himes

employed the detective novel as a tactical approach to explore the intersecting issues of

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race, urban space, and literary representation. In a scene familiar in American hard-

boiled fiction from Hammett to Chandler, the white detective surveys the urban streets

before him, reporting what he sees with tough-guy disinterest. In Himes’s version, as

Walker cruises Harlem searching for Jimmy, he reflects upon the changing racial

character of the city.

When he came out he noticed how the neighborhood had changed since his school days at City College. Colored people were moving in and it was getting noisy. Already Harlem had taken over the other side of the street. This side, toward the river was still white, but there was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street . . . South of 145th street the Puerto Ricans were taking over, crowding out the Germans and the French, who’d gotten there first. It was like a dark cloud moving over Manhattan, he thought. But it wasn’t his problem; he’d leave it to the city planners, to Commissioner Moses and his men.iv

This moment reveals how Himes drew upon detective fiction tropes to engage the social

crisis of racial succession and urban renewal that was brewing in mid-century America.

Looking out at a Harlem in racial transition, Detective Walker notes that African

Americans and Puerto Ricans have replaced French and German immigrants, a compact

narrative of urban America’s transforming racial and ethnic composition in the twentieth

century. Although Walker worries that the last few decades of the Great Migration are

like a “dark cloud moving over Manhattan,” he is relieved when he remembers that

Robert Moses will contain the menace through city planning. The narrative of the white

detective policing black bodies is a familiar one in American literature from the original

detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the race-baiting novels of Mickey Spillane.v What

is striking here is the way that the detective emotionlessly passes the buck to Robert

Moses, a real historical figure who infamously destroyed the fabric of many

neighborhoods with his urban renewal programs and highway construction projects.

Casting Moses as the figure who will pick up where the detective leaves off, Himes made

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an explicit connection between detective literature’s insistent violence against black

characters and Moses’s management of urban populations. Positing that the secret

agenda of Moses and the detective is actually to “stop the colored people from walking

across the street,” Run Man Run unmasks the figures of ostensible rationalism as agents

of Jim Crow modernity.

By representing Moses and the detective as doubles for one another, Himes

exposed how the racial ideologies of hard-boiled literature were collusive with the

spatial/material reorganization of the American city in the postwar decades. Perhaps

more than any other single figure of the twentieth century, Robert Moses was responsible

for creating modern America’s racially-divided landscape. Before he was ousted from

his position as chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance for New York in

1960, Moses led the nation’s largest slum clearance program. A proponent of the super-

block solution, he viewed slums as a spreading cancer that needed to be flattened and

replaced by homogenous high-rise housing projects. In the decades following World

War II, these Le Corbusier-inspired facilities were constructed in New York and then in

Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and in many other American cities during

Moses’s influential reign. However, the “projects,” as they are widely known, have

become virtual prisons for poor African Americans and other minorities almost since the

moment of their construction. Moses further promoted white flight and black

ghettoization with the construction of the modern expressway system. For instance,

dynamiting his way through the Bronx to make room for the Cross-Bronx Expressway,

Moses displaced some sixty thousand working-class New Yorkers and transformed that

neighborhood into an international symbol of urban blight.vi Robert Caro estimates in his

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Pulitzer Prize-winning tome on Moses that over the course of his career, the “power

broker” evicted somewhere around a half a million people from their homes, a

disproportionate number of them black and Puerto Rican.vii

Although Moses’s policies represent a watershed moment in the management of

racial and ethnic populations in the postwar city, he formalized a process of ghettoization

that had begun many decades earlier. As African Americans migrated to cities in large

numbers during World War I, there emerged a growing perception among working-class

whites that their neighborhoods were being “invaded.” A socio-political ideology that

linked black neighborhoods to vice, crime, and moral darkness soon materialized, and in

cities all over America, whites employed various methods of intimidation, including

block restrictions, neighborhood associations, and even bombings in order to force

African Americans into the city’s worst housing stock.viii Following World War II, non-

white racial identity and declining property values were conjoined in the minds of many

as a kind of discursive and symbolic unity.ix As a result, between 1940 and 1970, an

estimated seven million whites fled American cities, while at the same time five million

African Americans came to occupy those abandoned spaces left behind.x This American

apartheid, the divide between white suburbs and the black inner city, became one of the

defining characteristics of racial identity throughout the course of the twentieth century.xi

As a literary form and culture industry centrally concerned with class and race

struggles, dark urban spaces, and the popular versus the elite, American crime and

detective literature has been uniquely positioned to represent these social upheavals and

cleavages. A number of recent literary and cultural histories have tracked hard-boiled

literature’s relationship to its historical and political moment, hypothesizing that Himes’s

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Harlem novels represented a “coup” of the hard-boiled form invented by Hammett and

Chandler. In fact, many of these studies conclude with a chapter on Himes, creating a

narrative in American and African American literary studies that his occupation of the

form signaled its demise.xii However, this book positions Himes as actually the first of

many black paperback novelists to interrogate the dominant cultural and racial ideologies

fueling these transformations in the emerging marketplace of black pulp fiction. As an

artist who started writing from behind bars, Himes operated as an important antecedent to

black paperback writers Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, themselves criminal artists

who remade the American crime story from the perspective of prisoner. In the late

1960s, as insurrections swept across the country, black crime novels began to be sold to

black audiences for the first time on a mass scale, first with the publication of Iceberg

Slim’s bestselling Pimp: The Story of my Life (1967), and then with the publication of

Goines’s hard-boiled action novels. Publishing their pimp autobiographies and ghetto

crime novels as paperback originals with the small house Holloway House Publishing

Company, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines helped establish a new industry of black-

authored crime fiction. However, despite their massive sales and widespread influence

on American culture, especially gangsta rap, Slim, Goines, and other pioneers of the

“black experience novel” have received virtually no academic attention. Like Himes,

however, Slim and Goines worked within the formulas of genre fiction and within the

institution of white-owned paperback publishing to create a critical mass of African

American crime literature. The untold story of black pulp publishing represents an

important missing chapter in the history of popular literature and African American

cultural production. Twenty years ago, in the introduction to the expanded version of his

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important study Prison Literature in America, H. Bruce Franklin issued a plea that

literary scholars study Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Nathan Heard and other black

writers of the 60s and 70s alongside Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X,

Chester Himes, and the criminal artists in the American literary tradition. As a literary

and cultural history of popular black crime fiction, this book is an attempt to answer that

call.

Although black-authored crime novels were only initially sold only in liquor

stores, at newsstands, and at other off-the-wall venues, they are now available

everywhere from Barnes and Nobles to street corner tables in Harlem. Currently

comprising around half of all titles sold by African American authors, and the subject of

recent conversations in Black Issues Book Review, The New York Times, Time, and on

dozens of fan websites, self-published street literature is in many ways the literature of

our time. The controversies that currently surround street fiction’s popularity, its literary

quality, and it’s racial and gender politics are all issues that Himes faced when creating

his Harlem Domestic novels. As a digression from his more marketable Coffin Ed and

Grave Digger stories, Run Man Run registers Himes’s dissatisfaction with publishing

genre fiction in an industry that marketed his books as tawdry sensationalism. For

instance, Dell marketed the first American version of Run Man Run as the story of a

black female nightclub singer. “A girl named Linda Lou, grew up in the streets of

Harlem. Singing was her racket but men were her trade.” Responding to this

sensationalizing of his novel, Himes wrote in a letter to John A. Williams: “Who are they

talking about? I wrote a book about a psychopathic white detective killing two brothers

and trying to kill a third. And here they go putting down this shit about some black sister

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out of her mind.”xiii Writing at a moment when the literary marketplace was undergoing

massive transformations, as black readers were emerging as a legible and legitimate

group of consumers and white publishers were scrambling to meet the growing demand,

Himes anticipated a shift in African American cultural production from an assumed white

audience to a black one. As the dissenting novel of his Harlem Domestic series, a novel

that has been subsumable by neither commercial nor critical interests, Run Man Run in

many ways represents the unconscious of Himes’s literary career as well as black crime

fiction more generally, exploring as it does the possibilities and liabilities of popular

literature for constituting a black cultural consciousness in a society where access to self-

representation has been restricted.

The remainder of this chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I

examine the dominant racial ideologies of the hard-boiled novel through a close analysis

of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, my Lovely. A recognized classic of

American literature and the literary model for Run Man Run, Farewell, my Lovely

provides a clear picture of detective fiction’s collusive relationship with discourses that

equate black in-migration to urban decline. The second part of this chapter examines Run

Man Run as a revision of this traditional detective story. Unlike Chandler’s novel, which

features the white detective as the mediator of knowledge, Run Man Run employs a

narrator who reports on the perspective of the detective and his victim. This double-

voicedness not only undermines the hegemonic authority of the white detective, but it

also re-imagines the black “criminal” as a competing hero in the novel. In the third

section, I examine the conclusion of Run Man Run as Himes’s qualified celebration of the

black vernacular over against the unified vision of modernity represented by Moses.

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Reading Jimmy Johnson’s Harlem shopping trip at the conclusion of the novel as an

endorsement of black working-class culture, I reveal how Run Man Run ultimately

employs the popular form of the detective story as a qualified defense of black popular

life. Anticipating the novels of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines that would transform the

literary marketplace only a few years later, Run Man Run mobilizes the story of the black

criminal as a creative indictment of the effects of white racism on black populations. But

before we can understand the import of Himes’s revision of the hard-boiled detective

story in Run Man Run, let us first consider the source of his creative critique, Raymond

Chandler’s Farewell, my Lovely.

“I had the place to myself”: Raymond Chandler and the Fictions of Urban Decline

In a 1970 interview with John Williams, Chester Himes reflected upon his prolific

writing career, one that had yielded countless short stories, “protest” fiction, detective

novels, and social satires. In a moment that has gone mostly unnoticed by critics, Himes

explained to Williams how Raymond Chandler’s classic Farewell, my Lovely promotes

an ideology of racial segregation based on white superiority.xiv Commenting on the

opening of the book, in which Marlowe explores a black-owned bar in what is now

Watts, Himes remarked that the novel’s representations of black Los Angeles betray

Chandler’s prejudiced perspective. “You know, they didn’t open those night clubs and

restaurants on Central Avenue until Thursday. [Williams interjects: ‘Maid’s day off?’]

Yeah, they were closed. Because you know, some of Raymond Chandler’s crap out

there, he writes in Farewell, my Lovely, he has this joker ride about in the Central Avenue

section. Some of that’s very authentic—it was like that. A black man in Los Angeles, he

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was a servant.”xv Here Himes’s colloquial statement to Williams reveals the extent to

which detective novels like Farewell, my Lovely depend upon and produce an ideology of

racial servitude. Showing off his own skills as a detective, Himes read the opening of

Chandler’s novel as an emblem of white presumptions about the endless availability of

black labor. While granting that some of Chandler’s depictions of Central Avenue are

indeed “authentic,” his larger point was that the portrayal of black Los Angeles in the

novel is “crap” and that that Marlowe is a “joker,” a tourist of Watts. For Himes,

Marlowe’s expedition to Los Angeles’s dark underworld does not so much reveal

something about the black neighborhood, as it exposes the detective figure’s dependence

on such constructions for the constitution of his own identity.

According to Chandler himself, the detective was a man defined by his ability to

retain his honor in the face of a threatening urban landscape. As he wrote in “The Simple

Art of Murder,” his seminal essay on hard-boiled fiction, “But down these mean streets a

man must go who is himself not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective

in this kind of story must be such a man.”xvi Although Chandler uses the phrase “neither

tarnished nor afraid” to describe the detective’s moral decency, Himes’s comments about

the opening of Farewell, my Lovely indicate that there is a racial valence to this

description as well. To borrow from Toni Morrison’s influential formulation in Playing

in the Dark, in which she reads seemingly minor African American characters as

centrally important “serviceable” figures in the white literary imagination, the black

neighborhood in Chandler’s novel operates as the “mean streets” set piece against which

the detective defines himself as not “tarnished.”xvii In Morrison’s analysis, apparently

marginal black characters from the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe to Ernest Hemingway

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serve the interests of white authors by offering themselves up as scapegoats and victims

to be variously captured, castrated, and killed. Although these characters appear to be

insignificant to the story as a whole, according to Morrison, they lubricate the plot and

aid in the architecture of the new white man by operating as sites of projection and

intense self-reflection. As Chandler’s novel uses the black neighborhood as symbolic

shorthand for the dark city, South Central becomes a “serviceable” literary device in the

construction of the white detective. It is no wonder, then, that Himes concluded his

reading of Chandler’s novel with the non sequitur, “A black man in Los Angeles, he was

a servant.”xviii

A closer examination of the opening of Farewell, my Lovely reveals how the

novel promotes the collusive ideologies of white fellowship and racial containment. In

the first lines of the story, private eye Phillip Marlowe reports on his trip to Los

Angeles’s heart of darkness:

It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home. I never found him, but Mrs. Aleidis never paid me any money either.xix

Much like the moment I discussed earlier in Run Man Run where Walker reads the

cityscape before him, the opening of Farewell, my Lovely features a white detective

protagonist encountering a city in racial transition and reporting it to the reader in

economical prose. Historically speaking, during the first decades of the twentieth

century, the Central Avenue corridor had been Los Angeles’s most ethnically diverse

neighborhood, composed of blacks, Italians, Asians, Latinos, whites, and immigrants

from southern and eastern Europe who had all come to find work in L.A.’s burgeoning

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industrial economy. As the African American population increased during the 1920s and

1930s, however, whites employed formal and informal methods of intimidation,

including violence, block restrictions, and neighborhood associations to create a racially-

divided city. According to Los Angeles historian Mike Davis, “95 percent of the city’s

housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians,” creating a

“white wall” around Central Avenue.xx Marlowe’s opening vignette provides a narrative

microcosm of this social and geographical transformation. While partially hidden behind

Marlowe’s swift, deliberate prose, his self-deflating humor, and his assurance that “It was

a small matter,” the detective’s story about a vanishing barber hints at deeper anxieties

about the changing racial character of the city. The disappearance of the marginally

white (presumably Greek) Dimitrios Aleidis from one of the racially “mixed blocks” in

South Central Los Angeles is a parable for urban succession as a whole. Ethnic

whiteness is giving way to blackness, and although the block is “not yet all Negro” in this

increasingly African American neighborhood, Marlowe tells us, it will be soon. It is

Marlowe’s use of the word “yet” that signals his larger unease over the changing

composition of the urban neighborhood. Although he does not explicitly state it, in

Marlowe’s estimation, there is something inexplicably threatening in the neighborhood

inevitably turning “all Negro.”

In fact, Chandler’s novel raises the specter of the black neighborhood to create a

white fantasy of halting the Great Migration over twenty years after it began.

Immediately after Marlowe gives up on the Aleidis case, he spots Moose Malloy, another

white ethnic and former resident of the neighborhood who has just been released from

prison: “I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second

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floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He

was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a

hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty” (3). As a diminutive of

“Hungarian,” “hunky” was a slang term for the immigrants from Hungary, Poland,

Romania, Czechoslovakia and other southern and eastern European countries who came

to American cities during the first few decades of the 20th century. Immigrating by the

millions to provide a deskilled labor force for the burgeoning Fordist economy, Russians

Jews, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, and others had formed a mosaic of urban

ethnic neighborhoods in industrial cities across America. But by 1940, due to the

Nativist backlash of the 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and the impending World

War, immigration had been shut down, and European immigrants of this type were

quickly becoming a kind of vanishing American.

Written at this turning point in the racial composition of the urban working-class,

Chandler’s novel reaches back to an image of an ethnic immigrant American in the figure

of Malloy to act as an imaginary fortification against racial succession. Returning to

Central Avenue to find his old flame, a former nightclub singer named Velma Valento,

Malloy becomes enraged when he discovers the bar Florian’s where she used to work has

transformed into a “dinge joint.” Originally opened by Mike Florian as a place of

entertainment for working-class ethnic whites, in the time that Malloy has been away in

prison, it has become a bar owned by African Americans. The novel’s central specter of

black entrepreneurialism, Florian’s, the white establishment turned “dinge joint” operates

as the novel’s central symbol of urban racial succession. When Marlowe is dragged into

the bar by Malloy to help him search for Velma, he describes the place as if he and

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Malloy were dropped down in the middle of the African continent: “There was a sudden

silence as heavy as a water-logged boat. Eyes looked at us, chestnut colored eyes, set in

faces that ranged from gray to deep black. Heads turned slowly and the eyes in them

glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another race” (7). Although once a bar

for working-class whites, Florian’s in the hands of urban blacks has become a space of

‘dead alien silence’ for intruders like Marlowe and Malloy. Malloy goes on a violent

rampage inside the bar, murdering and maiming the black residents of Central Avenue,

while Marlowe looks on with apparent neutrality:

Something sailed across the sidewalk and landed in the gutter between two parked cars. It landed on its hands and knees and made a high keening noise like a cornered rat. It got up slowly, retrieved a hat and stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was a thin narrow-shouldered brown youth in a lilac colored suit and a carnation. It had slick black hair. It kept its mouth open and whined for a moment. People stared at it vaguely. Then it settled its hat jauntily, sidled over to the wall and walked silently splay-footed off along the block (4-5).

As a number of critics have already noted, such a representation reflects the unapologetic

racism that pervades much of Chandler’s work.xxi While it is Malloy who physically

polices the “brown youth,” it is Marlowe who excuses and repeats the violence through

his dehumanizing representation of the victim. By calling the youth “it” seven times in as

many sentences and comparing him to “a cornered rat,” Marlowe embodies the dominant

racial attitudes of many whites during Jim Crow America.

The more important point to be made here, however, is that Chandler erects this

elaborate scene of racial confrontation in order to provide an imaginary resolution to the

crisis of the black “invasion.” Dragging Marlowe into Florian’s with him, Malloy

terrorizes the patrons of the black bar in search of Valento. When Malloy cannot find

her, he charges into the owner’s office, murders him, and flees the scene. Having related

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this incident with detachment, Marlowe finishes the story with a witty, but curious

remark. “When the prowl car boys stamped up the stairs, the bouncer and the barman

had disappeared and I had the place to myself” (15). This wisecrack is meant as a dry

denouement, a disavowal of the violence Marlowe has just witnessed. But given the

novel’s preoccupation with issues of racial and urban succession I outlined earlier,

Marlowe’s statement “I had the place to myself” also reads like a smug reclamation of

rightfully white territory. Eerily anticipating the so-called Zoot-Suit Riots of 1943, in

which police officers and servicemen roamed Los Angeles streets assaulting any black

and Mexican youths caught wearing the stylish sharkskin garments, the opening of

Chandler’s novel targets black working-class culture as a scapegoat for the larger societal

anxieties connected to urbanization, industrialization, and ethnic and racial succession.

With Malloy providing the cathartic expulsion of the black people who have taken over

Florian’s, Marlowe is free to claim the emptied black business without being directly

implicated in the violence to which he has been party.

But furthermore, Marlowe and Malloy’s homosocial bonding over the bodies of

black folk also reflects the racial parochialism of the pulp publishing industry itself. In

terms of their production, consumption, and subject matter, the pulps where Chandler got

his start as a writer belonged to white men.xxii Eschewing the ostensibly feminizing

corporate advertising that the so-called “slicks” used to offset their high costs, the pulps

relied mainly on low production costs and cheap materials to turn a profit. Like its 19th

century predecessor, the dime novel, pulp magazines were targeted emphatically toward

men, especially ethnic immigrants and white working-class men clustered in American

cities (Hersey 8-9; Denning 45; Goodstone xii; Smith 23). Although the venerable Black

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Mask magazine began with the subtitle “An Illustrated Magazine of Detective, Mystery,

Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism,” by 1927 it was subtitled the redundantly

masculine “The He-Man’s Magazine.” With garish cover art, featuring half-naked,

buxom blonds, gun-toting tough-guys, and over a hundred action-packed pages of

military and sports stories, westerns, tales of suspense and, of course, hardboiled

detective fiction, the seven-by-ten inch pulp magazine garnered ten million regular

readers during the 20s, 30s, and 40s (Smith 23). The authors of this fiction, too, were

integral to the atmosphere of white manliness that pervaded the pulps. Paid by the word

instead of the work, the authors of pulp fiction often identified themselves with the

industrial working class to whom the stories were marketed. Carroll John Daly, the man

who invented Race Williams, and along with Dashiell Hammett was responsible for the

creation of the hard-boiled detective in the 1920s, said that writing for the pulps was as

exhausting as “digging for coal in a mine,” while Erle Stanley Gardner, the writer behind

the incredibly popular Perry Mason series, wrote to Black Mask editor Joseph Thompson

Shaw, “I am a fiction factory.” For Hammett, Chandler, and the rest of the Black Mask

boys, the culture industry of pulp fiction provided a community where, through the

mechanized production of literature, writers could imagine a cross-class identification

with the white industrial workers for whom they were writing. Even though Chandler

abandoned the pulps to pursue literary respectability in 1939 with the publication of The

Big Sleep and Farewell, my Lovely a year later, his representation of Malloy as

Marlowe’s lost brother figure who fights off encroaching blackness illustrates his

persistent sentimentality with regard to filial bonds between white men.

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Chester Himes’s Run Man Run and the Rewriting of American Detective Fiction

Even though Chester Himes started writing around the same time as Raymond Chandler,

during the Depression, he did not begin writing detective novels until twenty years after

the publication of his first short stories. In the early 1930s, while serving a seven-year

sentence in Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, Himes discovered Black Mask

magazine. Imitating the style of Dashiell Hammett, Himes wrote a number of prison

stories while incarcerated, some of which were published in Esquire. But Himes was

never quite able to achieve critical or commercial success with these early works. After

being released from prison, he worked briefly for the WPA before moving to Los

Angeles in 1941 with his wife Jean Johnson. With the aid of Louis Bromfield and

Langston Hughes, Himes’s circulated prison novel titled Black Sheep through the studio

system for two years. However, because the story featured a white protagonist and

explicitly sexual interracial relationships between men, no one would pick it up. When

he could find neither producer nor publisher to buy the script, Himes attempted to get

other work in the movie industry, writing one-page synopses of novels for the likes of

Warner Brothers. But Jack Warner had Himes fired from the studio, proclaiming

famously, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”

It is a well-known fact that Himes became a detective fiction writer primarily

because of the financial pressures of the literary marketplace. Having achieved little

financial success for his “protest” novels If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The

Lonely Crusade (1947), and hard up for cash after moving to France in 1955, Himes was

persuaded to write detective stories by Marcel Duhamel, the famed editor for Série Noire.

In 1957, Himes wrote For the Love of Imabelle, later renamed A Rage in Harlem, which,

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to his surprise, became a bestseller in France and won the Grand prix de la littérature

policière in 1958. Between 1957 and 1969, Himes published nine detective novels, all

set in New York (primarily Harlem), and all but Run Man Run featuring his famous

detective duo Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.

In Run Man Run, Himes restages the primal scene of conflict between the white

detective and serviceable black characters to expose the racial chauvinism that bankrolls

American detective fiction. At the opening of the novel, Detective Walker stumbles

drunkenly through midtown Manhattan searching for his missing car. Like Hammett’s

Continental Op or Chandler’s Marlowe, Himes’s Walker gazes upon the city before him,

though he is unable to read its meaning clearly:

When he came to 37th Street he sensed that something had changed since he’d passed before. How long before he couldn’t remember. He glanced at his watch to see if the time would give him a clue. The time was 4:38 A.M. No wonder the street was deserted, he thought. Every one with any sense was home in bed, snuggled up to some fine hot woman (7).

Walker’s inexplicable anxiety that “something had changed since he’d passed before”

transmogrifies into a standard narrative of black criminality when he spots a black porter

named Luke taking out the trash at a fast-food restaurant. Although Walker has only

forgotten where he has parked his car, the porter provides a site/sight upon which he can

project his fantasy that a black man has made off with his ride. “He knew immediately

that the Negro was a porter. But the sight of a Negro made him think that his car had

been stolen instead of lost. He couldn’t have said why, but he was suddenly sure of it”

(9). Following this hunch, Walker questions Luke and then heads to the kitchen to

interrogate the mopping porter named Fat Sam. As he questions Fat Sam, Walker’s

  19  

general feelings of racist unease coalesce into a reconstruction of events in which the

porter becomes part of an elaborate car-jacking racket:

“I’ll tell you how you did it,” the detective said in a blurred uncertain voice. “You came back here from out front and used that telephone by the street door. Your buddy was working and he didn’t notice.” By now the detective had got his eyes focused on Fat Sam’s face and they looked dangerous. “You telephoned up to Harlem to a car thief and told him to come down and lift. That’s right, ain’t it, wise guy?” (13).

Here Himes reveals how the detective’s narrative solution to the crime is actually a form

of discourse production about racial criminality. At one level, this is clearly a lampoon

of Farewell, my Lovely. While Marlowe’s authoritative understanding of black

neighborhoods apparently allows him to negotiate the terrain of the dark city, Detective

Walker’s racial presuppositions actually keeps him from solving any crimes, as his

knowledge amounts to little more than a racist fantasy. As a black author writing in a

long tradition of white-authored detective narratives, Himes’s story of a white detective

who murders black workers deflates white authority in the crime fiction genre by

unveiling it as too often the fabrication of a consciousness driven by racist motivations.

Much of the novel features Walker using his skills as a detective to cover the tracks of his

crime, suggesting that the art of ratiocination is nothing more than an elaborately

reasoned justification for racial violence.

What further distinguishes Run Man Run from a traditional detective novel is that

Himes provides the perspectives of both the detective and his usually silenced black

victims. When Walker accuses Fat Sam of stealing his car, Sam does not cower before

these accusations. Much like Himes in his interview with Williams, Sam mocks the

detective’s conflation of blackness and criminality as an anachronistic device, dating

back to an earlier age of detective fiction. After listening to Walker’s wild allegations,

  20  

Fat Sam replies: “Here you is, a detective like Sherlock Holmes, pride of the New York

City police force, and you’ve gone and got so full of holiday cheer you’ve let some punk

steal your car. Haw-haw-haw! So you set out and light on the first colored man you see.

Haw-haw-haw! Now, chief, that crap’s gone out of style with the flapper girl” (15). Fat

Sam first openly ridicules Walker’s powers of deductive reasoning by ironically

comparing him to Sir Conan Doyle’s genteel detective Sherlock Holmes, the popular

successor to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Acting as a mouthpiece for Himes,

Fat Sam then states that the detective’s projection of criminality onto black bodies is a

tired rhetorical contrivance, invented in the pages of Black Mask during the age of “the

flapper girl.” Infuriated by Fat Sam’s irreverence and still half-believing his own story,

Walker murders Fat Sam and Luke and hides their bodies in the company refrigerator.

Himes does not conceal Walker’s murder of the two porters behind the clipped, hard-

boiled prose employed by Chandler, but instead forces the reader to confront the

grotesque spectacle. Describing Fat Sam’s death, the narrator says: “He fell forward,

pulling the tray from the rack along with him. Thick, cold, three-day-old turkey gravy

poured over his kinky head as he landed, curled up like a fetus, between a five-gallon can

of whipping cream and three wooden crates of iceberg lettuce” (17). While the terse style

of white detective fiction authors often serves to cover over racial violence, Himes’s

writing refuses any such sanitation by placing the denigrated black body in full view of

the reading audience. Reducing the restaurant porters to the food over which they labor

each day, Walker emerges, not as a detective hero, but as a butcher whose position as an

officer of the law sanctions disturbing acts of racial violence. “Poor bastard,” Walker

thinks after he has killed Fat Sam, “Dead in the gravy he loved so well” (18).

  21  

Importantly, Himes’s novel shifts the opening scene of violence from the “dinge

joint” on Central Avenue to Schmidt and Schindler’s, a fictional chain restaurant based

on Horn and Hardart. The Horn and Hardart automat was one of the main precursors to

fast-food restaurants like Burger King and McDonalds, dispensing coffee, buns, and

sandwiches through tiny glass-door compartments. First started around the turn of the

century, Horn and Hardart reached the height of its popularity in the 1950s, with about a

hundred locations throughout New York and Philadelphia serving over a quarter of a

million people a day.xxiii Before Himes moved permanently to Europe in 1955, he

worked at Horn and Hardart as a stainless steel polisher, an experience which would help

inspire Run Man Run. As Himes tells it in his autobiography:

While we were eating in the basement, a drunken white detective staggered down the stairs and accused us of stealing his car and waved his pistol around. This incident became the basis of my novel Run Man Run. But I showed him my passport, which I had taken to be renewed and that sobered him somewhat. He must have thought a nigger with a passport was connected with the government (Absurdity 29-30).

But more than just providing the kernel for the story of Run Man Run, the corporate

restaurant, with its emphasis on sterilized, rationalized order, operates as Himes’s

metonym for the postwar city as a whole. After Walker has gotten away with murder, the

superintendents restore order to Schmidt and Schindler’s by removing all traces of the

bodies. “The wooden, ribbed floor where the bodies had lain were scraped, scrubbed,

and washed down with scalding water spurting from a plastic hose. It was as though they

were trying to wash away the deed itself . . . By eleven a.m. the murder had been

expertized, efficiently, unemotionally, thoroughly, and as far as was discernable, the

slight pinprick on the city had closed and congealed” (55). Here Himes’s narrator uses

the wonderfully expressive word “expertized” to describe the process of removing, not

  22  

only the murdered black bodies, but all evidence of “the deed itself.” Mimicking the

process of urban renewal, in which entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for

expressways and housing projects, the murder and elimination of Luke and Fat Sam’s

bodies from Schmidt and Schindler’s functions as Himes’s metaphor for the violence

visited upon populations of urban minorities in postwar America.

“I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books”: Chester Himes and the Creation of Black Crime Fiction

As much as any Himes novel can have a “hero,” the sympathetic protagonist of Run Man

Run is not the detective at all, but the porter he chases, Jimmy Johnson. Modeled partly

on Himes himself, Johnson embodies Himes’s qualified celebration of localized black

vernacular culture over and against the totalized, homogenized America symbolized by

fast food restaurants, expressways, and Moses-inspired public housing projects.

Describing Jimmy at work washing the garbage cans at the opening of the novel, the

narrator says of him: “It wasn’t a hard job for Jimmy. The cans were heavy, but he

handled them with the tireless ease of a man who didn’t know his own strength” (27).

Although a striking a portrait of the conventional masculinity of hard-boiled fiction,

Himes’s hero is a tough-guy imagined from a specifically African American cultural

consciousness. “He had the big-boned, broad-shouldered, flat-chested, muscular build of

the southern farmhand accustomed to heavy plowing, coupled with the sleepy-type,

sepia-colored good looks that Joe Louis had at the age of twenty-four. His eyes were

alert and intelligent” (28).

Thus, while Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones may be Himes’s most well-known

protagonists, then, it is the service-economy figure that is the true hero of Himes’s crime

  23  

fiction imagination. The allegories and accents of service work appear in the earliest of

Himes’s stories and are prominently featured in his literature throughout his career. In

“Headwaiter” (1937), Himes explores the intimate and complex social and racial

relationships of a small town through a day-in-the-life portrait of veteran headwaiter Dick

Small, while in the allegorical “Lunching at the Ritzmore” (1942), a bet between a

student and a drifter over whether a Negro will be served at Los Angeles’s Ritzmore

restaurant results in a mob scene at the posh downtown hotel. Even in Himes’s first

Harlem Domestic, For the Love of Imabelle, it is not the two detectives around which the

story focuses, but rather an undertaker’s assistant by the name of Jackson. The lowliest

of all of Himes’s proletariats, Jackson’s main job is as a laborer for the dead. “He drove

the limousines for the funerals, brought in the dead in the pickup hearse, cleaned the

chapel, washed the bodies and swept out the embalming room, hauled away the garbage

cans of clotted blood, trimmed meat and rotten guts” (7). The point here is that, although

Himes transformed himself from a “protest” to a “popular” writer over the course of his

career, his works have always been motivated by a sympathy toward black workers. Run

Man Run, more than any of Himes’s other detective novels, uses the apparatus of popular

literature to reveal the black worker as a victim of white racism without entirely reducing

the black worker to this status. This helps explain the spare humor of Run Man Run,

which Himes employs to suspend the tension between the “popular” and the “protest”

elements in his novel. For instance, the moment Walker begins shooting at Jimmy in the

basement of Schmidt and Schindler’s is represented as both horrifying and funny:

“Wait a minute, you black son of a bitch!” he [Walker] screamed unthinkingly. Jimmy heard him and came up from his squatting position with a mighty push.

  24  

The minds of both were sealed, each in its compelling urge, one to kill and one to live, so that neither registered the humor in Walker calling to Jimmy to wait and get himself killed (31).

Reflective of Himes’s turn toward existentialist modes of expressing the nature of

modern racism, this passage illustrates his dual goals in writing Run Man Run. While he

shows that the black worker is a victim of a capricious and dangerous white world, a

theme central to the mid-century “protest” literature of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and

even Himes’s own first novels, he also suggests that this victimization is an essentially

absurd construct, constituted more by compulsion than material self-interest.xxiv

It is therefore suggestive that Jimmy finds temporary solace in his role as a

consumer. Toward the novel’s conclusion, after Jimmy has been unable to convince

anyone that Walker did murder Luke and Sam, he goes to Harlem in search of a gun to

defend himself. Much like the scenes where the detective encounters the city in racial

transition, Jimmy observes the changing character of the black neighborhood, though his

reaction to the transformation is decidedly different. In Himes’s story, it is the corporate

restaurant, rather than the “dinge joint” that serves as the barometer of decline in the

black neighborhood for the black protagonist: “He’d always heard that one could find

anything and everything in Harlem, from purple Cadillacs to underwear made of

unbleached flour sacks. But he hadn’t found anything good to eat. The big chain

cafeterias had come in and put the little restaurants out of business. All you could get in

one of them was grilled chops and French fried potatoes . . . He was tired of eating

Schmidt and Schindler food, luncheonette-style food, no matter how good it was

supposed to be” (155-156). Reversing the dynamic of Chandler’s novel, in which the

“dinge joint” signals the death of the formerly white neighborhood, Himes’s text

  25  

postulates that it is in fact the fast-food restaurant with its white-bread tastes and

colonization of black businesses that is a harbinger for decline in Harlem. But I also read

this moment as an allegory for Himes’s complex position in the literary market. As a

corporatized entity offering an insufficient menu to its Harlem customers, Schmidt and

Schindler is in many ways a displaced reflection of the homogenized detective fiction

industry of which Himes was a part. By suggesting that the “big cafeteria chains” are

unequal to the task of nourishing Harlem, Himes is also expressing that the corporatized

crime fiction industry is unequal to the task of nourishing the black writer or the black

consumer.

It is hardly any wonder, then, that Himes ends the novel with Jimmy both eating

soul food and shopping for black books to prepare himself for the final confrontation with

the detective. At the conclusion of the Run Man Run, Himes uncouples the symbolic

conflation of black neighborhoods and “mean streets” by recasting Harlem and its

locally-owned businesses as Jimmy’s only protection in a dangerous white world. In

fact, Himes remakes a “dingy” restaurant the site of temporary rescue for Jimmy. After

passing up a fast-food cafeteria, Jimmy stumbles upon a soul food restaurant sitting

inconspicuously on the same block:

He came to a dingy plate-glass, curtained-off storefront which held a sign reading: HOME COOKING. It looked like a letter from home. He went inside and sat at one of the five empty tables covered with blue-and-white checked oilcloth. To one side a coal fire burned in a potbellied stove. It was hot enough in there to give a white man a suntan” (156).

A stark contrast to the luncheonette, the soul food restaurant is “a letter from home” for

Jimmy and a place humorously inhospitable to whites. It is in this environment that

Jimmy experiences a moment of bravery by feasting on home cooking:

  26  

He chose hog maws and turnip greens with a side dish of speckled peas. He splashed it with a hot sauce made from the seeds of chili peppers. The hot dish with the hot sauce scorched the inside of his mouth and burned his gullet as it went down. Sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin. But after he’d finished, he felt a hundred percent better. He felt mean and dangerous and unafraid; he felt as if he could take the killer by his head and twist it off” (156).

Rather than a figuration of blight, the “dinge joint” here offers Jimmy a reprieve from the

pursuing Walker. By making the “dingy” storefront the site where Jimmy’s courage

momentarily erupts, Himes provides his readers with one of his understated expressions

of how black cultural institutions provide a bulwark against a violent white world. While

for Chandler, the black neighborhood is an imaginary staging ground where Marlowe can

make a brief journey into the urban exotic, for Himes, the black community provides his

black protagonist a space of at least temporary security in the form of local cultural

identity.

Nowhere is this made more apparent than when Jimmy passes a black-owned

bookstore, which has on display, among other titles, James Weldon Johnson’s The

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry,

George Schuyler’s satiric Black No More, Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy,

and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis. At this moment, Himes

provides one of the most heartfelt defenses of the black neighborhood that can be found

in his literature:

Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts; he was served by black people in businesses catering to black people; he was presented with the literature of black people. Black was a big word in Harlem. No wonder so many people desired their own neighborhoods, he thought. They felt safe; there was safety in numbers (152).

  27  

As this quote reveals, the purpose of Himes’s novel was not just to show readers the

black neighborhood that Chandler cannot or does not represent, but also to make the case

for the importance of black identity in creating such representations. In an act that

mirrored the very process of racial succession that Himes was attempting to capture in his

novel, he occupied a literary form that had been all-but-abandoned by the late 1950s in

order to stage a narrative vindication of black culture and black neighborhoods. Turning

the popular form of the hard-boiled detective story into a mode of racial critique, Himes

became the first of many black crime writers to marshal popular fiction to represent the

social conditions of black urban life. Although he would not live long enough to see the

massive inroads many black writers would make into the crime fiction industry in the

past decade, Himes accomplished precisely what he set out to do, initiating a symbolic

takeover of popular literary representations of black life. “The Harlem of my books was

never meant to be real; I never called it real,” Himes once famously wrote. “I just wanted

to take it away from the white man if only in my books” (Absurdity 126).

But even as Himes spends the penultimate pages of the novel showcasing

Harlem’s bookstores, soul food restaurants, theaters, and barber shops, he wants to reveal

how these institutions are ultimately unequal to the task of protecting black citizens

against urban renewal and ghettoization. For as Himes’s narrator writes, Jimmy is “lulled

into a sense of absolute security” by the mountain of literary commodities he encounters

at the black bookstore. In the novel’s last pages, Jimmy heads into the Harlem streets to

confront Matt Walker in a final duel. However, the expected showdown between the two

characters does not materialize, as Jimmy’s act of masculine courage proves ineffectual

in the face of Walker’s panoptic foresight:

  28  

He couldn’t hear the shots and didn’t know what direction they were coming from. He felt the tearing of the bullet’s trajectory inside him. He tried to call for help but didn’t have the breath. Nothing came from his mouth but blood. With one last desperate effort he jerked his pistol free and fired it at the pavement” (177).

Although Jimmy survives the shooting and Walker dies at the hands of the police,

Jimmy’s desperate final clash with the detective provides a more apt expression of the

novel’s meaning than the tacked-on happy ending would imply. For while Himes himself

was able to escape from America in 1955, the image of Jimmy being gunned down in the

streets without seeing or hearing his attacker operates as a powerful symbol for the

containment that the majority of urban blacks faced in postwar America. Jimmy’s final

desperate act of firing his gun at the pavement dramatizes that individual armed

resistance to the systematic violence that Walker represents is about as effective as

shooting the street itself. Although Walker himself is killed at the novel’s conclusion, the

disappearing detective is revenged by other white authorities, who impose “urban

renewal” on urban minorities in the form of slum clearance policies, high-rise housing

projects, and low-wage service-sector employment in the postwar decades.

In the final analysis, Run Man Run mobilizes the popular form of the detective

story to engage the issues of racial succession, urbanization, and population management

in mid-century America. Privileging the vernacular over the official narratives of history,

Run Man Run joins Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of American Cities as an important

postwar text that challenged the hegemony of urban renewal. But whereas Jacobs’s book

met Robert Moses on the sanctioned terrain of sociology, history, and public policy,

Himes’s novel hijacked the popular form of the detective novel to narrate his critique of

white racism and economic exploitation. In this way, Chester Himes operated as the

  29  

predecessor for street literature authors who have emerged in the past few decades. On

125th Street in Harlem, dozens of tables are set up every day, overflowing with the latest

titles by black crime fiction novelists. Often self-published, the books by Nikki Turner,

Shannon Holmes, K’Wan, Vicki Stringer, and many lesser known local writers represent

the present and future of black popular publishing. Written in the vernacular of the

streets and featuring narratives of pimps, hustlers, and drug dealers that appeal to a black

working-class readership, street literature (or urban fiction, hip hop fiction, or gangster

literature as it is also known) represents a vital expression of a segment of black popular

culture that is not found in mainstream discourse. Much like gangsta rap to which street

literature is often compared, this brand of fiction provides an alternative to authorized

sociological and historical accounts of black reality by narrating insider stories of

criminal life in the ghetto. While it is now a common-sense assumption in both hip hop

and street literature “you got to go there to know there,” with respect to representing the

black urban experience, this is a relatively recent cultural shift, one that I would argue

started with the crime novels of Himes and then later with the books Iceberg Slim and

Donald Goines. Although street literature is usually understood to be an outgrowth of hip

hop culture, the gangsta rap of innovators like Ice-T, Ice-Cube, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Jay-Z

and many others was in fact inspired by the early street novels of Iceberg Slim and

Donald Goines. As the first black-authored crime novels to hit the paperback market in

the late 1950s, Chester Himes’s Harlem novels are clear forerunners to the literary

phenomenon of black-authored pulp fiction. But whereas the novels of Slim, Goines, and

subsequent authors were written for and marketed to blacks living in American ghettos,

Himes’s novels were part of an earlier moment in which publishing companies still

  30  

assumed a white readership. As Himes was writing in the midst of this transition, his

novel Run Man Run offers insight on the ideological and artistic limitations of hard-

boiled American detective story. By pushing the narrative of the white detective chasing

a black criminal to its absurd, but logical conclusion, Himes’s novel implicitly makes a

case for new modes of African American crime literature to be written. With the

materialization of self-publishing as a viable commercial and literary enterprise, black

crime and detective fiction is now not only possible, but has emerged as a literary

tradition of its own. In chapter two, we turn to Iceberg Slim to examine the invention and

institutionalization of the black experience novel.

                                                                                                               i The people who have contributed to the critical assessment of Himes’s literature in recent years are too numerous to list. Some of the best early essays and reviews on Himes are collected in James Silet, The Critical Response to Chester Himes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Other important contributors to scholarship on Himes include Edward Margolies, The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982); H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford, 1989); Robert Skinner, Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989); Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: The University of Massachusettes Press, 1996); Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Megan Abbot, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). ii There are a few critics who do discuss Run Man Run. See for instance, Megan Abbot, “The Strict Domain of Whitey: Chester Himes’s Coup” in her The Street Was Mine, 155-190, as well as Alice Mikal Craven’s “A Victim in Need is a Victim in Deed: The Ritual Consumer and Self-Fashioning in Himes’s Run Man Run,” in Linda Martz and Anita Higgie, eds., Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction (Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 37-55. Soitos is unique among critics by arguing that Run Man Run most clearly demonstrates Himes’s “growing conviction that African American survival depends on violence against the white oppressor” (164). iii Michael Denning, “Topographies of Violence: Chester Himes’s Harlem Domestic Novels,” in Silet,165. iv Chester Himes, Run Man Run (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1995), 111. v See Frankie Bailey, Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Pandarus, 1991); Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford, 1992); Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Belknap, 1993); Erin Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); and Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (New York: Oxford, 2001). vi Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982). vii Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 20. viii St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Gilbert

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930 (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1996); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996). ix Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). x John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983). xi Douglas Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). xii See, for instance, Abbot and McCann. xiii Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 149. xiv Abbot too notes that Himes was aware of Chandler’s text, though she argues that Himes’s creative revision of Farewell, my Lovely takes place in Himes’s The Real Cool Killers. Abbot, 168. xv Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, Conversations with Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 55. xvi Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988), 18. xvii Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). xviii As Himes would comment in his autobiography about his time living in Los Angeles: “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known—much more than any city I remember from the South. It was the lying hypocrisy that hurt me. Black people were treated much the same as they were in an industrial city of the South. They were Jim-Crowed in housing, in employment, in public accommodations.” Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes Volume II (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 73. xix Raymond Chandler, Farewell, my Lovely (New York: Knopf, 1940), 5. xx Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 161. xxi Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980), 155; William Marling, Raymond Chandler (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 98; Bailey, 48; McCann, 162. xxii For the personal and informal histories of the pulps, see Harold Hersey’s Pulpwood Editor: The Fabulous World of the Thriller Magazines Revealed by a Veteran Editor and Publisher (New York: Frederick Stokes Company, 1937); Frank Gruber’s The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1967); and Ron Goulart’s Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1972). Tony Goodstone’s The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture (New York: Chelsea House, 1970) and William Nolan’s The Black Mask Boys (New York: W. Morrow, 1985) offer historical background as well as selections from the magazines themselves. For more recent criticism on pulp magazines, see Ron Goulart’s The Dime Detectives (New York: Mysterious Press, 1988); Lee Server’s Danger is my Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines; 1896-1953 (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1993); Woody Haut’s Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1995); and Erin Smith’s Hard-boiled: Working-class Readers and Pulp Magazines. xxiii Phillip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New York: Knopf, 1986), 16-24. xxiv At the opening My Life of Absurdity, Himes writes: “Albert Camus once said that racism is absurd. Racism introduces absurdity into the human condition. Not only does racism express the absurdity of the racists, but it generates absurdity in the victims. And the absurdity of the victims intensifies the absurdity of the racists, ad infinitum” (1).