James Sallis on
Chester Himes
at Edinburgh International Book Festival
18th August 2000

Ravi Bali

Chester Himes was one of the first crime fiction writers who managed to convincingly articulate the experience of being black and living in America.

He is in many ways a writers' writer, regarded as fine a craftsman of mood, character and story as Raymond Chandler or Dasheill Hammett, though he never achieved their level of popularity. Through his central characters he was able to convey a sense of the pent-up rage that black people, particularly black men, felt about living in a racist America where their dignity was continually undermined. His books (particularly the three detective novels that make up The Harlem Cycle) have enjoyed a certain level of popularity in Britain, and Europe more broadly, while inexplicably being neglected in the country where he was born and where all his stories were set.

Unfortunately, in this talk James Sallis, who has just written a major biography of Himes, was quite candid that he had not been able to account for this disparity in how the book was received. He did give some of the details of Himes' life, the early part of which was spent in prison where he started his writing. In his whole life he hardly made any money from his books, most of which were printed as cheap pulp editions, and only much later, when he got the royalties from film scripts based on his novels, was he able to support himself through his writing.

Himes makes a good subject for biography because he was such a fantasist, in that the line between the confessed facts of his life and his written fiction is blurred. He gave details of his life that were not true, while on the other hand his novels contained scenes that clearly reflected his direct experience. It is the complex interweaving of these elements of fact and fantasy that Sallis explains he was trying to unravel in his new book on Himes.

The sociological explanation of why Himes was so differently received in the land of his birth does not lie in his emigration to Europe, because there are other black American writers who established their popularity on both sides of the Atlantic despite not living in the States. The answer to why Himes' work has not entered into the canon of American popular fiction is a theorisation which will have to wait for another day; and perhaps for a writer other than Sallis. It is a shame that Himes never got the level of recognition he deserved, but hopefully this biography will help to increase appreciation of him as the very fine writer he was.