One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape: arresting, prickly, and resilient, stinging harshly when pressed too hard or approached too indelicately —and yet carrying enough water beneath its tough hide to refresh, even renew the landscape around it.

In a lifetime beset with neglect, struggle, and scorn, that is exactly what Himes did. He wrote and wrote, channeling his anger, taking risks, and leaving behind a shelf of more than 20 books, the best known of which were his detective stories set in Harlem—a place he didn’t actually spend as much time in as he had in the Midwest, where he’d begun writing while serving prison time during the 1930s, or in Europe, where he’d moved in the 1950s after a series of personal and professional setbacks in his native country confirmed for him his destiny as a literary outlier, marginalized even within the relatively marginalized status of Black American writers near the dawn of the civil-rights era.

“I get the ass-end of everything on the way to someplace else” is a quote that belongs not to Himes but to a fictional character named Max Reddick, the restive, itinerant, and beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. 
Williams’s epochal 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am. But it could also have been said of Himes and his often star-crossed life and literary career. Williams, a friend and confidant to Himes, might in fact have borrowed much of the latter’s embittered humor and worldly demeanor in creating Max. One can’t know for sure. Yet the more one learns about Himes and reads his fiction, the easier it is to imagine him tossing out, even in casual conversation, a lament like Max’s. In many ways, one can imagine it serving as a kind of chorus for the beat-down, rough-edged rhythm-and-blues dirges one finds in what is now known as Himes’s “Harlem Cycle” of novels, four of which, from the late 1950s and early ’60s—A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, and Cotton Comes to Harlem—have recently been compiled in an Everyman’s Library collection. They, along with 1960’s The Big Gold Dream and All Shot Up, 1966’s The Heat’s On, 1969’s Blind Man With a Pistol, and the posthumously published Plan B, feature the forbidding, irascible, zero-bullshit Black NYPD detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who use even the most unseemly means at their disposal to manage chaos on their combustible turf. The prose is lean and muscular, and the narrative is spiked with mordant wit and baroquely violent imagery.

Chester Himes was in his mid-40s when he began writing detective fiction at the suggestion of his French translator, Marcel Duhamel, who ran a line of crime novels called La Serie Noire for Gallimard. At the time of Duhamel’s suggestion, Himes was likely more than willing to try anything, having arrived at an impasse in his literary career. Born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, he was the youngest of three sons of teachers working in what was then characterized as the “Negro higher education system” in a racially segregated America. His autobiographical writings, including his 1972 memoir The Quality of Hurt, describe a peripatetic childhood fraught with bitter conflict between his parents and guilt over an accident that blinded an older brother. The family eventually moved to Cleveland, where Himes got caught up in the city’s underworld and was convicted of armed robbery in 1928. In the Ohio State Penitentiary, he found his calling as a writer and eventually published five literary novels.

The novels had only middling financial success—hence Duhamel’s suggestion that he try his hand at something more popular like detective fiction. At the time of Duhamel’s recommendation, Himes was just recovering from the ordeal of The End of a Primitive, his most recently completed novel, which had been rejected by his editor, who told him that if it were published, “it would bring down the roof on all of us.” The chronicle of a destructive interracial romance, it was eventually published in 1955 in expurgated form as The Primitive (though later republished, unexpurgated, with the original title), and while it remained Himes’s favorite among his books, its raw details, interspersed with surrealistic touches like TV newscasts foreshadowing violent acts involving the book’s characters, made the novel a challenging one and opened even its author up to the possibility of finding a more hospitable mode and genre.

The truth is, however, that The End of a Primitive was not Himes’s only difficult book—almost all of them were, in one way or another. Himes’s 1945 debut, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, whose prose still burns the hands of anyone reading it, recounted four anxious days in the life of Bob Jones, a Black shipyard worker psychically and physically assaulted by his white coworkers and the police, falsely accused of rape, and eventually compelled to join the Army. Drawn from Himes’s experiences working in the Los Angeles shipyards during World War II, If He Hollers, Let Him Go is a waking nightmare interspersed with bad dreams only slightly more warped than this deeply sensitive Black man’s daily existence, infected on the home front by the “tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the streets as gas fumes.”

Even though it was a far cry from his later detective fiction, the novel was a revelation. Himes’s astringent style, evoking the headlong ribaldry of a present-day stand-up comic or rap artist, announced itself as its own all-American paradox: at once hard-boiled and thin-skinned, self-pitying and stoic, grimly resigned and boisterously irreverent. But it was also clearly not going to become 
a bestseller.

Nor was Himes’s second novel, Lonely Crusade, published in 1947. Following a Black union organizer at a California aviation plant charged with the task of recruiting other Black workers, the novel took chances in its detailed exploration of class as well as racial disparities, Black antisemitism, and the battles and betrayals within the progressive movements of the 1940s. It, too, was a critical and commercial flop. “Everyone hated it,” Himes wrote in his memoir The Quality of Hurt. “The left hated it. The right hated it. Jews hated it. Blacks hated it.” Even some fellow Black authors who were otherwise sympathetic to the risks Himes took did not like it. In a letter to Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison wrote that he found the novel “dishonest in its pseudo-­intellectuality,” while James Baldwin, reviewing it for The New Leader, wrote that the book “probably had some of the most uninteresting and awkward prose I have read in years.”

Part of Himes’s problem was not of his making at all. The literary marketplace of the 1940s tended to assess fiction by Black authors as sociopolitical tracts (“protest novel” being the familiar euphemism that Baldwin himself would push back against). There were, of course, plenty of sociopolitical observations in If He Hollers, Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, but focusing on them meant the aesthetic elements of Himes’s fiction went largely unacknowledged. Back then, his early novels were mostly compared to Wright’s, and the comparison wasn’t entirely misapplied. But another part of the problem was that Himes had not yet quite hit his mark. His books were bracing, fiercely experimental, and often painful to read. But the tough, callous landscape they described, the brooding despair and gritty realism they evoked, would come into its own in his detective novels. Like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, Himes found that once he turned to this genre of writing, he could become one of its great virtuosos.

Before the detective fiction, however, there were other novels. In the frustrating years after Lonely Crusade, Himes reached further into his autobiography with Cast the First Stone and The Third Generation, which were recently released in new editions. The novels were originally published in 1952 and 1954, respectively, but if you’re using them to follow Himes’s life story chronologically, you should read them in reverse order. The Third Generation’s Taylor family is a thinly veiled rendering of Himes’s own in the early 20th century. As Himes’s father did, William Taylor teaches blacksmithing at various Black colleges in the South. He clashes often with his fair-skinned wife, Lillian, who resorts to what John A. Williams describes, in his introduction to a later edition of the novel, as “stinging, emotional, racial outbursts” at her husband that include denigrating his darker skin. The intense, sometimes violent friction between the Taylors is exacerbated by the Jim Crow segregationist practices of the era, even in the Midwest, where the Taylors eventually migrate with their three sons. Charles, the youngest and most sensitive, is Himes’s alter ego: He falls down an elevator shaft while working as a janitor, sustaining several broken bones and a broken vertebra, injuries from which he would never fully recover (an ordeal that Himes also experienced), then drops out of Ohio State University and becomes acquainted with the Cleveland underworld.