Maceo, raised and anchored by his grandparents in a powerful, extended family, seems to be successfully walking the line between college baseball on one side and the violent, dead-end world of most of his companions on the other. Even the fact that Felicia Bennett, a brilliant student at the University of California at Berkeley and the one girl he has really loved, now belongs to Billy Crane—a rising drug dealer and Maceo’s best friend from boyhood—doesn’t appear to have knocked Maceo off his axis.
But when Billy is murdered and Felicia—the chief suspect—disappears, all that changes. Neither his loving grandfather’s rough wisdom nor the crashed dreams that deface the neighborhood can deflect Maceo from what seems to be the suicidal course of finding Felicia and proving her innocent. And because of Tramble’s extraordinary ability to put us inside the skin of this smart, slight young man in his early 20s, we get aboard with grim eagerness for a ride that has to be strictly downhill.
At one point, Maceo is standing outside his grandfather’s bar with a nurse named Alixe who holds out the possibilities of love and escape. She asks him if he—as she does—always feels alone, even in a crowd. Before he can answer, a group of his friends—mostly thugs and dealers, including his other best boyhood pal, Holly —stumble out of the bar, “drunk on kinship. The laughter in their words was heavy with their own heroics, the retold stories of spectacular drug deals, enemies beat down, and police outsmarted. I watched them for a moment, feeling the aloneness Alixe had just mentioned. There was a part of Holly that despite our friendship I could not or would not touch.”
“The Dying Ground” is the first in a new series of Strivers Row quality paperbacks, named after a street in Harlem where high achievers gathered. If the rest of the new authors live up to Tramble’s awesome talent, it should become quite a neighborhood.
Chester Himes, and Other Biographies
CHESTER HIMES: A Life, by James Sallis (Walker)
In 1955, the same year his novel “The Primitive” was published, 46-year-old Chester Himes landed a job as a night porter at a Horn & Hardart automat in Manhattan. He wasn’t slumming or searching for material: Despite the fact that he had already published several well-reviewed novels, many short stories and essays, and also had considerable mechanical and craftsman skills passed on from his father, this was the only job he could get.
As James Sallis shows us again and again in his splendid new biography, which builds on previous studies and adds important layers of his own research and critical acumen, part of the problem was Himes himself—a man who could be charming (especially to women) but who more often than not bristled at any hint of criticism, favoritism or racism.
Before he left America for good in the late 1950s for Europe (where he found fame and some degree of fortune as the author of a series of popular detective stories, including “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” featuring tough black cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, which opened the door for the current likes of Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips and Robert Skinner as well as Sallis, who writes the excellent Lew Griffin series), Himes had virtually written, talked and acted himself out of the literary sweepstakes. As Sallis says:
“In contemporary American culture where the writer becomes ever more marginal, it’s important to recall just how marginal a writer like Himes, a black ex-convict writing novels on themes and in manners no one seemed prepared to confront, was. Himes stood apart from America’s bounty long before he departed from America itself.”
In retrospect, Himes’ rejection by and of America appears almost preordained. His father, Joseph Sandy Himes, was the son of a slave who had taught him to be a blacksmith and a wheelwright, and who rose to teach these same skills in the land-grant Negro colleges that still existed in the South as a result of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Chester, born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Mo., watched as his father—constantly sniped at by a demanding, socially pretentious wife—slowly slid out of this respectable academic groove and sank into a diminishing series of menial laboring jobs in St. Louis and Cleveland. As his parents bickered and divorced, young Himes put on a facade of respectability himself—going to Ohio State University at Columbus by day and drinking, whoring and thieving by night.
Then, in 1928, the 19-year-old Himes robbed a home in Cleveland Heights and set off for a pawnshop in Chicago that he had heard was a reliable place to sell stolen jewelry. Instead, the pawnbroker called the police. Overnight, Himes changed his Columbus address and status: from an undergraduate at Ohio State University to a convict at Ohio State Penitentiary. “H. Bruce Franklin argues that all Himes’s achievements, even his existence as an author, came directly from his experience in prison,” Sallis tells us, quoting the author of a book on prison literature. In one of his early stories, Himes has a character wake from a dream: “And then suddenly Jack realized that he wasn’t a freshman in a nice old college, and he wasn’t in love with a pretty girl called Violet, that he didn’t even know such a girl, that he was just convict number 10012 in a dark, chilly cell, and he had eaten too many beans at supper.”
Himes spent eight years of a 20-year sentence in prison, paroled in 1936 to his mother’s custody. He had already sold several short stories to magazines as diverse as The Bronzeman and Esquire, and although Sallis says about them now that “swayback syntax peeps out from the corners of uncertain sentences, the cliches and commonplaces of received wisdom float to the top, a scab of sentimentality forms over them,” they also contain elements of the violence and rage that would make his novels such a bracing change from what some critics and readers perceived as the excessive gentility of the black fiction of the Harlem Renaissance.
His first novel, “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” started out to be a mystery set in the Los Angeles labor movement during the early years of World War II. After several years of being supported by various federal grants, admiring editors and a smart young wife, Himes had arrived in California in 1941, hoping to earn some screenwriting money. That never happened, but he saw enough of the blatant racism just beneath the city’s sunny surface to turn the book into a strong, bloody protest novel.
Published by Doubleday in 1945, “If He Hollers” set the tone for a lifetime of squabbles with publishers—over botched editing, failed promises, late or never-paid royalties. The reviews were generally strong (and a 20-year-old man who later called himself Malcolm X was among the book’s original admirers), but sales were poor. Himes was convinced that the publisher had sabotaged his efforts.
The prestigious house of Knopf accepted his largely autobiographical second novel, “Lonely Crusade,” with great expectations in 1947. Then came every author’s nightmare: On the morning of publication, after two big department stores and an important radio show canceled appearances at the last minute, Himes and Knopf knew they were in trouble. “ ‘Himes found himself in a position that few other American novelists have occupied,’ ” wrote one biographer quoted by Sallis. “ ‘He was being assaulted by communists, fascists, white racists, black racists, and practically every reviewer within those extremes.’ ”
Himes had ruined his marriage with bouts of drinking and womanizing. By the early 1950s, convinced he would never succeed as a writer in America, he was ready to leave for Paris, where other black writers and artists, including his friend Richard Wright, appeared to have found sanctuary.
“Surely it requires a certain acrobatics of both expectation and thought to envision finding a place in a foreign society when unable to forge such a place in one’s own,” Sallis says about Wright and Himes, but then goes on to paint a rich picture of their lives during that period—including a famous scene at Brasserie Lipp, witnessed by Himes, where Wright clashed with James Baldwin, a scene recreated to fine effect by John A. Williams in his classic novel “The Man Who Cried I Am.”
The chance to finally earn a living from his writing—and to reach the wide audience he wanted and thought he deserved—came when editor Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard persuaded Himes to write upscale but unpretentious pulp fiction for that publisher’s now-famous La Serie Noire. Himes later wrote:
“ ‘Get an idea,’ Marcel said. ‘Start with action, somebody does something—a man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor.…Make pictures.…We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what—only what they’re doing.…Don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages.’ ”
And it worked:
“Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side…Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.”
That’s how Himes introduced the world to his detectives— described as “tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary- looking dark-brown colored men,”
“plowhands in Sunday suits” and “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town”—in “A Rage in Harlem” (called “For Love of Imabelle” when it was first published in America). It was an immediate success, and Himes would write eight more books about the Harlem cops—moving from relative reality to a world of absurd violence where blind men fired pistols, cotton bales were stuffed with money and severed heads rolled down 125th Street. (The last one, “Plan B,” where Coffin Ed and Grave Digger become enemies, was finished by Michel Fabre and Robert Skinner and published in 1993).
“Himes had gotten the handle,” Sallis writes. “He’d started off writing for the French, giving his new public what he thought they wanted, peopling his Harlem with exotics, with figures so exaggerated and actions so unreal as to be cartoonlike.…The supposed lightness of what he was writing relieved him of what had become to him burdens—protest, high seriousness, autobiography—and offered in their stead a new freedom of imagination.”
The fame and money (although the latter was never really huge by today’s standards, even with the subsequent movie sales) made Himes’s last years in France, England and Spain (where he died in 1984) much more pleasant than his time in America. Also of great importance in this was his second wife, Lesley, a British woman with what seems to have been amazingly deep wells of love and forgiveness. “One forever wonders what might have happened had Himes’s books been published with proper timeliness,” Sallis writes, thinking about the success of black writers who came after him. “But Chester was always there at the station too early, taking the train alone.”
Sallis’s book achieves that perfect biographer’s balance between admiration and honesty; he quotes with approval a reviewer’s comments that one volume of Himes’ autobiography was a “catalogue of misogyny, grievance and self-aggrandizement” with some justice. And although he never met Himes, Sallis has collected enough printed and verbal evidence to state with conviction, “There was about him often a baffling passivity, a disengagement, that reminds us he spent formative adult years in prison and clashes oddly with the man’s obvious passion.”
I can attest to that; during a 1967 interview in London, I found Himes curiously protective and sparing of his words and himself, like a convict who puts his arms around his dinner to keep it from being invaded. I was miffed for a moment, but then I went back to his books and realized that he’d already had his say.
WILLEFORD, by Don Herron (Dennis McMillan Publications)
Here’s everything I thought I knew about Charles Willeford: Career Army guy who became a mystery writer late in life; had some critical success with “Miami Blues,” his first book about police Detective Hoke Moseley, in 1984, followed by increasing commercial success with three more Moseleys (“New Hope for the Dead,” “Sideswipe” and “The Way We Die Now”) and the movie version of “Miami Blues”; died at age 69 in 1988, before he could really enjoy it. After his death, a Black Lizard paperback version of his savage 1971 satire of the art world, “The Burnt Orange Heresy,” began to sell strongly; in 1993, a very dark crime novel titled “The Shark-Infested Custard” appeared. I also heard rumors of another Hoke Moseley novel, too depressing to be published because it began with the hero killing his two daughters.
Now, thanks to an affectionate but honest biography from two of Willeford’s longtime friends and advocates —writer-editor Don Herron and publisher Dennis McMillan, who specializes in gorgeous first editions—I know a lot more. I know that one of the most important and interesting writers of our time lived and worked in Florida and marked that territory as his own with an enduring spoor long before the current rage for Floridian crime fiction. He reviewed mysteries for the Miami Herald for 20 years, loved to discover new talent, and befriended and helped such writers as Joseph Hansen, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and James Crumley.
Herron found this undated notebook entry after Willeford’s death:
My work is one
long triumph
over my
limitations.
It’s fitting that the entry looks like a poem: Willeford’s first published works were poems, and all of his books—even the paperbacks he knocked out for a few hundred dollars—contain lines of dark poetry as evocative as any from the more celebrated writers of the noir persuasion. “Her pale skin had turned gradually to saffron, and then to golden maple,” he has art critic James Figueras say in “The Burnt Orange Heresy” about a high school teacher from Duluth who had come down to Palm Beach after having a cyst removed from the base of her spine. “The coccyx scar had changed from an angry red to gray and finally to slightly puckered grisaille. Our romance had passed through slightly similar shades and tints.” His favorite writers were Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller—and it’s not hard to imagine Willeford sharing their table in some heavenly bistro.
Willeford’s early biography reads like most of the other bleak, disjointed, virtually hopeless writers’ lifestarts chronicled by editor Robert Polito in his recent “American Noir” set for the Library of America (Willeford’s “Pick-up” is in Volume 2). Charles Ray Willeford III was born in Little Rock in 1919. His father died of tuberculosis when the son was 2 and his mother of the same disease when he was 8. “When you’re an orphan at the age of eight, you realize that you’re the next one to die,” he once told an interviewer. “Your vision of life is colored by reality rather than pipe dreams.”
His poverty-crippled years with his grandmother in Los Angeles, his adventures as a 14-year-old hobo and—most important—his discovery of a permanent home and family in the U.S. Cavalry in the Phillipines were covered in two attempts at autobiography—”Something About a Soldier” and “I Was Looking for a Street”—both of which Willeford kicked around in several forms (all detailed in Herron’s exhaustive bibliography). A lively correspondence in his last years between Willeford and an old Army buddy helps Herron fill out that period, showing how many of Willeford’s fictional characters and incidents came from his military days. Moving from horses to tanks, Willeford spent the last years of World War II serving under Gen. George Patton. Then he continued his Army career by writing English-language radio soap operas in Japan, and speeches, press releases and training manuals at bases from Newfoundland to San Francisco.
From Willeford’s early poems, novels published badly or never published at all, paperback Westerns and lurid sex novels with titles like “Wild Wives” and “Lust Is a Woman,” Herron traces Willeford’s writing career as it mostly ebbs but occasionally flows through the 1960s, when marriages and the other needs of life made him take on all sorts of literary hackwork. When Crown brought out “The Burnt Orange Heresy” in hardcover in 1971, the world probably wasn’t ready for this dazzling slice of prickly American noir pie. There followed a 10-year lull, as the author sustained himself with teaching and journalism. Herron makes a good point of comparing Willeford’s career to that of Chester Himes, the black mystery writer whose books produced occasional thunder and lightning, but no real rain of money during his lifetime.