Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 39

Cotton Contes to Harlem:
The Novel, the Film
and the Critics
Chester Himes, the prolific African-American novelist, earned a
considerable literary reputation for his fictional works. Born in
Missouri in 1909, Himes, who was sent to prison in 1929 for armed
robbery, began writing fiction while incarcerated. It was during his
imprisonment that he wrote his first "crime story." Some of his early
works were published in the Pittsburgh Courier, Bronzeman, Abbott’s
Monthly Magazine and Esquire. His decision to write detective
fiction was a natural outgrowth of his exposure to violence and tough
characters, but this choice was also a way for him to further his
literary career by writing within a popular genre. During the latter
part of his career and his years of expatriation in Europe, which
began with his migration to France in 1953, Himes focused his
literary talent on the detective genre. In 1956, Himes had been
encouraged to further his writing of detective fiction by Marcel
Duhamel, who suggested that Himes submit his work for publication
in Gallimard's "La Serie Noire" (Muller xiii-xiv). Himes's notoriety
in France often rivaled his reputation in the United States.
Influenced by Dashiell Hammett, Himes was described in the
London Sunday Times as the "writer of the toughest crime stories in
print," a quote which has been used by Vintage Crime Editions to
promote reissues of the majority of Himes’s detective novels. Like
Himes, Hammett had also been incarcerated but for radically
different reasons and for only a brief period (Layman 222). For the
most part, Himes's detective fiction was set in Harlem, a location
which offered Himes numerous artistic possibilities for exhibiting
realism and satiric humor.
Himes wrote nine detective novels: For Love of Imabelle (1957),
which earned him the 1958 "Grand Prix" for the best detective novel
of the year. The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), The
Big Gold Dream (1960), All Shot Up (1960), Cotton Comes to Harlem
(1965), The Heat's On (1966), Run Man Run (1966), and Blind Man
with a Pistol (1969). Three of Himes’s detective novels have been
made into films, most recently. For Love of Imabelle as A Rage in