This is a guest post by Thomas E. Ricks.

Following Bill Barol’s suggestion, I dove into The Real Cool Killers, one of the “Harlem Detectives” novels of Chester Himes. The esteemed Barol (author of Thanks for Killing Me) made the recommendation after reading my earlier appreciation of Himes. So did the esteemed Will Noah.

Two things struck me on this go-round. First, the extraordinary depiction of violence. In the opening scene of Real Cool Killers, Himes has an angry bartender swing a razor-sharp hatchet at a man trying to knife him. “The severed arm in its coat sleeve, still clutching the knife, sailed through the air, sprinkling the nearby spectators with drops of blood, landed on the linoleum tile floor, and skidded beneath the table of a booth.”

Second was the lush writing. As in Run Man Run, Himes lovingly describes the people and places of Harlem. At a Black gay bar, one of Himes’ Black police detectives, Grave Digger Jones, sees “a chocolate dandy in a box-backed double-breasted tuxedo sporting a shoestring dubonnet bow.” Jones questions the bar’s pianist-owner a bit harshly, provoking the bartender to “put his hands on his hips” and say, “And just what can we do for you, you mean rude grumpy man?”

I also read another of the Harlem detective novels, A Rage in Harlem. I didn’t like it quite as much, but still reveled in Himes’ lively style. Consider, for example, the rhythm of this opening of a chapter: “The black sedan came up so fast it skidded to a stop slantwise, and the two big loose-jointed colored detectives wearing shabby gray overcoats and misshapen snap-brim hats hit the pavement on each side in a flat-footed lope.” Lots of S’s and P’s in there.

Himes has fun with adjectives later in the same novel when a body begins to slide out of a hearse being used as an escape car: “The back doors were flung wide and the throat-cut corpse came one-third out.”

He also enriches his language with an occasional dollop of dialect. “I ain’t getting biggety,” a man protests to his captors.

Himes also offers a skewed, slightly comic take on the larger white world outside Harlem. At one point a white police sergeant asks if the police chief, also white, of course—this was published in 1959—is still on the scene. “Yeah, he’s still hanging around,” another cop responds.

“Well, that’s his job,” the sergeant laconically replies. Again, as I said in my first installment, this rivals Mark Twain.

A Rage in Harlem also has a character, a Black man named Goldy, who disguises himself as a nun and begs in the streets. One observer comments, “Impersonating a nun. Everybody got their racket, ain’t they?” It reminded me of the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie, Sister Act, in which a Black lounge singer hides out in a Harlem convent and dresses as a nun.