Chester Himes
For Love of Imabelle
1957 (1971 reprint, Dell Publishing Co.)
I’m convinced that most crime fiction stories could be re-written as comedies with little to no change to the plot. Both forms find their meat in irony, bad judgement, mismatched lovers, human weakness, and people who go to extremes to get out of trouble. Perhaps most obvious though is that both crime and comedy often involve an unholy mix of two types of characters: idiots and villains.
Put an idiot and a villain together and a powder keg can result. Maybe the villain manipulates the idiot. Maybe the idiot takes on the villain despite being outclassed in craftiness. Maybe the villain IS an idiot, but he’s still smarter than this other lowlife. What happens next might be funny. Or deadly. Or both.
That’s my theory, at least. Don’t test me too hard on it. I haven’t been thinking on it for twenty years. In fact, I didn’t think about it much at all until I read this brilliant, sleazy, violent, and often laugh-out-loud pulp novel from Chester Himes. It’s all about dangerous men, one shady woman, a city full of predators, and one hopeless fool at the center of it all.
Humor and some real nastiness mix together here. They barge in on each other, but it’s always natural. Himes never oversells his comedy. It’s just there. It’s in the way that these sentences walk and breathe.
“Red-eyed patrol cars darted about like angry bugs, screaming to a stop, cops hitting flatfooted on the pavement, picking up every suspicious-looking character for the lineup. A black hoodlum had thrown acid in a black detective’s eyes and black asses were going to pay for it as long as black asses lasted.”
Meanwhile, he also offers what amounts to maybe a travelogue of 1950s Harlem. Himes knows the intersections and the train routes and the fire escapes. He portrays Harlem as a black urban Wild West. Anything can happen and a lot of what happens ain’t good. Still, it’s a place that’s as full of life and as it is sometimes full of death.
He opens chapter 16 with a wide view of the city and then zeroes in on Harlem, describing its place in the New York City landscape as “waves of gray rooftops [that] distort the perspective like the surface of a sea”. He then goes on:
“Below the surface, in the murky waters of the fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.
That is Harlem.”
The story: This idiot, Jackson, a country boy transplanted to the city, who has no business being involved with hardened crooks, gets swindled hard from the first paragraph. Jackson is our main character and Himes describes him at the beginning as “a short, black, fat man with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing”. Jackson is the furthest thing from a slick alpha type and he gets suckered into giving his hard-earned $1500 (in 1950s money) to a con man who’s convinced him that he knows how to bake cash in an oven so that when it comes out, the bills are all worth ten times more. Alexander Hamilton turns into Benjamin Franklin if you heat him up just right.
Jackson believes this because Jackson is a 28-year-old dork. He has no defense against tricksters or a beautiful woman, which brings me to his girlfriend, Imabelle, a “high yallah” looker who is out of his league.
She’s the one who leads Jackson to the con man, of course.
EVERYONE in the book knows that Imabelle is NOT Jackson’s friend except for Jackson. He’s too transfixed. Imabelle can’t do anything wrong. Her pretty face would never lie to him.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but the first chapter is fair game and that’s where we see that the oven scam ends when a US Marshal suddenly breaks down the door to put a stop to this brazen crime.
Everyone conveniently gets away except for a deeply confused and frightened Jackson. Jail is the scariest thing in the world to him so he offers a bribe. He doesn’t have the money to cover it (the oven-genius made off with everything he had), but he knows how he can steal it from his employer at the funeral home where he works. So he does and that launches the madness of the rest of the book.
Jackson’s journey to somehow repair this mess leads him to seek out his lookalike, but otherwise completely different, brother Goldy. The brother makes his living (and supports his addiction to cocaine + morphine speedballs) by walking the streets in a wig and nun’s habit and posing as a Sister of Mercy who collects coins for the church.
Jackson also crosses paths with two recurring characters in the Chester Himes literary universe, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, two black police detective partners on the Harlem beat. They aren’t on the take, but they’re hard-as-nails types. They’ve seen everything and it’s turned them into demons. Police brutality is just part of the job. Meanwhile, they aggressively look out for each other. They’re far from wholesome, but we trust them because they’re among the few characters in this world who don’t lie about who they are.
It adds up to a novel that hasn’t aged at all in 2022. The prose maintains a contemporary thump. The plot still lands plenty of solid haymakers. The characters are people that we will never stop seeing in our daily lives.
Idiots and villains. Turn on the news. Drive through busy traffic. You’ll see ’em everywhere.
The combination is still sometimes funny and sometimes deadly. Life can be both a comedy and a tragedy in the same day, in the same hour, in the same minute.
If you haven’t figured this out yet, Chester Himes has. Read him and get sad on one page and then laugh in the next one. As far as I’m concerned, it’s only through this combination that our world makes any sense at all.
Got into Homes during the lockdown – ALL SHOT UP from 1960 – absolutely the author for our day!
I definitely intend to cover more of his work!