The Heat's On by Chester Himes

It was laughter dripping wet
with tears. Coloured people's laughter.

It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls, “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse-Richard-Pryor-in-See-No-Evil-Hear-No-Evil moment). To address this ongoing and previously undiagnosed and therefore unconscious bias, and unrelated to my deep and abiding love of the writings of Everett (something I attribute to the vaguely ASD nature of some of his protagonists, which speaks to me as though of another long buried latent personality / developmental issue – or feature, which is less pejorative – of my own), I’ve followed the intertextuality (or jacket blurb – believe whichever suits your own ontological bias) flowing from other writers I admire, and have since discovered Ishmael Reed, Paul Beatty (just wow by the way) and Richard Wright (none of whose books have been reviewed as of writing this because reasons).

Are you suitably contextualised and therefore sitting comfortably? Lovely.

However, this is NOT the reason I read and love Chester Bomar Himes (and I do, no matter what a grumpy old me once wrote). That I put down to the devil-may-care attitude of my librarian mother, who, because I was too lazy* as a pre-teen and later teen to go down and actually choose books to read, would simply sweep up any new or recently added sci-fi & fantasy novels (including but certainly not limited to Anne McCaffrey, Piers Antony, Stephen Donaldson and Terry Pratchett), and more dangerously, crime novels to bring home for me to read at breakfasts and suppers when parents might not necessarily be sharing the table with me – and so would be less inclined to knock a book out of my hands on grounds of manners – and whereby interactions and aggravations with my big bro and lil sis would be prevented because I was just totally ignoring them. This was the way I was introduced to the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), the noir hard-boiled crime writers Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and the Harlem novels of Chester Himes.

I didn’t think she knew what sort of content she was providing me with at the time, given Himes’ Harlem was populated liberally with all sorts of racial pejoratives, but in retrospect I do wonder – I caught her dropping the N-bomb to my 3-year-old just this week by total 1950s rote-learning accident when doing eeney-meeney-miney-mo to pick a picture book at bedtime. I wasn’t walking around aged 12 talking about high yeller bitches or cursing out white police officers, so maybe she was doing me a solid by assuming I wasn’t the kind of arsehole to knowingly make racist remarks in public. But I knew the N-bomb was bad (and bad-ass for a white Welsh 12-year-old in Dyfed, circa 1990 to know what it meant) long before I got my grubby little hands on a copy of the first Snoop Dogg album or Naughty By Nature on bootleg cassette tape in 1993, so it was illicit and exciting. Whereas Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were just monstrously different and dangerous and brimming with violence. And they were the good guys.

The Heat’s On is something like book 6 of the Harlem cycle, and is the first one in which I can clearly remember one of the two detectives properly losing their shit. After a series of events beginning with the Bizarro World opposites of a giant albino junkie escaping arrest and a dwarf pusher dying in custody, and ending in their suspension, Grave Digger is shot when following a hunch and the reader, as well as partner Coffin Ed, assumes he’s bitten the big one. Ed starts rampaging through the hot, sticky Harlem streets to find answers, a genuinely terrifying embodiment of rage (armed rage too). Normally, as a reader I found for even these unknowably different men a measure of empathy because of the nature of their honour, their protection of the (relatively) innocent and (moderately) defenceless inhabitants of Harlem, their stoic acceptance that the price of their brand of justice is the burden of their white colleagues’ racist disparagement, but an enraged Coffin Ed is pretty discomfiting. But this short burst of unfettered emotion aside, Himes’ often sparse prose and the joyous lack of exposition still manage to conjure magnificently those steamy Harlem nights, filled with the sounds of city life, the crack of a revolver fired in anger, the horns of tired cabbies, a sudden and piercing siren, a scream, and then silence. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, despite any curmudgeonly charges that I’m overbalancing against the weight of my white privilege, are my two favourite bad good guy cops, beyond doubt.



*Also embarrassed – there’s no telling what my mother had been telling the old gossips of Milford Haven library about me and I had absolutely no desire to find out

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