ENG - In Harlem nobody knows Chester Himes

The 110th street that borders Central Park on the north is now called Central Park North. This is where the Democratic politician Casper Holmes lived in All Shot Up. From his window, he could see the children of the black bourgeoisie of Harlem ice-skating in the park. I interview passersby. They are interested when I tell them about Himes but have never heard of him.

I continue towards the north of Manhattan. In Washington Heights, Edgecombe Drive (now Edgecombe Avenue) overlooks the Harlem River and the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to the east. This is where two historic buildings of Harlem - the 409 and the 555 - are located, the latter also known as Roger Morris.

These two buildings are quite present in several novels of Himes: in The Crazy Kill, "[Johnny Perry] and Dulcy, along with other well-heeled Harlem pimps, madams and numbers bankers, lived on the sixth floor of the flashy Roger Morris apartment house”. In The Big Gold Dream: "Without hesitation, Dummy entered the ornate lobby of the Roger Morris Apartment House, better known as 555. In its day, it had been a very pretentious apartment dwelling for upper income whites, but now it was occupied for the most part by successful colored racketeers, jazz musicians, madams and current prize fighters."

Today, like the 409, the Roger Morris has lost much of its grandeur. The building has become middle class. The beautiful, somewhat weathered lobby remains. I speak with a resident: he does not know Himes.

Melvin Van Peebles wrote in 1993: “Despite the fact that Chester, this literary giant, had been publishing essays, short stories, and novels for over a quarter of a century, I, a black American, had grown up, gone to college and never once heard his name mentioned in the myriad literature courses I had taken. This spoke volumes about the walls of prejudice and the barriers of racism.” (Preface to Yesterday will make you cry).

New York, November 2011

ENG - Ataúd Ed Johnson y Sepulturero Jones

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Ataúd Ed Johnson (Ataúd = coffin) and Sepulturero Jones (Sepulturero = grave digger) are the names of the two inspectors in the Spanish translations of Himes’ crime novels or his Harlem domestic novels as he used to call them.

If we look at the Spanish titles of these novels, we can see they have been translated very faithfully from the titles in the American editions. They therefore do not take up the puns of the original French editions in the Série noire collection.

Original Himes' title	Title in the Série noire	Title of the subsequent American edition	Title of the Spanish edition
The Five Cornered Square	La reine des pommes	1. For Love of Imabelle (1957).  2. A Rage in Harlem (1965)	Por amor a Imabelle
If Trouble Was Money	Il pleut des coups durs	The Real Cool Killers	La banda de los musulmanes
A Jealous Man Can’t Win	Couché dans le pain	The Crazy Kill	El loco asesinato
The Big Gold Dream	Tout pour plaire	The Big Gold Dream	El gran sueño de oro
Don’t Play With Death	Imbroglio négro	All Shot up	Todos muertos
Be Calm	Ne nous énervons pas	The Heat’s On	Empieza el calor
Back to Africa	Retour en Afrique	Cotton Comes to Harlem	Algodón en Harlem

Translating Himes is never easy. For the blog Mis detectives favoritos, "it is a

challenge to translate the language of Harlem into Spanish. Some translators keep the original nicknames of the inspectors, others translate them. The translation of Bruguera (Por Amor a Imabelle, 1980) has not aged very well because it used the slang of the time (and slang, which evolves more quickly than the common language, always ages worse) ".

The blog Cuaderno de trabajo presents Himes as follows: "Chester Himes is a North American writer who was very well known in his time and who is now a bit out of fashion and little present in journalistic references." We can but subscribe to this comment.

We saw in the article Cidade escaldante; What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes’ The Heat’s On? that Himes, in his position of author working on commission for the Série noire collection (with a 220 page imposed format, for example) had also accepted – or anticipated – the formulation of titles conforming to the line or the style of the collection: the example of Ne nous fâchons pas (Be Calm), later renamed The Heat's On, is the most striking. Between the French title and the title of the subsequent American edition, we are dealing with two types of puns and humor (traditional French vs hardboiled American). The difference also tells us about the distance between the language of Himes and that of his translations.

 Unlike the titles of the Série noire, the titles of the Spanish editions do not take the risk of the pun: a pity because The Five-Cornered Square – the  title given by Himes to the manuscript of the novel later titled For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem – with its pun on “square” (naïve), had given in French a very good La reine des pommes.

See the blogs

El blogo de Juan Carlos

Cuaderno de trabajo

Mis detectives favoritos 

ENG - Cotton Comes To Harlem: the peak of MacGuffin

The MacGuffin was not invented nor coined by Hitchcock [1] but he undoubtedly theorized it in a humorous way: "A MacGuffin – you see it in most films about spies – is the thing the spies are after. […]. It is always called the thing the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care." It is found in a number of other novels and films, for example, in the excellent Kiss Me Deadly, by Robert Aldrich, adapted very freely (fortunately!) from the novel by Mickey Spillane, A MacGuffin is an element, often material, which is supposed to be an issue in the story and, more often than not, a pretext for its development. One inevitably thinks of the Maltese falcon in the novel of the same name. Himes could not do without having recourse to it: it is, for example, the false mining title in A Rage In Harlem, Val’s secret in The Crazy Kill, Alberta’s money in The Big Gold Dream… 

It is however in Cotton Comes To Harlem that it is used in the most accomplished way. In this novel, one MacGuffin contains another: in the cotton ball is hidden the money that the Harlemites gave, in all gullibility, to the false Reverend O'Malley to organize their release and their return to Africa, the land of their ancestors.

The henchmen of Colonel Calhoun, leader of the Back To the Southland Movement steal the cotton ball. It then passes into the hands of an old black ragpicker, Uncle Bud, the only one who realizes the dream of returning to Africa where he will buy "a hundred women of average quality" with the money hidden there. Dancer Billy buys the cotton for her cotton dance at the Cotton Club (!). The two inspectors finally seize it, after a chase punctuated by an impressive number of corpses. They will discretely compensate the inhabitants of Harlem, robbed by black scammers and white racists.

It is partly for the magnificent use of the MacGuffin that Cotton Comes to Harlem is the culmination of the detective form in Himes, while constituting a significant step in the creation of a new genre, more political and fantastic.

Himes had a clear insight: "It is a good novel, probably the best of my detective novels". "My last book on the Cops and the Cotton is entirely devoted to the racial problem and the living conditions in Harlem and I make my inspectors express what they – and the other blacks – feel in Harlem" [2]. On the one hand, there is "a mastery of the storytelling which joins the classic tradition of the black novel, on the other, an intrigue whose historical and political issues are clearly mentioned. Finally, a writing more brilliant than ever, but now more subject to the necessities of storytelling. The complexity of the organization is particularly evident in the careful watchmaking of cotton. A cotton ball is lost by a truck; this cotton ball is found by an old black man by the name of Cotton Bud; simultaneously, an advertisement is posted in Colonel Calhoun's room "looking for cotton ball"; Cotton Bud sells the cotton bale to a ragpicker; an employee of the latter, Josh, offers Colonel Calhoun to sell him the cotton ball; the ragman's warehouse watchdog is poisoned and then Josh is murdered: the cotton is gone ... "[3]

[1] The term "MacGuffin" was coined by a screenwriter Hitchcock worked with named Angus MacPhail, according to Donald Spoto in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock : Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures.
See Hitchcock and MacGuffin

[2] These two references are found in the second volume of Himes' autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p. 277 and p. 279.

[3] Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013, p. 142.