No other writer has ever immortalized Harlem, the cultural and spiritual mecca of Black America, as masterfully as Chester Himes. The dean of African-American crime fiction, who died 40 years ago, is most famous for the “Harlem Cycle” of novels featuring detectives “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Gravedigger” Jones, and was hailed as “one of among the towering figures of the black literary tradition” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., America’s foremost scholar of black literature.

Born in Missouri in 1909 to a middle-class family, Himes’ childhood was disrupted by frequent family moves. After enrolling at Ohio State University in 1926, he turned to bootlegging, gambling, and hustling. Later, convicted of armed robbery in 1928, he served seven and a half years of a 20-year sentence in the state penitentiary. In prison, where he entered at the age of 19, he picked up his pen for the first time.

After parole in 1936, he devoted himself to writing. His first novel If He Hollers Let Him Go was published in 1945 but met with little success, as did the four other naturalistic novels he wrote next. Then, following the lead of fellow African-American novelists Richard Wright and James Baldwin, in 1953, at the age of 44, Himes left the US for Paris in search of greater racial freedom and more career opportunities. Ironically, although the fiction for which he is best remembered is set almost exclusively in Harlem, it was France, not America, that gave him the intellectual and artistic freedom to write and, perhaps more importantly, the existential freedom to be the man which he wanted. to be

Paris was undoubtedly Himes’ personal and artistic salvation. At the suggestion of an editor from his French publisher, Himes wrote a detective story set in Harlem in 1958 (published in the US as A Rage in Harlem), which won the award. Grand Prix Police, France’s most prestigious prize for crime fiction and was followed by seven more. Although written in English, all but one of the novels originally appeared in French.

In the Harlem cycle, Johnson and Jones, known by their sepulchral names, are marked by battle, avenging angels make the unjust world a fairer and more hospitable place. They may punch and shoot with impunity, but they act fundamentally out of love for their people.