“Death always doubles off”

The Crazy Kill, by Chester Himes

Over Christmas I read an article which quoted PD James. She talked about how the pleasure of crime fiction was the knowledge that by the end of the book order would be restored. Bad things happen, but good wins out. The world is, ultimately, just.

That’s true of some crime fiction, but not of any crime fiction I enjoy reading. It’s not true of Chester Himes. In the 1950s Harlem of Himes’ novels the bad guys generally do get punished, but so do several other people along the way and there’s no restoration of order because there was never any order to begin with.

Here’s the opening of The Crazy Kill:

It was four o’clock, Wednesday morning, July 14th, in Harlem, U.S.A. Seventh Avenue was as dark and lonely as haunted graves.
A colored man was stealing a bag of money.

The bag is full of change. It’s on the seat of a double-parked car, just near a cop on patrol and a grocery store manager who’s opening up and will be back in a moment to pick up the bag and take it inside. Problem is, a bag doesn’t have to be left alone long in Harlem to go missing.

Nearby at a wake Reverent Short is leaning out of a first-story window watching proceedings. He leans too far out, falls and ends up in a large basket of bread sitting outside the bakery below.

The Reverend’s fine, but when he returns to the wake he does so with what he claims to be a vision. He saw a dead man, and when the partygoers go outside they find right in that same bread basket the body of Valentine Haines, stabbed through the heart with the knife still jutting out.

Before long everyone’s wondering who killed Val. Was it Johnny, local gangster and Val’s business partner? Was it Dulcy, Johnny’s girl and Val’s sister? What about Chink Charlie? He’s got the hots for Dulcy and he owns a knife just like the one sticking out of the corpse. Everyone says Val had no real enemies, but there seem to be a lot of people who might be in the frame for his death.

The Reverend’s throwing out accusations and stirring up trouble; Dulcy doesn’t seem to mind Chink Charlie paying her a little attention; and Johnny’s a jealous man with a violent temper. If things carry on as they are Val’s body won’t be the only one with a knife sticking out of it. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are soon on the scene and applying pressure.

The questioning was conducted in a soundproof room without windows on the first floor. This room was known to the Harlem underworld as the “Pigeon Nest.” It was said that no matter how tough an egg was, if they kept him in there long enough he would hatch out a pigeon.

I won’t say more about the plot. It’s only there because without it nothing would happen. As ever with Himes the real substance is in the characters, and in the sense of Harlem life. Johnny is a successful gambler and gets a lot of respect, even from the police. He wears sharp suits and drives a fancy car. The Reverend says, and believes, that he’s sworn off all alcohol, but he drinks a nerve tonic of his own devising which is a mix of hard drugs and harder liquor.

This is a Harlem filled with gambling joints, whorehouses, the Holy Roller Church where the Reverend preaches and where the congregation roll around on the floor when the spirit moves them. It’s Summer, it’s hot as hell, and tempers are running high. The only place there’s any relief is in the bars and gambling joints where people like Johnny spend their time:

Inside it was cool, and so dark he had to take off his sun glasses on entering. The unforgettable scent of whisky, whores and perfume filled his nostrils, making him feel relaxed.

In a sense this is Damon Runyon territory. It’s a different decade, a different part of New York and everyone’s black, but otherwise he’d recognise a lot of this. Just look at the names some of the characters have: Chink Charlie, Baby Sis, Reverend Short, Valentine Haines, Deep South, Mamie Pullen, Dulcy, Johnny, Pigmeat, Poor Boy, Doll Baby, Alamena, and of course Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed themselves.

The difference though is that Chester Himes doesn’t write comic novels. His characters have none of the loveable nature of Runyon’s rogues. Take away Runyon’s humour, and his affection, and the milieu isn’t so different. Damon Runyon after all portrays a world in which people scheme, cheat, take crazy risks and kill. Runyon does it with a laugh. Himes’ books have plenty of laughs, but hollow ones, and you can smell his characters’ sweat.

There’s always a question with novels forming part of a series as to where one should start. With the Harlem cycle the answer has to be at the beginning with A Rage in Harlem. The answer definitely shouldn’t be The Crazy Kill. It’s solid, but probably the weakest of the three I’ve read so far.

Jones and Ed barely feature, which isn’t vastly problematic as Himes’ interest is always more in his criminals than his detectives, but their presence sets up expectations about the kind of novel this is which aren’t quite realised. The plot, clearly intentionally, makes very little sense which is fine as Himes is all about the atmosphere but does make what happens all a little random (which again is clearly intentional, but even so is a little unsatisfying).

Although The Crazy Kill features a crime, and detectives who solve that crime, it’s not really a detective novel. At the end I found myself wondering if it would have been better with a little more detecting, or with none at all. It’s messing with Mr. In-Between that causes the problems there are here.

In writing this I found two reviews online by other bloggers, here and here. That first link has two extremely well chosen quotes and so I’d strongly suggest at least following that to get a little more of a taste of Himes’ prose. Otherwise, if you’ve read the first two Himes and enjoyed them then you should absolutely read this, but if you’re not already a fan this won’t be the one to convert you.

The cover up above is from the Vintage Crime edition, which I don’t particularly recommend as it has absurdly large margin spaces. There’s a Penguin Modern Classics edition now available, and if I were buying this now that’s what I would get. For the curious there’s also apparently a biography of Himes written by James Sallis, which makes it rather fitting that this review follows my review of Drive.

On a very final note, I found two alternative covers for this online, which I thought I’d share because they’re just great examples of vintage cover art. Particularly the first.

Keep cool, fool

The Real Cool Killers, by Chester Himes

I read (and wrote about, here) the first of Chester Himes’ Harlem detective novels back in March 2009. It was a larger than life portrait of 1950s Harlem that showed it as an absurdist abyss of poverty and violence. It was lively, funny and ultimately very angry. I liked it.

Himes didn’t just write genre fiction, in fact he didn’t even mostly write genre fiction, but it’s the Harlem detective novels for which he’s (not very well) remembered. That’s probably unfair, but serious works about the impact of racism on labour relations just aren’t as easy a sell as fast moving crime novels with oversized guns and frequently comic mayhem.

Well, it’s a year and a half later and here I am reading another of his genre novels, and I still haven’t read one of the serious ones. The funniest thing about The Real Cool Killers though is that for all it’s lurid excess and mordant humour it comes with a sucker punch. It’s hard hitting, exciting and grotesque but by the end of it all it makes real points about Harlem life. It’s a serious novel after all.

Here’s the setup. A white cola salesman named Galen is in a black bar in Harlem watching the locals dance to the jukebox. A black man takes exception to Galen’s presence and tries to cut his throat with a knife. The bartender protects Galen, and ends up cutting the knifeman’s arm off with a short-handled axe.

Galen leaves the bar, but outside gets chased down the street by another black man named Sonny who’s firing a pistol after him. Soon after, Galen is killed, shot dead in front of a teenage street gang called the Real Cool Moslems (none of whom are moslem). It looks like Galen was killed by Sonny, but Sonny’s pistol only fired blanks – he was high and looking to give someone a scare. That means there was at least a third person after Galen. It also means it really wasn’t Galen’s night.

By the time Harlem detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turn up there’s a huge crowd gathered. Matters get out of hand with the teen gang. Coffin Ed opens fire and kills an unarmed gang member and shoots a bystander in the leg. It’s chaos, it’s Harlem in the 1950s and it sets the tone for a novel the entire story of which takes place in just one night.

It takes a while for the police to realise that Sonny’s gun wasn’t loaded, so when he escapes from custody they set up a dragnet over the whole area and start house to house searches for him. Nothing can get in or out. Meanwhile, Grave Digger carries out his own investigation using his local contacts and street knowledge. He has to work alone. Coffin Ed is under suspension for his two shootings and it turns out that might be for the best because as Grave Digger digs deeper he starts to realise that Coffin Ed’s own daughter may be somehow involved.

I have to admit, I rather groaned when I found out that Coffin Ed’s daughter might be involved. Even in the 1950s it must already have been a cliché. Thankfully it’s the only one and it’s at least used well.

The novel follows two main strands. One is Coffin Ed kicking down doors and beating up anyone who might know anything, determined to find out what went down. The other follows the Real Cool Moslems – black teenagers who dress up as fake arabs and who luck into hiding Sonny after he gets away from the police. Both strands get steadily darker as the night goes on. Coffin Ed finds out that there were good reasons for Galen to have enemies. Sonny finds that he might have been better off in police custody than the gang’s as their leader Sheik starts thinking of ways to amuse himself with his captive.

This is the opposite of the traditional cosy crime novel. Here the criminals aren’t cold blooded, they’re hyped up on drugs, furious or just plain malicious for the sake of it. They act on impulse and try to cover up afterwards and generally they’re not particularly competent. Grave Digger too is no Sherlock Holmes. He’s not stupid but his way of finding out whodunnit mostly involves beating people up until they tell him what they know. The whole picture is one of savage brutality and casual violence. The only white faces present are the police and the occasional visitor from outside Harlem come to enjoy an illicit thrill that they can’t get back in their part of town. Here, a white club goer complains about Grave Digger roughing up a witness in front of him, and Grave Digger responds:

“I’m just a cop,” Grave Digger said thickly. “If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.”

Grave Digger is no politer to other black men. Later that night he returns to the diner where Galen’s evening began. A couple of seats are cleared for him. The men previously in those seats object until they realise they’re dealing with a cop.

Both rose with alacrity, picked up their glasses and vacated the stools, grinning at Grave Digger obsequeiously.
“Don’t show me your teeth,” Grave Digger snarled. “I’m no dentist. I don’t fix teeth. I’m a cop. I’ll knock your teeth out.”
The men doused their grins and slunk away.

Grave Digger spends the whole novel angry. What’s fuelling that anger though is something more than the lies he’s told and the ugliness of what led to Galen’s death. What really makes Grave Digger angry is Harlem itself. It’s a place born of inequality, a place where he’s assured by someone that Galen wouldn’t have been killed for sleeping with a man’s wife because sleeping with a white man doesn’t count as infidelity – it’s just an easy way to bring some more money into the family home. Harlem is the zoo and the whites are keepers or visitors, all of them wondering why the animals behave so badly while making sure they don’t get out of their cages.

As the novel reached the end, the pointlessness of it all became inescapable. This is a book in which a fair number of people die and in which a lot of others go down for some serious time. It’s all meaningless. It’s just another night in Harlem and that’s the sucker punch I talked about at the opening of this blog entry. Everything that’s happens during the long Harlem night is exciting, it’s hardboiled, but it’s also futile and ugly and Himes wants the reader to know that. As dawn breaks the tone shifts and it’s suddenly apparent that all this adventure adds up to is some ruined lives and some ended ones. Crime novels are exciting to read, but Himes wants the reader to know that living in one isn’t nearly as entertaining.

Uptown in Harlem, the sun was shining on the same drab scene it illuminated every other morning at eleven o’clock. No one missed the few expendable colored people being held on various charges in the big new granite skyscraper jail on Centre Street that had replaced the old New York City tombs.

The Real Cool Killers

Assimilation as revolution

Incognegro, by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece

Incognegro is a graphic novel written by Mat Johnson, inspired by the birth of his twin sons, one of whom looks white and the other black. In Johnson’s own words, taken from an interview here:

Incognegro is about a mixed race Negro journalist who looks white who investigates lynchings in the 1930s. The story is about when his own brother is framed for a murder, and he must go Incognegro to solve the crime and free him.

Carrying cover blurbs by Paul Theroux and George Pelecanos, Incognegro then is a number of things: it’s a detective story, an adventure story, a tale of daring exploits. But what it also is of course is a story about one of the uglier periods of American history, about the way in which concepts of race are constructed and about quite how artificial these distinctions can be – yet still real enough to get a person killed.

Incognegro opens with a flashback, it’s protagonist Zane Pinchback (the famed Incognegro) is recounting how he does his work. It’s the early 1930s and nobody’s interested in stories about lynchings anymore, so he makes it interesting by attending in person, masquerading as a white journalist and taking incriminating details of those involved. Zane can pass as white because, in the language of the time, he’s a high yellow – pale skinned – and when he’s dressed in a suit people assume he’s white because they can’t imagine he’d be black.

Put another way, he’s taken as white because his skin’s not so black as to make what he is obvious, and because he changes his own context by how he speaks and dresses. In this opening segment, when the lynch mob realise nobody knows who he came with, they suddenly understand that he’s a black man, the only thing that stopped them seeing it before was the impossibility of the concept of a black man in a suit at a lynching.

The opening scenes do something else, too, they show a lynching. They show what that term really means, the full horror. The victim is ritually humiliated, his body desecrated, men line up to have their photos taken with the corpse. It’s ugly stuff, and it’s clear if discovered that Zane will be tortured and killed.

After these opening scenes, the scene switches back to those he’s recounting the incident too – friends in Black Harlem, well dressed and sophisticated people, part of the Harlem Renaissance. Zane works for a black newspaper, his friends are black too, and in the main their concerns are the same as those of the whites. Zane struggles for promotion, too good at his current job for his own good, his best friend Carl is good looking and stylish, but has nothing of Zane’s seriousness – instead making his money with card games and rent parties. They drink cocktails, worry about settling down, and Carl being another high yellow sometimes they go to white hotels and enjoy the good life that they’d be denied if the whites knew what they were.

I’m not going to go into the plot too much, Zane heads South on one last lynching story, his brother potentially facing the mob, and Carl joins him hoping that when Zane gets promoted he can take his job and so impress his fiancée. When they reach his brother’s town, Zane poses as a senior member of the Klan visiting to check things are being done right, a ploy that soon gets undermined when a real senior Klansman turns up in town with the same purpose…

The story of Incognegro is a good one, and at times surprisingly brutal. Mat Johnson makes this an exciting read, but it’s also (and rightly) a disturbing one. When things go wrong, they go wrong in very nasty ways. The stakes couldn’t be higher, Zane’s brother’s life, his own, Carl’s. The whites in town are already willing to kill, what will they do to a black man they discover is pretending to be one of them? A man who by his existence subverts their beliefs?

Johnson packs a lot into his 135 pages, including some still very relevant observations. I can’t reproduce the relevant panels, but here’s Zane reflecting on how he does what he does:

Race is a strategy.
The rest is just people acting. Playing roles.
That’s what white folks never get. They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think that they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical.
They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal, and that everyone else is an odd deviation from form.
That’s what makes them so easy to infiltrate.

And if you think he exaggerates, I once had a flaming argument with a girlfriend who was highly offended when I commented on her accent one day – she said she didn’t have an accent, she was middle class English, I had an accent sure and other people did but her’s was the baseline. She was serious. And I suspect few white people think of a hamburger or steak frites as ethnic food.

A graphic novel of course isn’t just words and story, it’s just as much (often more) the art. Here Warren Pleece brings a clean and spare black and white style, and black and white in this context makes style part of the point. You can tell some characters are black by their facial structure and the use of shading, but some you just have to know what they are through the story, if you weren’t told then as a reader you couldn’t tell.

Pleece has an attractive and simple technique, bringing uncluttered imagery which complements Johnson’s words without distracting from them. Pleece is particularly good bringing out facial expressions with just a few strokes, and I’d be interested in following up his work with other writers. Here’s some examples, taken from Incognegro, that I was able to find online:

Overall then, this is an intelligent and thought provoking work, well written and drawn, and an excellent introduction if one is needed to the graphic novel as a form. This could have been done as a novel (Walter Mosley, who provides a back cover blurb, has addressed similar territory), but the art underlines the argument and is a pleasure in its own right. It also enjoys (if that’s the right word) a definite continuing relevance, because although while as I write this America has its first black president, it’s fair to say that the race people say you belong to still determines much of the life you can expect to have.

Incognegro

Imaro

Following the extraordinarily dark How the Dead Live, I had planned to immediately start the next volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. I found, however, that I needed a break, some light relief, something where I wouldn’t be thinking about the nature of existence and what it means to be human. I chose Imaro, by a narrow margin, it came very close to being an Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar novel instead…

Imaro is a sword and sorcery novel by African-American writer Charles R. Saunders. Written firmly in the tradition started by Robert E. Howard, it is a deliberate attempt to write a hero that an African-American reader can relate to, to create a Black Conan.

Originally published in 1981, Imaro was in part a response to Saunders’ perception that fantasy literature overwhelmingly featured white protagonists and marginalised black characters. As an African-American man, Saunders struggled to entirely relate to the characters in the books he was reading, and was unhappy with the often racist depictions of Africans. In his foreword to the current 2006 edition he states that he thinks matters have improved, making him a more optimistic man on that front than I am. In 2005 after all, the sci fi channel broadcast an adaptation of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard from Earthsea featuring an entirely white cast. That book, for those unfamiliar with it, contains no white characters at all – a deliberate decision by Le Guin who wrote it in part to address the exclusion of non-whites from fantasy fiction.

But enough of politics, or almost so. The other interesting aspect of Imaro, beyond the text itself, is that the 2006 edition is heavily revised from the original 1981 edition. An entire story is in fact omitted, replaced with a wholly new story. Imaro inhabits an Africa-analogue called Nyumbani, essentially our Africa but with countries and peoples renamed to give Saunders a little more creative freedom. The 1981 edition contained a key story, including the origin of a central character, set in a kingdom modelled on Rwanda and featuring a genocidal conflict between the two tribes inhabiting it. Later events turned the story, from Saunder’s perspective, into a mockery of real-world horror and as such although he was keen to see Imaro reissued, he was not keen for that story to be reissued. His answer was a new tale, and consequential revisions. How they compare to the original I can’t say, but I do think it interesting how history caused Saunders to have to rewrite so much material.

Anyway, on to Imaro. Imaro is the child of a woman of the Ilyassai, essentially the Masai. His father is of another tribe, making him an outcast within his people, tolerated and raised within their customs but never liked. He grows, as sword and sorcery heroes do, to be a young man of extraordinary ability, huge strength and quick wit. But, he has enemies, and this novel which is rather a series of connected short stories tracks his time with the Ilyassai and his later adventures across Nyumbani as he seeks his destiny.

Saunders has a real love and knowledge of African folklore and customs, he introduces the ways of the Ilyassai smoothly and makes them understandable if not always wholly sympathetic. Other cultures, forest dwelling tribes dependent on fishing, bandit kingdoms, urbanised coastal nation states, are all also brought to life and Saunders creates an Africa that is a vibrant and diverse place. A land of many cultures, often mutually incomprehending, but each credible and seeming-authentic (I don’t know enough about Africa to say how genuinely authentic).

As the book progresses, Saunders works in words in the tongue of the Ilyassai, names for animals, coming-of-age rituals, weapons, and then going forward those words are often used without further explanation so that as you proceed the reader becomes himself a little Africanised – helping achieve the immersion so important to this kind of novel.

Freedom. The concept held little meaning for Imaro, except during times such as this, when he ran alone in the Tambure, dry grass swishing against his bare legs. It was then that he felt that he truly belonged in the savanna, at one with the vast herds of impala, zebra, kudu, gazelle, and countless other hoofed creatures that along with tembo, the mighty elephant, roamed wherever their will guided them. Even more did the youth identify with the Tamburure’s deadliest predators: Ngatun the lion, Chui the leopard, Matisho the hunting-hyena. These creatures hunted the grass-eaters as it pleased them, without regard to the strictures imposed by clan or tribe.

Saunders also explains, but without heavy exposition, the reason for certain customs, for example the Ilyassai believe that when an Ilyassai dies his soul enters the body of a lion, when a young man comes of age he must slay a lion to prove his courage, and in so doing release that soul so it can again reincarnate into the body of an Ilyassai. Fascinating stuff. The book is full of small descriptive details that add to the richness of his setting.

Imaro knew he was in the Land of No One, a wild uninhabited stretch of territory that served as a borderland between the realms claimed by the Turkhana and the Ilyassai. It was not uninhabited now. A band of Turkana had set up a small encampment, consisting of a fresh-dug firepit and a circular barrier of spiky thornbrush. It was the encampment of a hunting party or a war band, quickly erected and easy to dismantle.

As well as all this culture and myth, Saunders draws as so many sword and sorcery writers do on HP Lovecraft. Evil sorcerors in Nyumbani use mchawi, witchcraft, but those who grow too devoted to it change and become something no longer wholly human. Mchawi grants power, but at a terrible cost. Mchawi is also, of course, found in ancient ruins of uncertain origin and in peculiar and monstrous survivors of an earlier age – beings alien to humanity and the natural world.

Ages ago, the misshapen pile of crumbling masonry was a building, an edifice of colossal proportions. The gigantic stone blocks from which it had been constructed once fit together with immaculate precision. But that time was thousands of rains ago, as humans measure time. Now, the structure was only a mound of aging stone, futilely defying the passage of the rains even as the name of its long-dead builders had long since been forgotten. It hulked in the midst of the Tamburure like a monument to a time so distant that even the land surrounding it had changed.

And:

The builders of the Place of Stones were short, squat, manlike in shape … and thoroughly nightmarish. Narrow, elongated eyes glittered balefully in the green light suffusing the ruin. Bestial fangs filled their gaping mouths. Colorless hair sprouted in thin patches across scabrous, unclothed skin. Cat-like claws curved from the fingers of hands otherwise human in form.

Saunders avoids, however, the bleakness of Lovecraft’s vision. Here those who are the source of mchawi, mysterious entities not encountered in this book, are opposed by other entities which may be beneficient. In one of the book’s more interesting elements, it is clearly implied that Imaro himself is a form of weapon, designed by the beneficient entities to fight their enemies. That he himself may not be wholly human, but something more crafted to inflict harm on those who would harm humanity.

Saunders’ prose style is straightforward and efficient, this is a work driven by its plot and its ideas, and Saunders is largely happy simply to communicate both. Generally, he avoids falling into Howardian pastiche, though on several occasions he refers to Imaro’s mighty thews, which jars every time he does it for obvious reasons (obvious to those with any knowledge of the genre anyway, if not I’m happy to explain in the comments). The Night Shade imprint is easy to read and attractively bound, though on occasion there were unfortunate typos and the odd missing or plainly incorrect word.

Imaro hurdled the flaming thornbush, and drove his blade into the throat of the war-leader. As blood spewed from the Turkhana’s neck, the iron hand of panic crushed the courage from the rest of the warriors. To their terror-stricken minds, Imaro was a ghost returned for vengeance, for they could not believe that a bound man or boy could have survived the Tamburure at night. Shrieking prayers to their gods or ancestors, the Tamburure broke and fled. And Imaro ravened among them like Ngatun himself.

Note the second use of the word Tamburure there is an error, it should be Turkhana as it is the people who are fleeing, not the savanna. Still, in the main Night Shade have done a pretty fair job here.

There is a difficulty with Imaro, however, one that is one intrinsic to its genre. Imaro himself is stronger than any other man, a better warrior, he is cleverer and more charismatic, he’s not even bad looking. That’s ok, the uber-protagonst is common in this genre and there does at least seem to be an in-setting reason why he’s so special, but it does rather reduce tension. Imaro, put simply, is a winner and although he is on a few occasions beaten into unconsciousness it’s perfectly obvious that by the end of each story he’ll have gutted everyone responsible. As I say, that’s probably unavoidable given the nature of the genre, but it does mean you sort of know what’s going to happen most of the time.

Imaro’s world is also not a subtle one. Bad guys tend to be very, very bad. Good guys aren’t good as such, but rather are men who stick to their word or who don’t betray friends (genuinely good characters would be out of genre) and those who fall into that camp stay in it, though as is generally the case with companions to sword and sorcery heroes the more sympathetic characters don’t tend to have a high survival rate. It is a world painted with a broad brush, proud warriors, evil sorcerors, beautiful women trained in strange erotic arts, wise old women, peaceful fisher-people, strange idols and hideous demon-things (really, what’s not to love?).

But, and it’s the key but, it’s a lot of fun. It’s not groundbreaking, it’s not going to change your perceptions of the genre, but it’s good solid sword and sorcery set in an Africa-analogue rather than a mock-Europe and with a nice level of cultural detail. If you already enjoy this sort of fiction, this is well worth checking out, if you don’t this isn’t the one that will change your mind. I enjoyed it though, and I intend to read the next in the series, where Imaro goes in search of the ancient kingdom of Cush…

Imaro

And, for the curious, Charles Saunders’ own website is here. There’s also a nice interview with him here.

The air is like champagne

Fraülein Else, by Arthur Schnitzler

Fraülein Else is a 1924 novella by Austro-Hungarian author Arthur Schnitzler, now perhaps most famous for writing the work that would eventually become Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut.

But let’s not hold that against him (actually, I think highly of Eyes Wide Shut, but popular opinion has I think moved against me on that one), Fraülein Else is a complex psychological novella written almost entirely in the form of the stream of consciousness of a young woman of respectable family staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa. In just over a hundred pages (and small pages at that) it manages to be as gripping as many thrillers, while having much to say about sexuality, the brutal realities underpinning polite society and loss of innocence (or worse, realisation that innocence was only ever a comfortable illusion).

I read the excellent F.H. Lyon translation of Fraülein Else, published by Pushkin Press. For those unfamiliar with them, Pushkin Press is a publisher of literary fiction with particular strengths in European literature (especially, from what I have seen, mitteleuropean literature). My wife, Emma, has read a number of works published by Pushkin Press and the general quality of their choices is very high. The books are published on a smaller than usual format, clearly printed on high quality paper, and although paperback with slightly stiffish card covers. Physically, they are very attractive, easy to hold and a pleasure to read. Even if ebooks do become the norm, there will I think always be a place for books as well produced as the Pushkin range.

Going back to Fraülein Else, the essence of the story is a simple one. Else is a young woman of good but not aristocratic Viennese family, her father is a lawyer and a successful one, she is on holiday with her aunt and attractive cousin at a spa when she receives a telegram from her mother, informing her that her father faces ruin and that only 30,000 gulden can save him. Her father has already approached all those who have lent him money in the past, all that is left therefore is for Else to approach family acquaintance Herr von Dorsday who is also on holiday at the spa and ask him for the money.

We soon learn that Else’s family is not as good as it appears, her father has embezzled trust funds and this is not his first brush with possible ruin, he has needed saving before. Else has holes in her stockings that she hopes will not be noticed and, although it is clear until now she has avoided thinking too much on the subject, the telegram leaves her unable to avoid the truth that her family is not so respectable after all.

Else approaches Herr von Dorsday. In return for the money he requires that she pay an improper price. For the course of an evening Else thinks on whether or not to pay that price, and on what her alternatives may be.

And that, in its most simplistic essence, is the book. It is the stream of consciousness of a young woman, forced by family exigency to consider matters she would prefer not to and exposed to the truth that even in polite society the good manners on show merely conceal the reality that everything still has its price. Else’s innocence is lost merely by the fact of the request from her mother to approach Herr von Dorsday, his request simply cements her understanding of the crude nature of the world she inhabits, a world that until then had seemed much prettier.

The drama of the novel comes from Else’s consideration of what to do, for much of it I was genuinely uncertain how events would play out and there is a real tension as one watches her thoughts flow to acquiescence, to rebellion, to escapist fantasy, to acquiescence again and so on. More powerful though is the character of Else herself, beautifully realised (as it must be, for the novel to work at all). Schnitzel shows Else’s initial innocence, its later resurgence as she dreams of ways out of her dilemma, he shows too her new understanding of her world – which seems always to have been present but heretofore unacknowledged, her despair and her savage hope. Schnitzel paints a subtle and wholly persuasive psychological portrait which made me empathise with Else and be fascinated by her situation.

Because it’s essentially an unbroken stream of consciousness (though far easier to read than that suggests), it’s difficult to pull out particularly representative quotes. I’ve tried, with the following two passages, to give some sense though of Else’s internal monologue and the style of the work. In this first excerpt she has received the telegram and is considering how to approach Herr von Dorsday:

I must turn on the light. It’s getting chilly. Shut the window. Blind down? No need. There’s no one standing on the mountain over there with a telescope. Worse luck … ‘I’ve just had a letter, Herr von Dorsday’ … Perhaps it’ll be better to do it after dinner. One is in a lighter mood then. Dorsday will be too … I might drink a glass of wine first. But I should certainly enjoy my dinner more if I finished the whole business first. Pudding à la merveille, fromage et fruits divers. But what if Herr von Dorsday should say no? Or if he’s downright impudent? Oh no; no one has ever been impudent to me. Well, Lieutenant Brandel was, but he didn’t mean any harm. I’ve got a bit thinner again. It suits me … The twilight stares in. It stares in like a ghost – like a hundred ghosts. Ghosts are rising out of my meadow. How far off is Vienna? How long have I been away? How alone I am! I haven’t a girl friend, nor a man friend. Where are they all? Whom shall I marry? Who would marry a swindler’s daughter? …

In this second excerpt, Else is returning to the hotel after thinking matters over for some time:

He’s waiting. Herr von Dorsday is waiting. No, I won’t see him. I can’t see him any more. I won’t see anyone any more. I won’t go back to the hotel, I won’t go home. I won’t go to Vienna, I won’t go to anybody, to anyone at all, not to Father, not to Mother, not to Rudi, not to Fred, not to Bertha, not to Aunt Irene! She’s the best of them, she’d understand everything. But I’ve nothing more to do with her or with anybody else. If I were a magician, I’d be in quite another part of the world. On some splendid ship in the Mediterranean, but not alone. With Paul, perhaps. Yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Or I’d live in a villa by the sea and we’d lie on the marble steps that run down into the water, and he’d hold me tight in his arms and bite my lips, as Alfred did at the piano two years ago, the impudent wretch. No, I’d lie alone on the marble steps by the sea and wait. And at last a man would come, or several men, and I’d choose one, and the others whom I’d rejected would throw themselves into the sea in despair. Or they’d have to be patient and wait til next day. Oh, what a delicious life it would be!

Part of what impresses me here, is how easily Schnitzel captures Else’s immaturity, her flights of childish fancy, but intercuts them with her dawning realisation of her actual situation. Schnitzel is also excellent in a number of passages in bringing out Else’s own burgeoning sexuality, suppressed by societal dictat but by virtue of this situation brought (only part unwillingly) to the forefront of her mind.

Other characters in the work are seen largely through Else’s eyes, the few times Else speaks to someone during the evening it is presented in italics and rarely are the words of the conversation on their own very revealing. Despite this, Schnitzler manages to capture Else’s aunt’s concern for propriety, Herr von Dorsday’s self-interest,self-regard and essential hypocricy, the tension between Cissy Mohr – possible lover to Else’s cousin Paul – and Else herself. We see only through Else’s eyes, and she does not appear a particularly unreliable narrator, but because suddenly she sees much so too do we and the work is full of small psychological truths.

An irony with Fraülein Else, compared to other works I have written about here, is in one sense I have relatively little to say about it. It is well written, shows great insight and is both an enjoyable and rewarding read. Pushkin Press have, once again, brought to English readers a novelist whose works might otherwise go ignored, and certainly without them I wouldn’t have read this particular work. The plot however is so simple, the essential dilemma faced by Else so easily grasped, the truth of her society so depressingly familiar, that it is hard to write at length about it. I am left then saying that this is a fine piece of Austro-Hungarian literature of a sort too little now recognised, and that I am extremely grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing this translation and giving me access to it.

Fraülein Else (also available directly from the publisher here). I note that John Self over at Asylum has written up a different Arthur Schnitzel here, which may also be of interest.

A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-o

Chester Himes is a new author to me, one that I had never heard of until I saw A Rage in Harlem recommended in a Waterstone’s Staff Pick.

However, that reflects more on me than it does on Chester Himes, because some investigation reveals that he is in fact a highly regarded African-American novelist with some forty years of output, not least among which is a series of detective novels collectively referred to as the Harlem Detective series. Himes’ fiction often dealt with issues of race and justice, issues he was perhaps unusually qualified to speak to having spent eight years in jail himself for armed robbery.

A Rage in Harlem is the first of the Harlem Detective series. Written and set in 1957, in it we first meet his two detective characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In later novels I understand they take a more central role, but here they are closer to plot elements than characters, larger than life forces of nature the presence of which drives the actions of others. The real protagonist of A Rage in Harlem is one Jackson, a “square” and churchgoing man, honest and with a profound faith in his girlfriend Imabelle.

As the novel opens, Jackson has been introduced by Imabelle to men who claim to be able to raise ten dollar bills to hundred dollar bills, using a secret technique they possess. As they proceed, they are raided by a man claiming to be a police officer, Jackson is apprehended but the other men run taking their equipment and Imabelle with them. The policeman asks for a bribe from Jackson in return for letting him go, and to get the money Jackson is forced to steal money from his employer’s safe. To get that back, Jackson goes gambling, and loses everything he has (in one of the better written gambling sequences I have read). By the end of this, fairly short in terms of the novel, sequence of events Jackson is penniless, a thief and believes that he is pursued by the police.

It is not giving anything away to reveal that the policeman is one of the gang of swindlers, that Jackson is the subject of a grift, and that he may well be one of the most gullible men in Harlem. All that said, he decides that Imabelle would not have gone with the others willingly, and so with the aid of his brother, a con man and junkie who cross dresses as a nun to swindle the poor by selling modern day indulgences, he sets out to rescue her.

A Rage in Harlem then is a novel of extremes. Goldie, Jackson’s brother, is an extraordinary character. He lives with two other professional criminals who cross dress as part of their own grifts, and they inhabit a world that squares like Jackson cannot comprehend (if they could, they wouldn’t be squares). Many characters are grotesques, many scenes are grimly comic, absurd even with unbelievable elements happily thrown in. At the same time, all this sits with a convincing depiction of life in Harlem in the late 1950s, a life often of grinding poverty, poor education and remarkable isolation from the wider New York City.

The language of the book is vivid, as you would expect, here we have an exchange between Jackson and a taxi driver:

A black boy was driving. Jackson gave him the address of Imabelle’s sister in the Bronx. The black boy made a U-turn in the icy street as though he liked skating, and took off like a lunatic.
‘I’m in a hurry,’ Jackson said.
‘I’m hurrying, ain’t I?’ the black boy called over his shoulder.
‘But I ain’t in a hurry to get to heaven.’
‘We ain’t going to heaven.’
‘That’s what I’m scared of.’

Similarly, here Jackson trades remarks with a shoe-shine boy:

‘Man, you know one thing, I feel good,’ he said to the shoe-shine boy.
‘A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-o,’ the boy said.
Jackson put his faith in the Lord and headed for the dice game upstairs on 126th Street, around the corner.

As the novel progresses, Jackson essentially falls through a crack in his world, moving from the realm of god fearing and church going people to the world of hustlers, con artists, pimps and killers. He moves from the world of prey, to the world of predators, and since he is by nature prey he spends a good part of the novel running from people and desparately hoping not to be brutally killed, for brutal death is rarely far away in Himes’ Harlem and in the course of the novel a fair number of characters do die – as often as not from sheer bad luck or meeting the wrong people at the wrong time.

Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson move through this world of casual violence and relentless criminality as part of the forces devoted to keeping some kind of order in place, they are both themselves black, coloured detectives as the people of the time term them. The police department is largely white, the white officers whenever depicted have neither understanding of nor sympathy for the blacks of Harlem, Jones and Johnson don’t have much more sympathy than their white colleagues, but they do understand and that coupled with their remarkable capacity for violence makes them effective and feared men.

They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people – gamekeepers, madams, streetwalkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket.

Discussing the attitudes of the police, takes me to the depiction of race in the novel generally. As is common in novels of this period and earlier dealing with issues of race, black characters are routinely described in terms of how black they are. One may have a coal coloured face, another be an ordinary brown, all of which is essentially merely descriptive, but then a sharp line is drawn between black people who are variously brown skinned and those who are “yellows” or “high yellows”, people whose skin is light in shade. High yellows are seen as more attractive than the brown skinned, and characters (including black characters, almost everyone in the book is black) will refer to others as a “high yellow” making distinctions as finely honed as would be found in any caste system. At one point a bystander quotes an old folk saying, as follows:

Black gal make a freight train jump de track
But a yaller girl make a preacher Ball de Jack

I have seen this distinction made before, in the works of writers such as Hammett and Spillane and in the songs of artists like Leadbelly (who in one sings of his “yellow girl”). A fairly formal differentiation between people according to the degree of blackness present in their skin tone appears to have been fairly common in American life in this period. For all the distinctions drawn, however, between the brown skinned and the yellow skinned, the key difference is with the white skinned. In this book blacks and whites barely communicate, the black characters occasionally interact with white policemen and that unwillingly, their world is a self-contained one and points of contact between black and white experience are few.

Life in Harlem is difficult, poverty is endemic, the police are feared and never assisted – which given they spend most of the novel arresting anyone in sight who looks a bit out of place is hardly surprising. At one point Jackson flees through an alley, slipping in mud, tearing his clothes, getting covered in blood and filth and reduced to rags. When he hits the street, he is not the worst dressed man in it, his appearance is not of itself remarkable enough to attract the near constant police attention.

Colored people passed along the dark sidewalks, slinking cautiously past the dark, dangerous doorways, heads bowed, every mother’s child of them looking as though they had trouble.
Colored folks and trouble, Jackson thought, like two mules hitched to the same wagon.

With poverty comes violence, at one point Jackson goes to a rough bar, where he is surrounded by whores and grifters, marked out by muggers, a whole ecology of crime clustering around an obvious mark. A fight breaks out, to the entertainment of all (the people of Harlem here love watching the troubles of others), and swiftly descends into farce:

Two rough-looking men jumped about the floor, knocking over chairs and tables, cutting at one another with switchblade knives. The customers at the bar screwed their heads about to watch, but held on to their places and kept their hands on their drinks. The whores rolled their eyes and looked bored.
One joker slashed the other’s arm. A big-lipped wound opened in the tight leather jacket, but nothing came out but old clothes – two sweaters, three shirts, a pair of winter underwear. The second joker slashed back, opened a wound in the front of his foe’s canvas jacket. But all that came out of the wound was dried printer’s ink from the layers of old newspapers the joker had wrapped around him to keep warm. They kept slashing away at one another like two rag dolls battling in buck dancing fury, spilling old clothes and last week’s newsprint instead of blood.

As well as race, poverty, brutality and violence, A Rage in Harlem is also full of almost slapstick humour. A car chase in which multiple squad cars pursue a fleeing hearse, which proceeds to careen through a central market scattering livestock, vegetables and meat in its wake and which en route loses its contents including the corpse of a freshly murdered man becomes a form of comic sequence, over the top, grim in that the driver is genuinely terrified but funny because it becomes ludicrous in the extremity of the description. Himes himself described his detective series as “absurd”, his Harlem becomes at times a grotesquerie, filled with freaks and morbid humour. Jones and Johnson are barely people, closer to caricatures of grim law enforcement, Jackson is astonishingly and continuingly gullible, Goldie so unredeemable he spends a fair time drugging Jackson so he can look for Imabelle without interference as Goldie has come to believe she has a wealth of gold on her person. Characters here are not subtly crafted portraits from life.

Well, except one character, Harlem itself. Harlem convinces, Harlem is really the main character of the novel, it is a novel about Harlem, its absurdities and cruelties. And it is in the descriptions of Harlem that some of the book’s best passages are to be found:

Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desparate 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 farther east it goes, the blacker it gets.

I’m not sure where I’ll go next with Himes. My (perhaps incorrect) impression is that he wrote what he considered serious fiction, and separately his detective fiction. I enjoyed the detective fiction, perhaps despite and perhaps in part because of its grotesque elements, his serious fiction is doubtless enjoyable too and it would be interesting to see how it compares. Still, I would not wish to give the impression that the crime fiction is not worth reading, it is, and it is that for which he is most famous. There is real skill here, the occasional extremity of description is intentional, not inadvertent and Himes has things to say which are I think worth listening to.

I link here to an essay I found online on Himes work, I particularly liked the reference to him “coupling craft with a searing and sometimes brutal black-humored “fabulism,”", a line I wish I had come up with myself as it definitely captures something of this work.

A Rage in Harlem