The American Century: Literature since 1945 733United States, usually to New York City. After several lean years in Europe, Himes
was given the opportunity to write for Editions Gallimard’s Série noire, a respected
series of translated American crime fiction. And so it was in Europe that his own
variations on the police procedural scored their first success: among them, The Real
Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), and Blind Man With a Pistol
(1969). In each of these novels, Himes juxtaposes absurdly comic characters with
sinister situations, setting everything against the grim background of a swarming,
degraded ghetto. Many of them concern a goodhearted black male, just inching
along, who finds himself involved in a desperate struggle for his life. A morally
equivocal light-skinned woman may be at the heart of his trouble. In any event, the
scene is packed with hard-nosed gamblers, religious freaks, and drug-crazed killers.
Armed with identical revolvers, dressed in black suits and driving a battered
Plymouth sedan, Johnson and Jones do the best they can in this world. As they
struggle to deal with the chaos and corruption that surrounds them, the two detec-
tives inspire the same fear, respect, and awe as the “bad men” of African-American
folklore. For all that, however, their struggle seems increasingly hopeless. By the time
of the last book in the series, Blind Man With a Pistol, chaos seems to have come to
Harlem in earnest and Johnson and Jones seem unable to restore order. The final
image of the novel, signaled by its title, sums it all up: people are helpless in the face
of a scattershot destructiveness that is as wasteful as it is random.
Twenty years after Himes completed his series of novels with Coffin Ed Johnson
and Grave Digger Jones at their center, Walter Mosley (1952–) published Devil in a
Blue Dress (1990). This was followed by several other novels, including White
Butterfly (1992) and A Little Yellow Dog (1996), set in postwar Los Angeles and
featuring a reluctant black investigator, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. The novels unfold in
a developing history: Devil in a Blue Dress takes place in 1948, A Little Yellow Dog just
before the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Little Scarlet (2005) after the
1965 Watts riots. What is more, they show an acute sense of the racism endemic in
American society, not least in its police force. A migrant from the South, financially
secure yet still painfully aware of the precariousness of being black, Easy Rawlins is
a World War II veteran who recalls that “the army was segregated just like the South.”
“The white boys hated me,” he remembers, “but if they didn’t respect me I was ready
to fight.” Easy carves out a life for himself with a home, some rental properties, and
an unconventional family of two adopted children, all of it concealed from the gaze
of white bureaucracy. He is socially invisible in a way, just like the protagonist of
Invisible Man. And, as he maneuvers his way in and around the absurdities of a
world dominated by whites, he attends to the voice inside him to guide him.
“The voice ... just tells me how it is if I want to survive: Survive like a man,” Rawlins
confesses in Devil in a Blue Dress. “When the voice speaks, I listen.” Not a detective
as such but someone in the “favor business” of the black community, he is drawn
into each adventure by attending to that voice: in order, that is, to maintain some
tenuous grasp on security for him and his children. The danger Rawlins encounters
comes from inside as well as around him. He is only too aware of his own capacity
for violence: a capacity powerfully figured in Raymond “Mouse” Alexander,GGray_c05.indd 733ray_c 05 .indd 733 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM