Chester Himes was in his mid-40s when he began writing detective fiction. Having spent years and years trying to jump-start a literary career, he had found himself at something of an impasse. He had written some accomplished novels, but they had not achieved the financial and critical success that they deserved and that he also needed. At the suggestion of his French translator, Marcel Duhamel, who ran a line of crime novels called La Serie Noire for Gallimard, Himes turned his attention to genre fiction. What followed were some of his most brilliant, searing works, “raucous, ribald, absurd, and yet gritty and realistic,” writes Gene Seymour. They also blended modernist art with sharp-eyed social analysis. In them one finds “a thwarted, combustible, often embittered romantic…the kind of romantic capable even on his worst days of spinning stories about tough, sore men using fair or foul methods to keep—or find—peace.” Read “Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs”