Penzler Pick, May 2001: In James Sallis's long-awaited biography of novelist Chester Himes, he reveals that his own crime fiction career was partly inspired by the older writer's example. Admiring Himes's work ever since he first encountered it, Sallis began to haunt used bookstores in order to turn up more of it and eventually dedicated one of his Lew Griffin titles to Himes, while making the author of Cotton Comes to Harlem and Pinktoes a character in another.

Researching and producing a life of a fellow author is homage of a vastly greater order. It is a full-time, obsessive commitment that seldom turns out as expected. First viewing Himes as a sui generis author of savagely slapstick ghetto crime comedies, Sallis came to regard his subject instead as "America's central black writer." "It is exceedingly strange to know so well a man one has never met," Sallis begins. Yet a fully rounded portrait of Chester Bomar Himes, the Missouri-born, middle-class rebel and prison veteran, much of whose life was spent as an angry black man in European self-exile, was not an easy one to paint, even for someone as sympathetic as this biographer.

Born in 1908, Himes was a 19-year-old college dropout when he began serving what would be seven years of a 20- to 25-year jail sentence for burglary. "I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary," he would later write. While behind bars, he managed to sell two hard-boiled stories to Esquire. Bought by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich, these "authentic" tales of a real-life convict appeared in a magazine that featured such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1936, at the age of 26, Himes was paroled and from then on embarked on a writer's path, though there were many obstacles, real and perceived, awaiting him. Whether moving from a stint in the WPA Writers Project to a utopian community in Ohio, or from the fringes of the Hollywood labor force to the lesser ranks of the Communist party, Chester Himes came more and more to regard himself as "a man without a country."

Even at Yaddo, the famed New York state writers' colony where he had a fellowship in 1948 (and lived across the hall from Patricia Highsmith as she worked on her first novel, Strangers on a Train), he was dissatisfied. Soon joining such fellow African American expatriates as Richard Wright and James Baldwin in France, he began to establish a reputation in Europe that would eventually precede him home.

"It is exceedingly strange to know so little, finally, about a man with whom you have spent so much time," Sallis winds up admitting ruefully at the end of his introduction. Readers of Chester Himes: A Life will know much more than they did when they began this highly intelligent if idiosyncratically assembled volume. --Otto Penzler


From Publishers Weekly
Novelist and critic Sallis (Bluebottle; etc.) delivers a satisfying, thoughtful, long-overdue biography of Chester Himes (1909-1984), a singular American writer and fascinating figure. Sallis outlines the author's threefold marginalization--as a WWII-era literary realist, as a crime novelist and as an African-American writer, a colleague of Wright and Baldwin. With unflagging clarity, he embarks on simultaneous explorations of Himes's writing and his tumultuous personal life. Sallis details Himes's upbringing in a fragmented, middle-class family, his brief infatuation with crime and the inception of his writing career in an Ohio state prison, during which time his work appeared in Esquire. In the 1940s and '50s Himes found himself in a cycle of literary aspirations and disappointments, epitomized by Jack Warner's memorable dismissal: "I don't want no niggers on this lot." Sallis weaves such accounts in with his solid discussions of Himes's important early novels, tightly atmospheric works that failed to find an audience in the racially charged climate. During Himes's expatriation in Europe, financial difficulties drove him toward surreal detective fiction, which won him acclaim late in life, as his health declined. Sallis's astute, writerly riffs on American inequities and literary vagaries zero in on what haunted Himes even in exile. As an "outsider" writer who forged unsettling social panoramas through violent fiction, perhaps Himes's only equal is Jim Thompson, and, similarly, Sallis's pithy book has the import of Robert Polito's biography of that better-known master of American crime. B&w photos. (Feb. 22)Forecast: Booksellers may note the appeal of this title to readers of mystery, literary history and African-American studies, and score a trifecta. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Chester Himes (1909-84) wrote some of the 20th century's most memorable crime fiction and has been compared to Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammet. His life was just as spectacular as his novels. Sentenced to 25 years in prison for armed robbery when he was 19, he turned to writing while behind bars and, when released after serving eight years, published two novels. Their poor reception by the white establishment only confirmed Himes's beliefs about racism in America. He eventually moved to Paris, spending most of the rest of his life abroad. While in Paris, he began to produce the crime fiction that would make him famous, including A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Sallis (Bluebottle, Eye of the Cricket) admits early on that Himes is a difficult subject for a biography, for he was a multilayered and often difficult person. Yet the author succeeds splendidly in fleshing Himes out in this riveting biography. Recommended for all libraries.DRon Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Best known as a writer of detective stories and the chronicler of Harlem life in the 1930s and 1940s (his Cotton Comes to Harlem was made into a movie during the so-called Blaxploitation period), Himes was much more complex and idiosyncratic in both his work and life. Sallis retraces Himes' childhood in a middle-class family: his father was a dark-skinned, industrious man, his mother was part white and part black, a woman who carefully gauged racial and class distinctions and sought the best for her children. Himes' attraction to the street life eventually led to prison, where he discovered writing as a means of expression and salvation, if not livelihood. Himes depicted America's dispossessed and explored the unresolved racial and sexual tensions and contradictions of American life. He voiced the unspoken truths of America: black hatred of their oppressors, fear of the discovery of that hatred, and the self-hatred borne of that fear. Himes' unique blend of horror, sorrow, and humor should make this biography widely appealing among contemporary readers. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Chester Himes's novels and memoirs represent one of the most important bodies of work by any American writer, but he is best known for The Harlem Cycle, the crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. His writing made him a major figure in Europe, but it is only recently that his talents have been acknowledged in the country that spurned him for most of his life, though his work is recognized as being on a par with that of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson.

In this major literary biography, acclaimed poet, critic, and novelist James Sallis explores Himes's life as no writer has attempted before. Combining the public facts with fresh interviews with the people who knew him best, including his second wife, Lesley, Sallis casts light onto the contradictions, self-interrogations, and misdirections that make Himes such an enigmatic and elusive subject.

Chester Himes: A Life is a definitive study not only of the life of a major African-American man of letters, but of his writing and its relationship to the man himself, drawing a remarkable, deeply affecting portrait of a too often misunderstood and neglected writer. This is a work of high scholarship and of penetrating and passionate insight, a rare conjoining of two fine writers-and as much a work of literature as any of their novels.

Author Biography: James Sallis is the author of the popular and critically acclaimed Lew Griffin novels as well as other works of fiction and multiple collections of stories, poems, and essays. A lifelong student of the work of Chester Himes, he was featured as the leading expert on Himes in a recent CBS Sunday Morning broadcast. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn, and can always be found on the Internet at www.jamessallis.com

SYNOPSIS

Drawing on interviews with his wife and others who knew him, poet and novelist Sallis weaves together the facts of the American writer Himes' (1909-84) life with analysis of his fiction to find the relationship between the two. Himes began writing in prison in the early 1930s, and is now known as one of the 20th century's best writers of crime fiction, especially in Germany and his adopted France. This is a paperbound reprint of a 2000 book. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

John Leonard

Highly recommended

Reginald McKnight

(Chester Himes: A Life) is written with abundant compassion, excellent research, and a novelist's sense of character, plot, place and narrative tension.

Ian Rankin

Chester Himes's extraordinary life led him to write extraordinary fiction. It has taken an equally unique writing talent-that of James Sallis-to bring Himes back to life

The Times (London)

Chester Himes: A Life is as intelligent, and as much fun to read, as a book by Himes himself. There is no higher praise.

Publishers Weekly