Thank God for Penguin and their Modern Classics, and thanks in particular for their re-releasing of Chester Himes’ Grave Digger and Coffin Ed series. In producing these new volumes, they have gifted the work of one of the greatest crime writers ever to a new generation, and indeed have fulfilled one of Himes’ final wishes, that his books not be allowed to die.

And well they should not. Himes is considered by many, this reviewer included, to be the equal of Raymond Chandler, and Cotton Comes to Harlem is testament to the fact. However, while Chandler exhibited all the racial sensitivity of a young Bernard Manning, peppering his work with racial epithets, Himes’ work provides an excoriating critique of race relations in mid 20th Century America, as complex as it is searing. For this reason, and for the brilliance of his writing, Himes’ work has been elevated beyond the level of mere essential reading, and can be considered ‘important.’ On its release, Newsweek cited Cotton Comes to Harlem among their list of fifty books that “define our times.”

The book opens with a meeting of the Back to Africa movement, where Reverend Deke O’Malley, in reality a confidence trickster named Deke O’Hara, is collecting $1,000 per family from African-Americans hoping to begin a new life in Africa. The reference to Garveyism sets the tone, but the narrative takes place in the Harlem of Malcolm X’s pre-Nation of Islam days. There is no vitality in poverty, instead Harlem is squalid, devoid of hope, ridden with crime, hustlers, drunks and degeneracy. It is a ghetto in senses that would be familiar both to Tupac Shakur and Hans Frank, a social dumping ground for African-Americans which is escapable only in a body-bag.

The Back to Africa meeting is broken up by white robbers, who steal the sum of $87,000 dollars, and stash it inside a vast ball of cotton for safe keeping; Himes ensuring the reader is roundly beaten about the head with symbolism. The cotton spills from the back of the getaway vehicle, and black detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are called in to retrieve it.

Jones and Johnson are iconic figures; fearsome, uncompromising, dressed entirely in black, they have cultivated a formidable network of stool pigeons throughout Harlem, which makes them extremely effective, and allows Himes to examine the squalor and despair of Harlem in detail. There is Uncle Bud, a cotton-haired, junk-collecting vagrant, Billie Belle, a lesbian striptease artist, and a cast of characters united only by their lack of prospects. Coffin Ed is scarred outside and inside by a previous acid attack, which has left him partially deformed and trigger-happy. Both men rank among the toughest hardboiled protagonists by necessity; earning the respect of their own people in Harlem is not something achievable with kindness.

Black on black violence is one of Himes’ own themes, for as pitilessly as he exposed the cruelty and hypocrisy of white people, Himes turns a critical eye on African-Americans’ treatment of themselves. There is the self-hatred of Iris, a mixed-race prostitute who loathes her own blackness, the pliant Uncle Tomism of some of Harlem’s residents, and a lack of unity espoused most clearly by Deke O’Hara’s willingness to con his own people. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stand in righteous opposition to all these, and ultimately are concerned far more with reuniting the innocent swindled families with their money than they are with solving the crime.

Cotton Comes to Harlem spares no detail in matters of sex, race or politics, and not one iota of its scorching potency has been lost in the decades since its release. In terms of crime fiction, it merits reading as much as the best of Chandler or Hammett, and fully deserves the lofty status of inclusion in Penguin’s Modern Classics series – this is nothing short of a must-read novel.

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