A white man is found dead and semi naked in a red light district. A black suspect was seen running away with the dead man’s trousers. Somewhere else, a card appears in an urban convent window requesting “fertile womens, lovin God, inquire within”. Meanwhile, a vexed blind man sits on the subway with his pistol ready. Yes, it’s just another day in Chester Himes’ Harlem.
Blind Man With A Pistol was the last novel featuring Harlem cops, Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed that Chester Himes wrote. It went out in 1969. Enough time for Himes to have witnessed the USA Vietnam War debacle, the Black Power Movement faltering, the Cold War at sub zero and the Middle East convulsing.
The plot? Well, it’s like trying to describe your own intestines – by the time out straighten it all out I’d have killed my (and your) interest in the book. Let’s just say Himes doesn’t bother so much with the immaculate plotting of say, The Crazy Kill. Don’t worry about plot. It will all kinda sort itself out as you read on.
The novel is set primarily outdoors. Himes has pretty much abandoned ‘going into character’: having you get to know with any intimacy any characters. Instead he looks at public space, public interactions and the burning conflagrations along the race divide. There is a lot that is wrong with the novel. Some of Himes’ attitudes, the creaky plot, the buffoonery. You start to feel maybe Himes’ legendary powers are waning. Yet the ending is a glorious redemption.
I racked my brains trying to think of an author who can write crowd scenes as well as Himes. Dickens? No. Dostoyevsky? No. Armistead Maupin? No. Pasternak? Almost. Tolstoy? Maybe, but without Himes’ verve. I finished the book and went to bed laughing. And for the next half hour I was smiling under the sheets –actual wet-eye smiling – as I remembered the last two chapters. Himes. In his own words, he was one crazy motherfucker. And he didn’t half write.
Extract:
“They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.”