Tag: Chester Himes

Mass-market Monday | Chester Himes’ A Rage in Harlem

BibliokleptLeave a comment

A Rage in Harlem, Chester Himes. Avon Books (1965). No cover artist or designer credited. 192 pages.

Himes’ A Rage in Harlem is a quick, mean, sharp read. I came to Himes via Ishmael Reed, who wrote of the author in a 1991 LA Times review of Himes’ Collected Stories,

James Baldwin, another proud and temperamental genius, said that if he hadn’t left the United States he would have killed someone. The same could be said of Chester Himes, the intellectual and gangster who left the United States for Europe in the 1950s. He achieved fame abroad with his Harlem detective series, which are remarkable for their macabre comic sense and wicked and nasty wit so brilliantly captured in Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem.

“Strictly Business,” a short story by Chester Himes

BibliokleptLeave a comment

“Strictly Business”

by

Chester Himes

What his real name was, no one knew or cared.

At various times, during his career of assaults, homicides, and murders, he had been booked under the names of Patterson, Hopkins, Smith, Reilly, Sanderson, and probably a dozen others.

People called him “Sure.”

He was twenty-five years old, five feet, eleven inches tall, weighed one-eighty-seven, had light straw-colored hair and wide, slightly hunched shoulders. His pale blue eyes were round and flat as poker chips, and his smooth, white face was wooden.

He wore loose fitting, double-breasted, drape model suits, and carried his gun in a shoulder sling.

His business was murder.

At that time he was working for Big Angelo Satulla, head of the numbers mob.

The way Big Angelo’s mob operated was strictly on the muscle. They took their cut in front—forty per cent gross, win, lose, or draw—and the colored fellows operated the business on what was left.

Most of the fellows in the mob were relatives of Big Angelo’s. There were about forty of them and they split a million or more a year.

Sure was there because Big Angelo didn’t trust any of his relatives around the corner. He was on a straight salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a week, and got a bonus of a grand for a job.

Business was good. He could remember when at eighteen he had worked for fifty bucks a throw, and if you got caught with the body you were just S.O.L.

He and Big Angelo were at the night drawing of the B&B house, a little before midnight, when the word came about Hot Papa Shapiro. Pipe Jimmy Sciria, the stooge Big Angelo had posted in the hotel as a bellhop to keep tabs on Hot Papa, called and said it looked as if Hot Papa was going to spill because a police escort had just pulled up to the hotel to take him down to the court house where the Grand Jury was holding night sessions during the DA’s racket-busting investigation.

Big Angelo had had the feeling all along that Hot Papa had rat in his blood, but now when he got the word that the spill was on the turn, he went green as summer salad. Continue reading ““Strictly Business,” a short story by Chester Himes” →

Chester Himes/Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (Books acquired, 28 Dec. 2020)

Biblioklept1 Comment

Picked up Chester Himes’s The Real Cool Killers and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler today. I did not find the novel I was looking for but I found these.

Here’s publisher Dorothy’s blurb for Fra Keeler:

 …a man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter’s death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

I loved the first Chester Himes novel I read, A Rage in Harlem. Here’s Anthony Bucher’s somewhat dismissive non-review in the 6 Sept. 1959 issue of The New York Times:

I think I’ll be on the loving side, but we’ll see.