History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Plot: A Back-to-Africa rally is robbed of $87,000, the money vanishes inside a bale of cotton, and half of Harlem goes looking for it.
• Clues: Mostly irrelevant; this is a chase, a satire and a street carnival more than a puzzle.
• Reveal: Satisfying and funny, with a final twist that lands a sharp political joke.

The Reverend Deke O’Malley is holding a rally in Harlem, collecting money from families who want to emigrate to Africa. Masked gunmen steal it. In the confusion, the loot ends up hidden in a bale of cotton, which falls off a truck and starts travelling around Harlem from owner to owner. Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, two huge, violent, weary cops, try to find it before anyone else does.

Chester Himes wrote his Harlem series while living in Paris, originally for Gallimard’s Série Noire, and the books are unlike any other American crime fiction of the period. They mix brutal violence with slapstick, political satire with grotesque comedy, and they treat Harlem as a theatre of hustlers, preachers, con men and ordinary people trying to survive.

Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are feared and admired, and their exasperation with the community they police is balanced by a fierce loyalty to it. The dialogue is fast and funny.

The book’s target is exploitation, whether by white racists or Black hustlers. The Back-to-Africa scam and a rival white supremacist scheme to return Black Americans to the South are both lampooned.

Its limits are those of the genre: characters are types, the plot is chaotic, and some of the humour is broad. Readers expecting a conventional detective novel will be bewildered.

The 8 reflects a singular, exuberant and angry book, arguably the best of the Harlem series. Ossie Davis’s 1970 film adaptation became an early landmark of Black cinema.