Cotton Comes to Harlem - Chester Himes (for the 1965 club)

First published in French, since Himes was living in Paris at the time, this is a detective story of the American hardboiled school, where life is cheap but getting back the hard earned cash of 87 families conned out of it by a preacher who promised them a new life back in Africa is a priority for police detectives 'Grave Digger' Jones and 'Coffin Ed' Johnson.

This isn't my usual flavour of book. The language, the sexual politics, the casual violence, the car chases and shoot outs are really not my thing. Everyone double crosses everyone, would turn their lover in for the right price or kill them to stop them talking, and by the same token everyone 'knows' that Jones and Johnson have to be rough and tough and have high body counts to keep control of the hoodlums.

They're full of wise-cracks too. It's all a bit 'there's a new sheriff in town' and it made me tired.

That said I did really like this book for providing a great (if exaggerated) shapshot of a particular place and time. The descriptions of the oppressive heat of a city in summer, the smells of over occupied houses, and even the shoot outs, are very, very well done. Here Harlem is a powder keg, the community is seething with anger, the places they live are slums, and anything might set off a riot.

As Grave Digger says when he and his partner are on the carpet for brutality.

'We got the highest crime rate on earth among the colored people in Harlem. And there ain't but three things to do about it: Make the criminals pay for it - you don't want to do that; pay the people enough to live decently - you ain't going to do that; so all that's left is let 'em eat each other up.'

Race is a constant refrain throughout the book, the different attitude of the authorities when white officers are killed, the light skinned woman who can't wait to remove the disguise that makes her look darker than she is, the confusion of the bar tender who can't understand what's being said, the 'back to Africa' movements and grown men being addressed as 'boy'. People are unable, are in fact not permitted, to forget it for a moment.

And on the last page but three Alabama refuses to extradite a white man 'on the grounds that killing a Negro did not constitute murder under Alabama law'. Small wonder that people were angry. Small wonder that some still are.