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.

A Spaniard in the Works - John Lennon (for the 1965 Club)

I'm not sure what I was expecting this book to be about, and having read it I have to admit I'm not a great deal clearer. It's a compendium of nonsense book - comparisons that occur are Searle cartoons (St Trinian's, Down With Skool), Monty Python, and possibly Edward Lear. Every single poem and short story has long strands of deliberate and completely inconsistent malapropisms, as if words are being thrown at the page. 

According to the preface that was exactly how Lennon claimed he wrote it. I'm not sure whether to believe that or not, because although the half the words are wrong, it is still possible to follow the short stories. 

And they are very short - two, three pages long. The poems have short verses too, the drawings seem dashed off. 

His use of parody makes it very hard to know if some of the bits that made me wince a bit - mostly around descriptions of said Spaniard and other non-Brits - are Lennon thinking there's nothing wrong there, or Lennon mocking others who think there's nothing wrong.  Similarly the use of taboo words - just scattered among the other malapropisms - makes them feel unloaded, but at the same time presumably they're chosen for a reason. Is it to shock? Or is it to say 'look, it's just a word'. 

Possibly I'm overthinking, but that's partly because it's a book that asks to be analysed. In the cartoons all the people are naked, and lumpish, some of them chained or missing limbs, others wielding clubs or burying others alive. The drawings are very basic - bodies are just an outline - but these distorted plasticine men have recognizable facial expressions, either blank or smiling while they go about their strange business. In a similar way the stories are short, the words scrambled, and terrible things happen but are reported in the same lets-play-with-language way as everything else. 

It is, I think, very much of it's time, and half the interest was, I'm sure, seeing inside the head of a Beatle. 

That is still the case. My copy is a reprint which includes Lennon's first book, In His Own Write and although I probably will flick through, if I didn't have it, I wouldn't seek it out. 

As always thanks to Karen and Simon for hosting these events.