Blind Man With A Pistol by Chester Himes

Reviewed by Raymond Embrack

Chester Himes (1909 – 1984) was a black writer of crime fiction novels set in Harlem NYC, a series with the black detective duo of Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They earned their names as hardboiled, hair-triggered thug cops packing nickel-plated .38s. Their method is to "light into a group of innocent people and start whipping heads until somebody talked…the best and cheapest way to solve a crime. If the citizens didn’t like it, they ought to stay at home."

The series was written from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. Maybe more than any 1960s crime fiction series, it was affected by the social arc of that decade. In 1960's All Shot Up, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are a force for law and order while operating in a corrupt and racist system that is also their antagonist. There is a sleek gold Cadillac, professional crooks, and the fools whose small hustles get caught up in larger capers. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed go through the plotline beating witnesses, suspects, and other cops until they find the killers, blow them away, and solve the puzzle. By 1969’s Blind Man with a Pistol, the puzzle is unknowable, the detectives clueless.

…all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. From the preface.

But bringing up the rear was a shuffling mass of solemn preachers with their own banner reading: FEED THEM JESUS! They’ll vomit every time!

Blind Man with a Pistol is oddly structured as two separate plotlines following the police investigations of two knife killings. One of the plotlines continues while the other is abandoned, blending into a third plotline. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed investigate the throat cutting of a white man. They investigate a stabbing case that takes place during a different kind of hustle. They are then assigned to find who is causing a series of riots in Harlem. The dual murder plots soon become a confusing jumble of details and characters that only give the reader a headache. Even the author appears to lose interest in writing a mystery. The plot is there to mainly justify a series of bizarre sketches of a sweltering summer Harlem, the games run by assorted grotesques, the hustlers organizing Black power marches to exploit The Revolution.

He wanted the Negroes to arise. He wanted to lead them out of the abyss into the promised land. The trouble was, he wasn’t very bright.

Long a caustic observer of the American Dream, Himes’ age during the 1960s made him as caustic an observer of the Black power movement. To Himes, The Revolution was just the American Dream of a younger generation. As Grave Digger explains it: "…whitey is a liar…Maybe our parents were just like our children and believed their lies…What saves colored folks our age is we ain’t never believed it. But this new generation believes it. And that’s how we get riots."

These themes drew Himes from telling crime stories toward creating nihilistic sketches in which plot, character, and outcome are irrelevant. As a crime novel, Blind Man With a Pistol is a failure, but Himes was abandoning the crime novel and would never return. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed would only reappear in Plan B, an unfinished novel even more nihilistic, apocalyptic and so far removed from the crime novel, it has one killing the other, ends with both killed.

In Blind Man they are still looking for answers. Looking for the one man causing the riots, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed find the case unsolvable. At book’s end, the two are reduced to killing time shooting the rats running from a condemned building. From here the book follows the incident of a blind man who has what The Boondocks calls "a nigga moment" (As politically incorrect racial satire, The Boondocks is so close to Himes it was possibly paying homage with its similar blind man storyline). A chain of misunderstandings and aggressions leads the blind man to pull his gun on a crowded subway. The blind man’s trail of subway shootings ends with a dead cop.

This exchange ends the book:

"Can’t you men stop that riot?"
"It’s out of hand, Boss," Grave Digger said.
"What started it?"
"A blind man with a pistol."
"What’s that?"
"You heard me, Boss."
"That don’t make any sense."
"Sure don’t."

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Copyright© 2007 Raymond Embrack

Read an extract from Raymond's novel Steez

Raymond Embrack. Paperback writer, USA.