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Coffin Ed Johnson & Grave Digger Jones

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Chester Himes
(1908-84)

“We just get pissed-off with all the red tape…We just want to get down to the nitty-gritty.”
– Grave Digger in Blind Man With a Pistol

“I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”
— Jack Warner‘s alleged outburst, before firing Himes

One of the true masters of the genre, Chester Himes “could write like a dream,” according to Art Bourgeau in The Mystery Lovers’ Companion, “and his prose was like music.” Himes, a Black American, served six years of a twenty year sentence in an Ohio penitentiary for armed robbery, where he discovered the work of Dashiell Hammett, John Carroll Daly, Ernest Hemingway and their hard-boiled ilk, and vowed to write books that would, in his words, “tell it like it is.” While in prison, he managed to sell a few stories to national magazines such as Esquire.

Upon his release in the mid-thirties he married Jean Johnson and struggled to find his way, trying to make it as a writer but also working a variety of jobs. He published several well-received but not necessarily lucrative semi-autobiographical novels, and the couple moved to Los Angeles in the forties, where Himes worked briefly for Warner Bros. as a screenwriter.

But he continued to write, and eventually — despite never living or spending much time there — he became associated with the Harlem literary movement, making the acquaintance of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, but mostly surviving on assorted odd jobs, grants, and loans from friends.

Growing increasingly disillusioned and frustrated, he left Jean behind and moved to Paris in the early fifties, eventually getting married again, to Lesley Packard, and at the urging of Serie noire publisher Marcel Duhamel began writing a string of what he called his “Harlem domestic detective stories” and what came to be known as the “Harlem Cycle.” All but the final novel in this series, Blind Man with a Pistol, were originally published in French, although Himes wrote all of them in English.

All but one of the series featured hard-boiled black Harlem cops “COFFIN” ED JOHNSON and “GRAVE DIGGER” JONES. Yeah, cops. Not private eyes. But their inclusion on this site is intentional. They might have been bona fide members of New York’s Finest, but they sure acted like a couple of freewheeling private dicks. And a couple of noticeably corrupt and occasionally vicious private dicks at that — their M.O. included shooting people, busting heads and extracting confessions through brutal intimidation. In one story, Coffin Ed threatens to pistol-whip a woman “until no man will ever look at you again”; in another Gravedigger strips a woman naked, ties her up, and threatens to slit her throat.

The two rogue cops appeared in a string of comical, tragical, preposterously violent novels, starting with 1959’s A Rage in Harlem (first published ias La Reine des Pomme as Serie noire #419), which won the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policière.

The titles of the books in the “Harlem cycle” (A Rage in Harlem; The Real Cool Killers; The Crazy Kill; All Shot Up; Run, Man, Run; The Big Gold Dream; The Heat’s On; Cotton Comes to Harlem and Blind Man with a Pistol), all written between 1957–1969, pretty much tell the story: Harlem is depicted as a surreal and at times nightmarish place, full of drugs, booze, sex and violence, where good people are constantly betrayed by their own greed or gullibility — or both. Con artists abound, often cloaked in the guise of respectability: clergymen, politicians and even funeral directors, such as H. Exodus Clay, who appears in several of the books. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger aren’t out to “clean up” their turf so much as just make sure nobody gets too hurt. So they let the gamblers and whores slide on by, but show no mercy to the strong arm men, dealers, scam artists and the like. They’re tough, but as Himes once said, “they never came down hard on anybody that was in the right.”

Not that there’s no light in these books — the brutality (and that’s what is is) is balanced by plenty of black (sorry) humour, and shrewd digressions on everything from music and soul food to politics and sexuality.

Well, except for Plan B, the bleak, viscious and frustratingly hard-to-find conclusion to the series that Himes started it in the late sixties, but died before completing. Only published in 1983, even now it’s hard to find, particularly in English, but even Spanish, French and German versions are pricey.

In the novel, Grave Digger, his head ringing with revolutionary rhetoric, murders Coffin Ed, only to be shot dead himself moments later. As Zach Vasquez notes on CrimeReads in April 2020, “Himes’s Harlem novels were always more violent, surreal and hard-edged than other ongoing detective series (his heroic duo would just as soon pistol whip a suspect to death as they would read him or her their rights), so this apocalyptic finale feels as inevitable as it is sudden, while also reflecting the author’s own political reawakening during the most violent period of the civil rights era.”

FILMS

A couple of attempts to capture Himes’ unique vision on film were made, with arguable results, right at the beginning (and possibly influencing) the seventies’ blaxploitation boom. Raymond St. Jacques played Coffin Ed and Godfrey Cambridge played Gravedigger in Cotton Comes To Harlem (1970) and Come Back, Charleston (1972), prefiguring Shaft, Super Fly and all the rest by a year or so. Fun, but played mostly for shuck-and-jive laughs.

1991’s A Rage in Harlem hovered closer to the source, really capturing the essence of Himes’ work and his world, despite George Wallace as Gravedigger and Wendell Pierce as Ed having relatively small parts.

“The movie has a nice period atmosphere, which is remarkable, since it was shot with Cincinnati doubling for Harlem,” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, “and it captures some of the texture of Himes’ novel, his love of characters who use their wits to outsmart each other. What’s best in the movie is the chemistry between Whitaker and (Robin) Givens, who is surprisingly effective in her first feature role.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A controversial figure even now, Himes continues to inspire moderm crime writers, in particular Walter Mosley, Robert Skinner and James Sallis, who have all acknowledged Himes’ influence, and all had their own detective fiction compared to Himes’ work.

But Himes’ life, like his fiction, is hard to pigeon hole. It was certainly eventful, and definitely colourful, and the two volumes of memoirs he left us, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976), don’t make it any easier to sort out the man and the myth. Despite achieving some early critical acclaim for a couple of post-war black protest novels, his literary career wasn’t really going anywhere until he moved to France and began writing crime fiction. Himes could be both insightful and infuriating, full of both raw contradictions and polished prose, brutally honest at times but occasionally self-serving as well, all of which makes him, like many other writers (Chandler and Hammett come immediately to mind) easier to respect as an artist than as a person. So, trust the art, not the artist.

But do yourself a favour — do read his books. They’re worth it.

THE EVIDENCE

UNDER OATH

THE HARLEM NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

 

ALSO OF INTEREST

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to John McDonagh for his valuable help on this one.

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