In Murder Done to Death: Parody and Pastiche in Detective Fiction, John Kennedy Melling notes that Hammett's famous novel has been the subject of a number of parodies, including the overegged “Maltese Duck Caper.”Footnote 1 In this farcical rendition, the private eye replies that he is no stool pigeon when asked to reveal the location of the statuette. A Wilmer-like figure offers to make the shamus sing “like a canary,” and the fat man warns, “Watch it, Wrench … The kid's a snow bird and he's hopped. Let's talk turkey.”Footnote 2 This is certainly not the only strange bird to hatch in the black bird's nest. The Maltese Falcon (1930) inspired the first detective novels of both Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes, both of whom borrowed from Hammett's novel, using it as the starting point for their own ambitious projects, which in turn opened new narrative spaces for exploration.
Hammett's formative role in establishing the conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula is widely acknowledged, not least by Raymond Chandler in his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” but the formative influence of his masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, on specific texts by subsequent innovators has remained largely unexplored territory. For Chandler, Hammett's novel demonstrated the possibilities of detective fiction. “The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius,” Chandler wrote, “but an art which is capable of it is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better.”Footnote 3 Subsequent practitioners have defined that potential in different ways. Chandler saw Hammett's realism and his colloquial style as important achievements and sought, in his own work, to continue developing the expressive range of detective fiction. Paretsky reacted to the gender politics of the novel. And working from Hammett's existential insights, Himes pushed toward an exposure of the absurdities precipitated within a racist society. While Paretsky's feminism and Himes's black consciousness are often explored directly, an examination of their first novels in relation to The Maltese Falcon offers a unique perspective on their stylistic choices and the social perspectives these articulated.
In dealing with such innovative writers, it is incumbent upon critics to think beyond the standard approaches, those that look primarily through the lens of race and gender, when categorizing and critiquing their works. In Paretsky's case, an understanding of Du Boisian double consciousness facilitates a deeper analysis of the central role played by the narrator's voice in reversing the gendered perspective of the private-eye novel. Du Boisian double consciousness can certainly identify the presence of racial consciousness in Himes's work, but does not explain Himes's idiosyncratic stylistic choices or the dynamics resulting from their use. For this, it is necessary to examine Himes's surrealism and the narrative strategies he shares with Nathaniel West, a friend of Dashiell Hammett's. Thus comparisons with Hammett's novel reveal the striking similarities and differences in Paretsky's and Himes's respective stylistic responses to a similar issue – social marginalization. The distance these two writers have travelled from Hammett's novel is also suggestive – of the rich possibilities inherent in their common starting point, a richness of possibility apprehended by Chandler.
Both Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes have paid tribute to Hammett's influence, with particular reference to The Maltese Falcon. Despite her somewhat ironic tribute to Hammett in her own parody, “The Maltese Cat,” Paretsky has acknowledged that “if Sam Spade had never existed, neither would VI Warshawski,” commenting, “Whether we write in imitation or reaction to Spade's world, we are all in one way or another standing in his shadow.”Footnote 4 Himes told Michel Fabre in a 1983 interview that he had decided to become a writer while still in prison after reading the serialized version of The Maltese Falcon. In another, earlier interview, Himes said that Hammett “was the only mystery writer who mattered” to him up until the time he wrote For the Love of Imabelle.Footnote 5 Marcel Duhamel, who commissioned this novel for the Série Noire, particularly recommended Hammett as a model. According to Himes, Duhamel called Hammett “the greatest writer who ever lived.”Footnote 6
GENDER POLITICS AND STYLISTIC INNOVATION
“When I read The Maltese Falcon,” Sara Paretsky commented in her introduction for the Folio Club edition, “I see … a world of dangerous female sexuality which Hammett found so terrifying that he needed to destroy it.”Footnote 7 In creating her own private investigator, Paretsky wanted to present “a rebuttal of Brigid O'Shaughnessy.” Her ambition was to create a heroine “who could, like Sam Spade, be a physical, sexual person without being evil.”Footnote 8 Paretsky's initial impulse was to invert Hammett's scenario. She considered presenting “a female private eye into whose midnight office, lit only by the blinking neon sign outside, would walk a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped mysterious man.”Footnote 9 This Adonis and seeming good guy would eventually be revealed as the principle villain. In Indemnity Only (1982), VI's client is hardly eye candy for the female imagination; he is short, stocky and aggressive. But, like Brigid, he is duplicitous and evasive.
Before beginning Indemnity Only, Paretsky worked for two years developing a very hard-boiled heroine, Minerva Daniels.Footnote 10 Recognizing that such a direct exchange of roles would lead to an unsustainable parody, she abandoned Minerva and changed her strategy. In the opening scene of Indemnity Only, Paretsky is, nonetheless, writing against reader expectations. No mention is made of her private eye's gender until the subject is raised by V.I.'s client. The suitability of V.I.'s vocation is then addressed very directly for the benefit of both client and reader.
Paretsky, like Hammett, is interested in individual motivation and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. She is particularly concerned with intergenerational responsibilities – and conflict. But instead of third-person narration, Paretsky chose to use her detective as narrator, enabling her to court reader identification with her character, to explore her private eye's perceptions and reactions directly, and to provide her heroine with greater emotional depth. What mattered to her, Paretsky has said, was voice, not action.Footnote 11 The narrative voice she employs allows her to reverse the gendered perspective without descending into parody. The female gaze is suggested by the attention given to how Warshawski will dress for different activities; by her awareness of the way men wear their clothes and the information this conveys about their self-image, income, and status; by her consciousness of her own body, its appearance, sensations, strengths and weaknesses; and by her ready acknowledgment of fear, vulnerability and insecurity.Footnote 12
Paretsky captures the complex assessments that stand behind women's actions when, for example, V. I. arrives very late for her first dinner date with Ralph Devereux in Indemnity Only, having been beaten up by a local mobster. She has soaked in the tub to try to keep her muscles pliable, dressed in loose-fitting clothes judged dressy enough for the chosen restaurant and comfortable enough to be tolerable, and applied as much makeup as she dares to cover the cuts and bruises on her swollen face. When Ralph gives her a hug, she cries out in pain. Acutely aware of how the situation must appear to him, she attempts to defuse the anticipated anger. Somewhat mollified, Ralph is still too annoyed and preoccupied to notice that she has been hurt until she starts shivering. He offers to put his arms around her and she accepts, but tells him to do it gently. It is then that he notices her face for the first time. Anger turns to sympathy, with his annoyance redirected at the waiters. Again, V. I. steps in, acknowledging Ralph's feelings while trying to ensure that the situation does not escalate; she takes some of the blame for his annoyance upon herself.Footnote 13
As this implies, the feminine character of V.I.'s voice is conveyed, principally, through its double consciousness, a complex perspective that observes the self from within and without, in relation to multiple subjectivities. Unlike the male point of view, such a perspective does not look at the world from a fixed center, assessing others in terms of the needs of the self. Female double consciousness acknowledges expectations, preconceptions and prejudices and takes account of the role these play in social and interpersonal interactions. It is akin to the racial double consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk.Footnote 14 Like racial double consciousness, feminine double consciousness is produced by the jarring discrepancies between a limited, socially sanctioned identity (the housewife, the career woman) and the individual's sense of the full range of her own talents and potential.
The gender politics of Hammett's novel were important to Chester Himes as well. Like Paretsky, he found Hammett's femme fatale striking, but for a very different reason. In an interview with David Jenkins, Himes commented, “The Maltese Falcon made a great impression on me. It was the first story in which a woman got sent to prison.”Footnote 15 In For the Love of Imabelle (1957), Imabelle is clearly another Brigid in her shifting loyalties; her pouting, assumed mask of vulnerability; and her practised exploitation of her sexual allure.Footnote 16 The fear of female sexuality that Paretsky identified in Hammett's novel becomes “male hysteria” in Himes's.Footnote 17 Throughout his oeuvre, the importance and pervasiveness of this fear is demonstrated by Himes's depiction of women and the brutality they unleash in men. Norlisha Crawford suggests that Himes's female characters reveal the social distortions that have constructed them, that they therefore carry more political significance than the traditional femme fatale.Footnote 18 But in Hammett's novel, Brigid's characterization also exposes and critiques the social forces that have produced her. Himes, Crawford argues, “wants the reader to see the intricate ways that racism and racist practices influence and shape the conduct and corruption that become combined forces of commerce and self-interest in his female characters' work lives.”Footnote 19 Substituting “capitalism” for “racism” would provide an apt description of Hammett's strategy, for Hammett emphasizes Brigid's willingness to commodify and use all her assets (knowledge, connections and influence, her person) as currency for exchange.
Hammett and Himes use different descriptive techniques to achieve their critiques, however. Gone is Brigid's “tall and pliantly slender” elegance.Footnote 20 Himes presents a caricature, “a cushioned-lipped, hot-bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled-brown eyes of a teaser and the high-arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural-born amante.”Footnote 21 Himes draws attention to the male gaze itself, exposing its selectivity in a way in which Hammett's description does not. In this regard, Himes's writing can usefully be compared to the stylistic techniques employed by Nathaniel West in The Day of the Locust: “She had a pretty, eighteen-year-old face and a thirty-five-year-old neck that was veined and sinewy.”Footnote 22 Like Mrs. Schwartzen, Imabelle is assembled rather than described. West and Himes dismember and exaggerate, deconstructing, however unselfconsciously, the dehumanizing male gaze and moving the text from social realism to surrealism.
Admittedly, the relationship between Jackson and Imabelle is less nuanced. Jackson is the sole victim of Imabelle's attractions, and the only one taken in by the confidence tricks of her confederates. The significance of Jackson's deception is thus presented, on the surface, as an individual defect. But Jackson's deception has a wider social significance, for he is absurd in a way that carries a distinct political valence. Like Spade, he is endangered by narratives that would define him, narratives generated by the femme fatale. But the identity Jackson accepts is, more significantly, constructed for him by a racist society. Unlike Spade, Jackson does not penetrate the mystifying narratives that prescribe his actions and so can neither see nor evade any metaphorical falling beams.
CRITIQUING SOCIETY: A RANGE OF APPROACHES
Hammett embraced the assumed social realism of the hard-boiled genre, capitalizing on his own experience as a Pinkerton Op to validate the authenticity of his work. An MBA from the University of Chicago and experience of working for CNA Insurance gave Paretsky a similar claim of writing from experience, while opening very different territory for exploration. Paretsky's detective is a specialist in financial fraud who continually exposes the exploitation, dishonesty and greed inherent in financial institutions. Earlier crime fiction, as Paretsky has noted, was often focussed on “highly personal stories: missing persons, entanglements or the violent school with a lot of random shooting.” But the insidious nature of white collar crime and the vast amounts of money involved meant that financial criminality “could inflict so much more damage than someone who's shooting a Saturday night special on the street.”Footnote 23
Paretsky charts the harm done to society when the culture of corporate enterprise becomes preeminent, distorting values and priorities, and she redefines the ethos of corporate “team players” as willed, blind loyalty or criminal collusion. In Indemnity Only, Yardley Masters's criminality is effectively masked by his corporate position – one that confers respectability and deference, invokes the protective instincts of the corporation, and enables him to call down favors from other members of the corporate elite, such as John Thayer. Ralph Devereux's inability to conceive of his boss's criminality almost costs his life. Perhaps more telling and suggestive of her practice in later books is her treatment of the union leader, Andrew McGraw, a man whose idealism and socialist principles are eroded by the realpolitik of labor strife while his rise to leadership within the union gives him a feeling of unrestrained financial entitlement. McGraw's culpability is therefore of a kind that implicates the social forces that have shaped him at least as strongly as the individual choices for which he later accepts responsibility. It is highly suggestive that the core evidence of criminal collusion is a photocopy of an “Agreement of Trust” signed by an insurance executive, the vice president of a bank in charge of the trust division, and the head of the Knifegrinder's Union. In contrast to The Maltese Falcon, which emphasizes the divisive nature of competitive individualism, Indemnity Only develops the logic of the financial trust as a fictive family where the trustees, or parent figures, manage the assets of the corporation for the benefit of the stockholders, or “children,” exposing the conflict of interests and values concealed by the metaphor.Footnote 24 In her opposition to the values and practices of the “system,” Paretsky's first book also bears the hallmarks of the generational politics of the 1960s; her portrayal of Peter Thayer and Anita McGraw equates youth with a commitment to social justice and egalitarian values that critique the status quo defended by their elders.
Paretsky adopts the social realism of Hammett, but pulls it in a different direction; Himes, on the other hand, as Jonathan Eburne has pointed out, writes against both the stylistic manner and philosophical assumptions of social realism.Footnote 25 He positions himself not so much in direct opposition to Hammett as in sly opposition to Richard Wright. Clearly Himes rejects the brand of social realism used in protest literature both “as a standard of racial authenticity” and “as a means of achieving political influence through literary representation.”Footnote 26 Himes seems to be siding here with James Baldwin, who commented that the “failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”Footnote 27 Himes's black humor and assumed indifference repel the sentimental identification – and appropriation – that plague protest literature. Himes seems to have understood that such protest writing transforms the ostensible beneficiary into a perpetual victim while affirming the agency and positive self-image of the benevolent reformer. His response was to expose and destabilize the sympathetic regard central to the rhetoric of reform. “Maybe it was an unconscious protest against soul brothers always being considered as victims of racism, a protest against racism itself excusing all their sins and major faults,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, referring to For the Love of Imabelle. Black criminals were, he commented, “as vicious, cruel and dangerous as any other criminals … The only difference being they were absurd.”Footnote 28
While banker's daughters might still weep over Bigger Thomas, there is little danger they could weep over Jackson.Footnote 29 In a scene that recalls Bigger's confrontation with the rat at the opening of Native Son (1940), Jackson wakes to find himself face to face with a rodent. Unlike the pitched battle in Native Son, the “rat looked at Jackson and he looked at the rat.”Footnote 30 The rat vanishes as the house begins shaking from the train's passage. Jackson runs, returning to the stolen hearse too late to save Goldy, who has been murdered with as much savage rage as Bigger's rat.
The absurdity of Jackson's world does not detract from its barbarity. Himes places Jackson in a world as exploitative and callously brutal as that of either Native Son or The Maltese Falcon.Footnote 31 Social institutions, such as the police or the church, are hostile, corrupt and/or irrelevant.Footnote 32 Support networks, such as those depicted in Paretsky's Indemnity Only, are nonexistent. All Jackson can do is to run toward impossible domestic bliss and away from inescapable dangers. When he turns back into Harlem, realizing that he is “down in the white world with no place to go,” he recoils from a mental boundary even more firmly fixed than the geographical color line he fears to transgress, despite the host of social taboos and laws he has already broken.Footnote 33 Spade's competence is replaced by Jackson's blind complicity in his own oppression.
While Spade refuses to play the sap for Brigid despite the strong attraction he feels, Jackson is too “square” to realize that he is Imabelle's dupe. He is, as Himes explained, so square he has five corners; the working title of For the Love of Imabelle was “The Five Cornered Square.”Footnote 34 As with the Brigid–Spade match, Jackson's relationship with his “woman” is used to suggest the consequences – in a world dominated by self-interest – of accepting a role prescribed by another. Brigid and Spade's maneuvering suggest the way exchange values corrupt interpersonal relationships under capitalism. The battle to control and define their relationship is also used to explore the instability of signification. The Flitcraft parable recounted to Brigid demonstrates Spade's keen awareness of the power – and limitations – of narrative to impose order, to set expectations, and to define roles. Through the Flitcraft parable, Hammett exposes the individual's existential dilemma and acknowledges the attractions of a retreat from chaos/freedom into the comforting fiction of assigned meaning.Footnote 35 Hammett uses Spade to demonstrate the power of creative authorship in a world that operates on the assumption that narratives are definitive and meanings fixed. Spade recognizes his ability to act freely in a world without ultimate meaning and so becomes the author of the narratives that define him. But Jackson does not and cannot. Himes thus approaches the same issues, but in a way that demonstrates the cost to the individual of blind complicity.
THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE
Paretsky's concern with gender and empowerment ensured that she would approach violence from a very different perspective than either Hammett or Himes. In Indemnity Only, the violence itself is defined in gendered terms. Earl's threat to scar her “so good that no one will ever want to look at your face again,” more than physical pain, suggests the violation of her self-image as a physically attractive woman. The lascivious look that one of the toughs gives her while his partner holds her down suggests an even more brutal form of violation.Footnote 36 This threat of rape is never realized, but Paretsky's detective does suffer symbolic violation when the domestic space of her apartment and office are torn apart. After using the threat of rape in Indemnity Only, Paretsky abandoned the practice, making a conscious decision on political grounds not “to permit rape or the threat of it to figure either as part of the storyline or in VI's head.”Footnote 37 Paretsky wanted to avoid blending sex and violence in a way that pandered to male power-oriented sensationalism that objectifies women. As she recognized, rape and the threat of rape are used as a weapon to render women powerless. “So if your character is making decisions based on fear then you're really saying – they've won, they can control you,” Paretsky argues. “And I won't have that.”Footnote 38
In The Maltese Falcon, Spade taunts Gutman with his inability to be threatened effectively. “If you try anything I don't like I won't stand for it,” Spade says. “I'll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can't afford to kill me.”Footnote 39 Paretsky borrows Spade's toughness for her detective, with its implicit recognition of potential victimization. Like Spade, V. I. refuses to be intimidated; she will not allow her social positioning as victim to define herself or her options.Footnote 40 After assessing a situation in which she finds herself confronted by Earl and two of his thugs, V. I. concludes that it would be better “to get it over with quickly and get out, rather than let him go on for hours.” She responds to Earl's approach by kicking him “squarely in the crotch.” As a result, V. I. receives a fast, vicious beating from Earl's flunky.Footnote 41 Paretsky's detective, like Spade, takes the initiative. Paretsky's handling of this scene not only allows her to present her detective as a subject, but also reveals the dynamics that would position V. I. as victim. The result, in keeping with the politics of Second Wave Feminism, is an exposure of the social dynamics, the sexual politics, of violence against women.Footnote 42 Paretsky also gives voice to the rage that violence produces, an acknowledgment that is also designed to be empowering. When V. I. returns to find her apartment trashed, she admits, “I was consumed with anger, the anger one has when victimized and unable to fight back.”Footnote 43
In the Harlem created by Himes, violence is both more intense and more unreal. In For the Love of Imabelle, reality is refracted through the revelatory unselfconsciousness of a dream-like state, allowing physical descriptions to become expressionistic representations of consciousness that blend physical reality with a sense of the nonrational reactions triggered by places and events. Thus, when Jackson tries to escape arrest after the melee at the gang's hideout by the river, he seems almost immobile. Descriptions take on the quality of a bad dream as Himes slows the forward action while intensifying the suspense. Jackson “churned his knees in a froth of panic,” but this “didn't increase his speed.”Footnote 44 When he hijacks a junkman's cart for his getaway, the horse moves “in slow motion, like a motion picture slowed down, its legs moving with each step as though floating slowly through the air.”Footnote 45 Jackson's desperation and frustration are effectively communicated, drawing the reader into an identification with this naive, shallow character. And identification with this ineffectual buffoon is not a terribly comfortable experience for the reader who must follow Jackson as he moves within the predatory, rapacious city. Himes offers an unforgettable and oft-quoted description of the savagery of Harlem:
Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, [is] a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.Footnote 46
Although some critics, such as Raymond Nelson, Angus Calder, and Stephen Miliken, emphasize Himes's realistic descriptions of Harlem, with their careful attention to detail, James Sallis is closer to the mark when he praises Himes's construction of “a world unto itself – not Harlem, certainly, but a response to Harlem.”Footnote 47
Himes uses a narrator whose awareness of the vicious dynamics of Harlem contrasts sharply with Jackson's naivety, his “squareness.” In The Maltese Falcon, the sensibility of the narrator is very firmly aligned with that of Spade, and the novel's ethical ambiguity results from conflicting evidence objectively presented. In For the Love of Imabelle, it is not ambiguity but incongruity that confronts a reader simultaneously aware of Jackson's perspective and that of the more knowing narrator. The strong sense of incongruity is reinforced by the character of Goldy, Jackson's twin brother, a drug addict who masquerades as a Sister of Mercy, begging and selling tickets to heaven while operating as a stool pigeon for the cops. Goldy is an effective foil for the protagonist; his judgments of Jackson echo those of the narrator while his actions suggest the rapacity and duplicity necessary to thrive in Harlem. But the sucker Jackson survives and wins Imabelle, at least temporarily, while Goldy is ultimately the victim of his own calculating mendacity and greed, further destabilizing simplistic judgments.
Goldy's murder, presented through an extended collage, provides the novel's climax and turning point. A train, whistle blasting, signals simultaneity and inclusion as the collage is built. Goldy's throat is cut just as the whistle sounds. He and Jackson have driven into the most deprived and violent section of Harlem, “known in the underworld as the Bucket-of-Blood”:Footnote 48
Goldy's scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls. Shaking plaster from the ceilings, mortar from between the bricks of the building walls. Shaking the rats between the walls, the cockroaches crawling over kitchen sinks and leftover food; shaking the sleeping flies hibernating in lumps like bees behind the casings of the windows. Shaking the fat, blood-filled bedbugs crawling over black skin. Shaking the fleas, making them hop. Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets, the sleeping cats, the clogged toilets, loosening the filth.Footnote 49
As the train whistle blends with Goldy's scream, Jackson wakes to confront the rat. “The thunder of the train filled the room, froze the shaking man and shaking rat in a death-like trance.” The whistle is like the sound of “a stuck pig running through the corn patch with the knife still in it.”Footnote 50 The train also passes Imabelle as she slashes a would-be rapist with a switch-blade: “The train overtook them, thundered by overhead, shaking the earth, shaking her running ass, shaking the blood from his wounds like scattered rain drops.”Footnote 51 As the collage develops, it pulls together simultaneous scenes and strands of suggestive images. Unity is provided by the train, the “shaking,” and the images redolent of poverty, deprivation, and sloth. The whistles and Goldy, sirens and Imabelle's scream blend the human with the inanimate, blurring the line between authentic communication and the mechanical reproduction of sound. There are visual linkages as well, with red linking passion and death, overlaying the physical with the emotional. Red is the color of Imabelle's dress, tongue, and lips; Jodie's burnt red hair and the “red ball of murder” he feels before slitting Goldy's throat; the eyes of Jackson, Big Fats, and the rat; the blinking lights of the police cars; and all the blood that flows. Himes's use of collage is reminiscent of The Day of the Locust, where Tod Hackett's painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles,” anticipates and interprets the final riot.Footnote 52 Himes would later use collage as the structuring principle for Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).
Himes famously referred to the “straightforward violence” of the detective story and commented that “Americans live by violence, and violence achieves – regardless of what anyone says, regardless of the distaste of the white community – its own ends.”Footnote 53 In The Maltese Falcon, brutality is used to suggest the essential violence, both emotional and physical, of capitalism. In For the Love of Imabelle, violence is an “indicator of a world gone awry due to racism.”Footnote 54 A direct comparison is instructive. When Spade disarms Cairo, his actions are described move by move, in a manner characteristic of Hammett's prose:
Spade's elbow dropped as Spade spun to the right. Cairo's face jerked back not far enough: Spade's right heel on the patent-leathered toes anchored the smaller man in the elbow's path. The elbow struck him beneath the cheek-bone, staggering him so that he must have fallen had he not been held by Spade's foot on his foot.Footnote 55
Hammett uses the objective technique to illustrate the violence of the milieu Spade inhabits and to demonstrate Spade's matter-of-fact acceptance of and competent participation in that world.Footnote 56 Hammett slows time, emphasizing Spade's calculated brutality.
While Hammett's narrator follows Spade closely, Himes's descriptions of violence are disassociated from any particular character's point of view, firmly repelling any potential act of identification or sentimental engagement. Instead of describing the fight in slow motion as Hammett does, Himes's description seems to accelerate the action:
Coffin Ed slapped Gus on the cheek with his open palm. Gus's tight-fitting hat sailed off and he spun toward Grave Digger, who slapped him on the other cheek and spun him back toward Coffin Ed. They slapped him fast, from one to another, like batting a ping-pong ball.Footnote 57
In Himes, the level of violence bears no relation to the action that precipitates it. When Gus is treated as a ping-pong ball, the brutality seems motiveless and absurd, taking Himes's handling of violence close to that of West; in The Day of the Locust, Earle's sudden transition “from apathy to action without the usual transition” shows the mechanical response of a character devoid of self-awareness.Footnote 58
Himes's depiction of violence as a means of self-expression for the “inarticulate masses of Harlem” reveals the close link between the otherwise inexpressible feelings of the politically unaware and the violence that provides a self-defeating outlet for their frustration.Footnote 59 As Andrew Pepper points out, it is a frustration born of Coffin Ed's and Grave Digger's position as servants of the white man's law in a black ghetto that helps to explain their rage and brutality.Footnote 60 The violence is even more politically charged than this suggests, however. As Denning points out, it illustrates Fanon's concept of colonial violence, where an oppressed subgroup vents its violence on fellow sufferers rather than on the oppressors.Footnote 61 The futile nature of such misdirected violence is bitterly comic in its absurdity, for individuals, however malevolent, are largely ineffectual. In For the Love of Imabelle, during a knife fight in a bar, two assailants slash at one another. The “big lipped wound” that opens in one combatant's tight leather jacket bleeds nothing “but old clothes.” A counterslash opens a wound that releases dried printer's ink from “layers of old newspapers.” It is not blood, but warmth that is lost.Footnote 62 The futility of unorganized violence was an important issue for Himes, as the “Preface” for Blind Man with a Pistol indicates.Footnote 63 In a letter to John Williams dated 8 March 1969, Himes would comment that “unorganized violence is stupid, pointless, and makes us more vulnerable than we are.”Footnote 64
In the collage, Goldy's death is pathetic, unheroic, and without meaning. The blood “spurted”; it “gleamed”; it “dulled.” “The flesh of the wide bloody wound turned back like bleeding lips, frothing blood.” The blood has a “sweet sickish perfume” that mingles with the “crap-smelling street.” Goldy's killer steps back to avoid the blood, letting “the dying body flop on its back to the pavement, jerking and twisting inside the black gown in death convulsions as though having a frantic sex culmination with an unseen mate.”Footnote 65 As Denning points out, in Himes's detective fiction “bodies become objects, and the attacks of violence on that body are little different than the destruction of buildings or automobiles.”Footnote 66 In the description of Goldy's death, more attention is lavished on the blood than on the person. While the inanimate becomes active, the person is stripped of agency, recalling West's description of the battle of Waterloo in The Day of the Locust. As the scenery collapses, nails “screamed with agony” and the “sound of ripping canvas was like that of little children whimpering.”Footnote 67 “The men of the gallant Seventy-fifth Highlanders were lifted out of the wreck with block and tackle.”Footnote 68 Such grotesque humor strips man of his dignity. But Himes's treatment of violence is more varied and nuanced than has been recognized. Within the novel, violence is multipurpose, creating suspense and atmosphere, acting as a survival tactic and a mode of communication, and dictating a particular set of stylistic techniques expressive of a particular ideology of violence.Footnote 69 Himes uses techniques associated with the surrealists to reveal the absurd, the grotesque, and the incongruous, inviting a more complex reaction to and assessment of the violence depicted.Footnote 70
NARRATIVE STRATEGY AND CRITICAL RECEPTION
In For the Love of Imabelle and Indemnity Only, Himes and Paretsky have appropriated and transformed characters, aspects of the plot, a social milieu, and in Himes's case a deadpan style from The Maltese Falcon. Where Hammett explores social corruption, Paretsky focusses on the misuse of power. Politically, while exposing injustice, Paretsky uses her fiction to promote liberal–humanist values.Footnote 71 As Margaret Kinsman, David Schmid, and many subsequent critics have noted, these values are mapped onto the city of Chicago as networks of support, establishing a surrogate family that counters and critiques the false, corporate families of financial intrigue and exploitation.Footnote 72 For this agenda, Spade's moral ambiguity and existential insight are cast aside. V.I.'s quest is different too. The materialistic allure of the bejeweled bird is replaced by V.I.'s efforts to find and protect the missing daughter of a corrupt Union boss before this college student can be located and murdered by the mob. In Indemnity Only, Hammett's fabulous statuette becomes a lost fledgling.
Like Hammett, Himes exposes the power that discourse exerts in limiting the range of what is conceivable. But ultimately the political agendas of the two writers are very different, and the narrative strategies that Himes develops not only diverge from Hammett's social realism, but do so in ways that were typical of the climate of Parisian intellectual culture at that time, a culture itself preoccupied by the work of American writers like Hammett.Footnote 73 Indeed, as Oliver Belas hints, Himes and the French surrealists travelled parallel paths toward a surrealism engendered by the disorientation, disbelief, and anger precipitated by, on the one hand, American racism and, on the other, the “torture, compromise, and collaboration” of the Second World War. But by the mid-1950s, the grounds of interpretative engagement for French intellectuals had shifted from the surrealism associated with Duhamel and Breton to the existentialism of Sartre; it is worth noting, therefore, that it was at the time of this shift that Himes fully embraced surrealism.Footnote 74
Himes apprehended, on some level, that surrealism offered a more radical and subversive response to racism than the social realism associated with protest literature.Footnote 75 His use of literary strategies associated with surrealism enabled the depiction of a worldview in which, as Himes commented, “reality and absurdity are so intertwined in the black man's life that they are virtually indistinguishable.”Footnote 76 The surrealistic character of Himes's detective fiction has been noted, particularly by Eburne, but the stylistic techniques expressive of the surrealistic approach have not been explored.Footnote 77 During an interview with John A. Williams, Himes commented that it was important for black writers to develop their own, individual narrative style. He said that he would like to produce “a novel that just drains a person's subconscious of all his attitudes and reactions to everything.” Himes felt that such a project would possess an intrinsic unity. “Just let it come out as it is, let it come out as the words generate in the mind, let it come out in the phrasing of the subconscious and let it become a novel in that form.”Footnote 78 Himes did not feel that he ever had produced, or ever would produce, such a novel, but his goal is revealingly similar to the surrealists' ideal, articulated by André Breton in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), of expressing the thought process “in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral control.”Footnote 79 Breton advocated automatism as a way of approaching this, but Himes's style is much too finely crafted to be consistent with this practice. Nonetheless, the fusion that Himes achieves in his descriptions between the physical world and his characters' reactions to it is very close to Breton's quest for a “surreality” where dream and reality become fused “into a kind of absolute reality.”Footnote 80 Himes's use of collage, his destabilizing use of humor, his strategic employment of violence, his juxtaposition of differing perspectives, and his emphatic use of the incongruous to attack the integrity and legitimacy of social institutions are central to Himes's project as well as to that of the surrealists. As Amanda Stansell has noted, the surrealists pursued an anticolonial agenda in France, using strategies that helped to destabilize racial categories and racist assumptions.Footnote 81 One such strategy was juxtaposition:
The Surrealists apparently intended this practice to combine contradictions and avoid rational categories. The result, however, privileges a complex logic that is neither fixed nor entirely ambiguous. Since the materials the artist uses are taken from other contexts, they never lose their associations with those cultural arenas and are not easily integrated into the artwork; both the former context and the new one remain in play. Conceptual categories therefore appear culturally constructed, yet unfixed, and such fragmentation requires the audience to reconstruct, consciously or unconsciously, the meaning of the artwork.Footnote 82
As Stansell points out, it is the interpretative role demanded of the reader that makes juxtaposition a politically viable strategy for raising awareness of socially constructed categories. When set within the claustrophobic, menacing world that he evokes, Himes's flattened caricatures and absurd discontinuities acquire considerable political resonance. As Kevin Bell points out, it is the radical discontinuities of Himes's approach to writing that “expose and eviscerate the American culture industry that produces ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ and other categories of cultural identity solely in order to exploit them.”Footnote 83 It was just this radically disruptive effect that enabled Himes to provide a model for subsequent African American and African crime novelists.Footnote 84
It is interesting that a book as charged with the politics of race as For the Love of Imabelle rarely confronts the topic directly. “You're a disgrace to the race,” Jackson tells the drunken Big Fats, annoyed by his interference. Jackson's comment displays a racial pride that is itself defined by the interests of the white world, but Jackson's meaning is lost on Big Fats, who replies, “What race, Little Brother. You want to race?” When Big Fats does apprehend Jackson's meaning, his response suggests both the irrational nature of debates about racial equality and the extent to which black self-image is shaped by white discourses: “You mean to say you'd let ‘em trust you with they woman?”Footnote 85 This indirection is typical of Himes. Given his use of two black policemen as the nominal detective heroes, the number of references to white cops in the novel is surprising, but these white cops act as a constant reminder of the role whites play in policing black Harlem, thus suggesting that the status quo defended by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed is imposed on the community from without. His indirection and surrealistic narrative strategy demand that the white reader participate in a worldview that reflects back the terms of that reader's privileged existence. “For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen,” Jean Paul Sartre noted in “Black Orpheus.” “Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind.”Footnote 86 The social realism of protest literature is much more comfortable for a white reader in so far as it offers, as Toni Morrison has pointed out, a recognition, if not a celebration, of white power.Footnote 87
Himes's narrative strategy is both a success and a failure. Paretsky, writing within the grain of a type of social realism associated with both protest literature and hard-boiled detective fiction, achieved early recognition. Himes, writing against the grain, did not. The long neglect – by American critics – of Himes's first detective novel undoubtedly has a number of different components. David Schmid argues that the neglect of Himes's fiction is due, in part, to its misanthropy, misogyny, and homophobia; to his eclipse by Richard Wright's status as representative African American protest writer; and to a more general hostility within the academy toward popular literature and detective fiction.Footnote 88 David Schmid may well be correct in his assessment, but I find the discomfort caused by Himes's narrative strategy to offer an equally compelling explanation. The extent to which Himes reflects back the privileged status of whites as seen by a black gaze is clearly relevant. But one also needs to consider the public's reaction to Nathaniel West's employment of similar narrative techniques. West fared little better. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, he complained that he was disliked by the “radical press,” by “the literature boys,” and by “lending library touts.” He wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, “Somehow or other, I seem to have slipped in between all the ‘schools’ [of writing].”Footnote 89 Himes suffered a very similar fate, as critics worked to position him as a protest writer, an African American author in the vernacular tradition, or a detective-story writer. It is telling that the detective novels that confront racial politics most overtly, such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), novels which can therefore be most directly related to Himes's protest writing, have received the most critical attention. Himes's work is inexplicable if treated solely within such categories. For both Himes and West, techniques allied to surrealism effectively disrupted and destabilized important, socially privileged discourses – and discomforted audiences and wrong-footed critics. In this respect, Himes's text is certainly a strange bird. Nonetheless, Himes, like Paretsky, found the starting point he needed in The Maltese Falcon. “Everyone who reads Hammett seems to read their own needs into his work,” Paretsky has remarked.Footnote 90 So what we have here in the novels of Hammett, Himes and Paretsky is, essentially, three ways of looking at a black bird.
