>Steven,
>
>>It seems that I've read somewhere that
Hines'
>>fictional Harlem had much more in common with
the
>>Cleveland that he had experience with than the
real
>>Harlem. Can't remeber where I read that at
the
>>moment though.
>>
>>
Two things about Himes. First he was rather educated
(University level) and considered himself as a "real"
professional writer (proof were his novels before the Harlem
cycle). Even if he had some street and prison experience, I
cannot see him has a "street writer", mixed in a sub-class
with the occasional or
"primitive " writers basing all, or close to all, their
fiction on their own street and/or underworld experience,
having been themselves often at the outskirts of the law
limits. Second: he came only later to crime fiction, and do
not forget that he wrote most of his Harlem cycle when he was
in Europe (France for the first one), so the real Harlem was
really distant. Maybe he choose Harlem just to be sure that
foreign readers (published in France first, in Gallimard's
Serie Noire, starting in *1958*) understood that the stories
were totally immersed in the world of the Blacks. On the
other hand IMO it does not matter that his Harlem was
fictionalized, the important thing about the cycle was that a
Black writer made atypical fiction of quality- even if it was
linked to mystery lit. and when compared to it- about certain
aspects of the Black people's social life and underworld.
Not, once more, naturalistic novels about Blacks.
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
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