Himes was one of a kind. I forget how good he is sometimes,
then I dip back into one of his books and he stuns me again
with what he was doing. I don't see him being at all like
Spillane, though. Certainly he was encouraged to write like
Hammett, who's at the other end of the hardboiled
spectrum.
To be specific: Marcel Duhamel (La Serie Noire founder)
wanted Himes to write detective novels for him. Himes said he
didn't know anything about detective stories, he was a
serious writer. This was Duhamel's response:
"Get an idea. Start with action, somebody does something -- a
man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his
eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down
the hall ... Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like
motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of
consciousness at all. We don't give a damn who's thinking
what -- only what they're doing. Always doing something. From
one scene to another. Don't worry about it making sense.
That's for the end."
When Himes handed in his first 60 pages he was told that
there was still too much of the author in it. But he got
Duhamel's seal of approval second time of asking. And the
rest is history, as they say.
Here's a retrospective quote from Himes about the Harlem
novels.
"I was writing some strange shit. Some time before, I didn't
know when, my mind had rejected all reality as I had known it
and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery.
Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He
shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn
reality, I thought. All of reality was absurd, contradictory,
violent and hurting."
(info culled from the Sallis biography, btw).
Al
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Robison
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2007 8:06 PM
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Real Cool Killers
Just finished this today. A fairly decent
novel.
Totally outrageous and way hardboiled in a
Mickey
Spillane and Mike Hammer way. I can see why Haut
had
such a hard time dealing with Himes. Trying to
twist
the whole genre into a commentary on state crime
is
the equivalent of hammering a square peg into a
round
hole. My reading of hardboiled and noir sees
personal
accountability as a common theme.
miker
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