SOURCE: Muller, Gilbert H. “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Detective Fiction.” In Chester Himes, pp. 80-105. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

In the following essay, Muller traces the development of Himes's detective fiction.

Following his three novels tracing the vagaries of interracial sex—The Primitive, Pinktoes, and A Case of Rape—Himes abandoned both the confessional mode and conventional novelistic genres to erect a radically new fictive universe. Refining the absurd elements inherent in his confessional fiction, Himes created a series of novels centered almost exclusively in Harlem and dealing with the criminal world. With the gradual development of his archetypal black detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, he would devise an entirely new crime fiction genre—or antigenre—that places the black experience in America in a new ideological context.

When Jesse in The Primitive observes, “Good thing I read detective stories; wouldn't know what to...