Post Harlem Shuffle– the Uses of Mystery

A number of famous folk have been turning out mysteries and thrillers lately. Both Clintons have published political thrillers with a little help from James Patterson and Louise Penny, while double Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead has produced Harlem Shuffle. Technically this is an historical novel that wraps a portrait of Harlem in the turbulent early 1960's around a heist scheme and a revenge plot. Our guide through this tangle of events is one Ray Carney, a good man, a faithful husband, a devoted dad, who, as the novel puts it, was "only slightly bent when it came to being crooked."

If the inhabitants of Whitehead's much praised The Underground Railroad were light on characterization and heavy on allegorical import, Ray is a man in full, hopeful, contradictory, vengeful, generous, and clever. In a word, complicated.

And he'd better be. Harlem in the '60's was a complicated place. New York City as a whole has never suffered from an excess of good government, and the Black city within the city was no exception. Stratified by wealth and color, impoverished by bias in nearly every facet of life, poorly educated, badly housed, and beset by crime, Harlem's vibrancy, creativity and vitality came despite danger and corruption.

Ray knows all about that. He owns a small furniture store, supplying a variety of new and used sofas and dinette sets, recliners and lamps. Much of his clientele buys on time and their payments are not always timely. Worse, the whole city appears to run on bribes to white cops and protection money to black gangsters or, in the lingo of the times, on the circulation of  "the envelopes."

With money going out the door, it is no surprise that Ray, whose late father, Big Mike, was a career criminal, does not look too closely at the source of the second hand radios, TV's, and appliances that cross his path. Indeed, shortly after the novel begins, what was happenstance begins to seem like fencing in earnest, thanks to his charming but feckless cousin Freddie. 

Freddie hangs out with the likes of Miami Joe, an ambitious but maybe unreliable thief, and Pepper, an ultra professional hitman. One foolish thing leads to another with Freddie, who involves his sensible but devoted cousin with Chink Montague, the big mobster of the moment.

If that is not complication enough, Ray is simultaneously attempting to move up the social ladder. He wants to grow his business and handle really quality furniture. He also wants to improve his standing with his snobby in-laws, disdainful of both his impoverished background and his dark skin.

Colson Whitehead

His attempt to join the Dumas Club, the prime organization for Black movers and shakers, provides more than he bargained for, namely another route to the underbelly of Harlem. There characters like Cheap Brucie and Miss Laura have interesting connections with the cream of Harlem society, presenting both danger and opportunity.

Soon Ray is juggling any number of tricky situations, endangering his marriage by flirting with criminality and endangering his life by making enemies of both outright mobsters and the seemingly legit, some of whom are white. His path through these dangers presents a picture of a society under extreme pressure. Riots that he understands 100% threaten hard-won prosperity, while the corruption that saps the economy of Harlem also provides a vital source of income.

It clearly takes a man of Ray Carney's particular talents and background to survive. His decent impulses and work ethic are as essential as his ingenuity and ability to compartmentalize, driving the novel, along with his imprudent loyalty to Freddie, the brother he never had, the companion of his youth and the spark plug of innumerable adventures.

Coffin Ed & Grave Digger Jones

Go back in time to the Sixties. The Police Action in Korea was over and the Vietnam Conflict was going full bore. Riots raged in the streets of many major U.S. cities, for one reason or another. Political agendas were being pushed by every group that thought they had the solution for everybody else. People believed anything was possible, even while poverty dragged at the lower classes. Change was blowing in the wind but still had a long ways to go.

Now find your way to Harlem, above 110th Street, in Manhattan. This is no longer the glitz, glamour and jazz culture of the Roaring Twenties Harlem when cash and booze flowed freely. This is the afterwards Harlem of decaying tenant buildings, corrupt officials, hard to get money and the erection of instant slums. Booze still flowed in bars, after hours joints and house rent parties, but now weed and H had been added to fuel the mixture. Crime ran rampant and violence became an occupational hazard. In the environment of Harlem Precinct, only a certain breed of cop could enforce the law.

Into this stewpot of pimps, prostitutes, weed heads, junkies, con men, gangsters, numbers bankers, thieves, muggers, and killers, author Chester Himes created two police detectives to keep law and order. The citizens of Harlem nicknamed them Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. They were there to protect the common people, the working stiff, the unwary, the naive square. Yet most times, Ed and Digger found it was all they could do to keep the lid on the city's garbage can.

Chester Himes tells their story better than I, so in his words:

Coffin Ed Johnson & Grave Digger Jones

The car scarcely made a sound; for all its dilapidated appearance the motor was ticking almost silently. It passed along practically unseen, like a ghostly vehicle floating in the dark, its occupants invisible.

This was due in part to the fact that both detectives were almost as dark as the night, and they were wearing lightweight black alpaca suits and black cotton shirts with the collars open....they wore their suit coats to cover their big glinting nickle-plated thirty-eight caliber revolvers they wore in their shoulder slings. They could see in the dark streets like cats, but couldn't be seen, which was just as well because their presence might have discouraged the vice business in Harlem and put countless citizens on relief. (Hot Day Hot Night, 1969, originally Blind Man With a Pistol)

Lieutenant Anderson had been on night duty in Harlem for over a year. During that time he had come to know his ace detectives well, and he depended on them. He knew they had their own personal interpretation of law enforcement. Some people they never touched--such as madams of orderly houses of prostitution, operators of orderly gambling games, people connected with the numbers racket, streetwalkers who stayed in their district. But they were rough on criminals of violence and confidence men. And, he had always thought they were rough on dope peddlers and pimps, too. So Grave Digger's casual explanation of Dummy's pimping surprised him. (The Big Gold Dream, 1960)

Coffin Ed was defiant. "Who's beefing?"
"The Acme Company's lawyers. They cried murder, brutality, anarchy, and everything else you can think of. They've filed charges with the police board of inquiry..."
"What the old man say?"
"Said he'd look into it..."
"Woe is us," Grave Digger said. "Every time we brush a citizen gently with the tip of our knuckles, there's shysters on the sidelines to cry brutality, like a Greek chorus." (Hot Day Hot Night, 1969)

Harlem

On the south side, Harlem is bounded by 110th Street. It extends west to the foot of Morningside Heights on which Columbia University stands. Manhattan Avenue, a block to the east of Morningside Drive, is one of the corner streets that screen the Harlem slums from view. The slum tenants give way suddenly to trees and well-kept apartment buildings where the big cars of the Harlem underworld are parked bumper to bumper. Only crime and vice can pay the high rents charged in such borderline areas. That's where Rufus lived. (The Big Gold Dream, 1960)

The Valley, that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was the frying pan of Hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan. (The Heat's On, 1966)

"...The Coroner's report says the victim was killed where he lay. But nobody saw him arrive. Nobody remembers exactly when Chink Charley left the flat. Nobody knows when Dulcy Perry left. Nobody knows for certain if Reverend Short even fell out of the goddamned window. Do you believe that Digger?"
"Why not? This is Harlem where anything can happen."  (The Crazy Kill, 1959)

"Trouble?" Grave Digger echoed. "If trouble was money, everybody in Harlem would be millionaires."  (The Real Cool Killers, 1969)

A Few Notable Citizens

Uncle Saint
Both fired simultaneously.
The soft coughing sound of the silenced derringer was lost in the heavy booming blast of the shotgun.
In his panic, Uncle Saint had squeezed the triggers of both barrels.
The gunman's face disappeared and his thick heavy body was knocked over backward from the impact of the 12-gauge shells.
The rear light of a truck parked beneath the trestle in the middle of the avenue disintegrated for no apparent reason. (The Heat's On, 1966)

Jackson & Imabelle
Assistant DA Lawrence studied Jackson covertly, pretending he was reading his notes. He had heard of gullible people like Jackson, but he had never seen one in the flesh before.

*           *           *           *             *
Suddenly a Judas window opened in the door....
There was a turning of locks and a drawing of bolts, and the door opened outward.
Now Jackson could see the eye and its mate plainly. A high-yellow sensual face was framed in the light of the door. It was Imabelle's face. She was looking steadily into Jackson's eyes. Her mouth formed the words, "Come on in and kill him, Daddy. I'm all yours." Then she stepped back, making space for him to enter. (For Love of Imabelle, 1957, originally A Rage in Harlem)

Casper Holmes (crooked Harlem politician)
Casper Holmes was back in the hospital.
His mouth and eyes were bandaged; he could not see nor talk. There were tubes up his nostrils, and he had been given enough morphine to knock out a junkie.
But he was still conscious and alert. There was nothing wrong with his ears and he could write blind.
He was still playing God. (All Shot Up, 1960)

al fin

Chester Himes was born in 1909 to middle class parents, served time in Ohio for robbery, took up writing while in prison, moved to France to find a better life, won France's La Grand Prix du Roman Policier award for the best detective novel of 1957 (first in his Harlem detectives series), has his original manuscripts in the Yale University Library, and later died in Spain. Three of his detective novels were made into movies, titled: A Rage in Harlem (For Love of Imabelle), Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back Charleston Blue (The Heat's On).