The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

Most noir tries to be cool. Maybe "cool" in the sense of wearing dark shades at night and smoking above eye level, but more often cool as in affect and mood. Cool as opposed to hot, as in jazz. Cool meaning it might come to a boil, but it's going to be a slow simmer for a while first. Cool as midnight, cool as a diner counter at 2 AM, cool as a proxy for cold - like the grave, like endless nothing, like the purpose of life.

Chester Himes, though, is not aiming for cool. (I say this having now read only two of his books, this one and A Rage in Harlem. I could be talking through my hat.) Oh, sure, The Real Cool Killers has the word "cool" right in the title. But it's a hot book, like a jazz combo following a horn riff off into the musical thickets, running quick and rat-a-tat with one damn thing after another.

This was the second novel in this loose series, published in 1959, two years after Rage. It all takes place one night in Harlem, and features Himes's series characters, the tough and violent detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In this series, they might be the only black cops in New York, or at least in Harlem. There's no sign that any of the beat cops are other than beefy white guys from other neighborhoods, and Gravedigger and Coffin Ed operate with more than threats of violence - Himes's Harlem is an anarchic place, barely under control at the best of times, full of pimps and gang kids and slumming white folks getting fleeced (but always, always left unmolested to go back to their own part of town) and teen girls willing to do whatever to make a buck or get some kicks.

It starts with a confrontation in a bar. Ulysses Galen, a well-off white businessman who spends a lot of time in Harlem, is drinking in the Dew Drop Inn. We don't know his business there when the action starts; we will learn a lot more by the end. A black guy takes offense to Galen, pulls a knife, attacks. The attacker is disarmed (literally) and Galen runs out into the street, chased by a different black guy, who seems to be angry about the same thing for a different reason.

There's a chase, drawing a huge crowd. As one character says later: seeing a black guy chase another black guy with a weapon is an everyday occurrence; even seeing a white guy chase a black guy with murderous intent is pretty common. But when a black man threatens to kill a white man, well, that's something new and surprising.

So this guy Sonny chases Galen, threatening him with a gun. He shoots, Galen falls. The cops arrive, scuffling with the Real Cool Moslems, a gang of local black teens who dress up as "Arabs" - half joking, half to obscure their identities. The gangers rile up the cops, and one of them throws perfume at Coffin Ed - who was badly scarred about a year before by an acid-thrower, and reacts really badly when anyone tries to throw any liquid at him. So he shoots that "Moslem," and Sonny escapes - with the other Moslems, in the ensuing confusion.

The rest of the book alternates the two strands - the cops, mostly Gravedigger, looking for Sonny, and Sonny himself, in the hands of these teen gangbangers, trying to get out of the police cordon and escape the house-to-house search and also not get randomly killed by these teen lunatics.

Oh, one more thing. Sonny's gun couldn't have killed Galen, and didn't: it only shoots blanks.

As I said, this is hot rather than cool - big personalities, big actions, cops who are mostly competent and crooks who rarely reach that level. All of whom are ready for violence at any moment: that's just how Harlem is, in Himes's telling. It turns out Galen was a sadist, paying black girls quite a lot of money to let him whip them - which he did a lot harder than they expected, so they generally only did it once each.

(It strikes me that this might not have been actually illegal, despite some arrests the cops make of procurers and panderers as the night goes on. If Galen was just whipping the girls - and Himes seems to be pretty clear that he just whipped and not fucked - the fact that they were underage might not be as dispositive as they claim. On the other hand, it's also clear that these cops find "criminals" first and figure out what to charge them with later, in the best noir fashion.)

This is a short novel, full of action and dialogue and local color. As in Rage, the criminals are often idiots, which doesn't make them any less dangerous to themselves and others. The cops are tough and even more violent - I imagine much of the appeal of this series, early on, was that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger are just as tough and unyielding and competent as any white authority figures, and always come out in the end with their man. It's not quite a cartoon, but it tends in that direction: that big, that exaggerated, that quick. Himes's language keeps it all at that rolling boil, that hot jazz-combo riff, and keeps it from ever going over the top - but it's close, more than once.