A Rage in Harlem

by Chester Himes

Paperback, 1989

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Series

The Harlem Cycle (1)

Genres

Publication

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (1989), Edition: Reissue, 151 pages

Description

A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City's roughest streets in Chester Himes's groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundreds--and then he steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a craps table. Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living--disguised as a Sister of Mercy--by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem. With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

User reviews

LibraryThing member lriley

Chester Himes ' A rage in Harlem' is just a great book. Excellently plotted and wonderfully worked out and almost always believable characterization. The book always moves at a nice clip and works well as a sometimes comic--sometimes graphically violent New York City, 50's period piece crime

thriller. In some respects it reminds me of the book I use as avatar on my profie page--Roberto Arlt's 'The Seven madmen'. Sometimes whacky, sometimes brutal but always honest in its perceptions of the Harlem society it focuses on. There is almost no superfluous material in it. It is stripped down and ready to roll. It is a fun book and I'd recommend it highly and I've already ordered the second book in the series--The real cool killers.

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LibraryThing member jnwelch

"Goldy turned south on Seventh Avenue, past the Theresa Hotel entrance, past Sugar Ray's Tavern, past the barber shop where the sharp cats got their nappy kinks straightened out with a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye. He turned east on 121st Street into the Valley, climbed over piles of frozen

garbage, kicked a mangy cur in the ribs, and entered a grimy tobacco-store which fronted for a numbers drop and reefer shop."

A Rage in Harlem is a savagely funny story set in Chester Himes' 1950s Harlem. Goldy is the savvy twin brother of the endlessly credulous Jackson. Goldy is a minor con artist who sells tickets to heaven while dressed up as Sister Gabriel. Jackson has to rank up there with the most foolish people ever to walk this planet, a dream victim. When he falls for a con involving changing 10 dollar bills into 100s, Goldy tries to help him recover while servicing his usual ulterior motive of helping Goldy.

Himes's regular characters, the cops Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, become involved after dead bodies start cropping up. Their solution to most problems is shooting with deadly accuracy, which of course isn't destined to lower the body count. The book is filled with sardonic humor, e.g., when Goldy goes to the Harlem post office he sees "There were pictures of three colored men wanted in Mississippi for murder. That meant they had killed a white man, because killing a colored man wasn't considered murder in Mississippi."

Jackson chases after the money he lost, and everyone chases after a trunk filled with 18 carat gold ore being used in yet another con. It's all a darkly funny roller derby through the author's tart and bitter-tasting Harlem.

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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes was originally published in 1957. I listened to an audio version read by Samuel L. Jackson who was the perfect person to voice this blistering, unrelentless yet humorous story. The main character, Jackson, isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, he is vulnerable and

totally besotted by his girlfriend, Imabelle, so when she involves him in a scam he goes along willingly. Of course when things go pear-shaped, he finds himself out of his money, out of his job and without Imabelle and her missing trunk.

Jackson goes to his twin brother, Goldy, for help to find Imabelle. Goldy, works his own scam impersonating a nun and collecting “charity”. Before too long Goldy is convinced that there is money to be had with this deal, the police are again involved and Jackson is still convinced that Imabelle needs to be rescued. The action takes place over the course of one long and exciting night, but come morning there is a body count to be tallied into the story as well.

The borough of Harlem and it’s residents are one of the main interests in this story. It is very quickly made clear that there is a dark anger brewing just under the surface. The people of Harlem live under different laws from the whites, and the poverty, although never directly pointed out, is explicit. A Rage in Harlem is a dark and hard-boiled crime story that keeps it’s characters on the verge of chaos and desperation. I highly recommend the story and, in particular, this audio version.

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LibraryThing member Smiler69

I'd heard of Chester Himes's Harlem Cycle before, but if it hadn't been for a new audio series called "The A-List" which has A-list actors narrating some of the most beloved books—in this case, none other than Samuel L. Jackson—it might have been a while yet before I'd gotten around to this

series. Taking place in Harlem, the story revolves around a naive man called Jackson who gets taken in by a team of fraudsters who convince him they can "raise" denominations of 10 dollars into 100 dollar bills. There's plenty of humour there, which combines well with the otherwise hardboiled world of gangsterism, drugs and violence. Not for the faint of heart, but deeply satisfying if you like your mysteries served up on the tough side.

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LibraryThing member Crazymamie

"She held him at arms’ length, looked at the pipe still gripped in his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled

bedroom eyes.

The man drowned."

This is the perfect pairing of story and narrator - like all fabulous audiobooks, the narrator here elevates the reading experience. This was written in the late fifties and is set (as the title tells us) in Harlem. Himes does a very good job of establishing a sense of place, but more than that he establishes a sense of atmosphere - we can feel the undercurrents of anger and frustration in a community where equality is a very distant dream. The tale is dark and gritty with a definite noir feel, and yet it is loaded with humor. A very tricky act, and Jackson pulls it off with ease - his voice seems born to the story. He brings every character and every nuance to life. I just cannot recommend this version highly enough.

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LibraryThing member Unkletom

I recently had the chance to ask Walter Mosley if he had considered writing a series of historical mysteries set in Harlem. He answered that he wouldn't because others, foremost among them being Chester Himes, had already done so and done it far better he could hope to. 'A Rage in Harlem' had been

on my TBR list for a long time so I made a point of tracking down a copy and reading it. It was time well spent. The description that Himes is to Harlem what Chandler is to Los Angeles is right on the mark.

The action starts on page one and doesn't let up. Jackson, a gullible mark if ever there was one, gets fleeced while trying to 'promote' 150 10-dollar bills into 150 100-dollar bills, loses his money, his job and Imabelle, the woman he swears has been kidnapped despite all evidence to the contrary. The hapless Jackson seeks the help of his twin brother Goldy, a junkie drag queen posing as a Sister of Mercy selling tickets to heaven to anyone who needs one. Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson also join in the hunt for the increasingly violent con artists. What follows is a madcap mix of comedy and searing violence. I couldn't put it down and fully intend to read the next seven books in this series.

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LibraryThing member MrsLee

A square gets caught up in some con men's game and spends a night in Harlem, committing more crimes than he ever knew about, trying to make it right.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. It is darker, grittier and fouler than most books I enjoy, but I enjoyed it. The first half or more had me

only cringing, but towards the end, the humor came out and had me laughing out loud. I loved that it took me into a world I would never have access to in my life. Between the excellent writing of Chester Himes, and the excellent narration of Samuel L. Jackson, I was able to see, hear, smell and touch that world, even when it was painful to do so.

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LibraryThing member KRoan

One of my all-time favorites.

LibraryThing member idiotgirl

This was a welcome and enjoyable surprise. I give it the 4 rather than the 3 because it was such a welcome, slightly weird, and unexpected read/listend. Read because it was part of a special group at Audible with celebrity readers. In this case Samuel Jackson. A really wonderful and nuanced

reading. This book is set in early 50s in Harlem. In the tradition, sort of, of the great detective, hard boiled, film noir writers of 40s/50s. Hard boiled that makes you laugh out loud and then wonder why you would laugh at such horror and violence. The sweet fool around which the story turns. With good stuff, kinda, almost winning.

Highly recommend. A movie was made recently with all star black cast. I'm very interested to see what they did with this little gem.

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LibraryThing member JBreedlove

A look at Harlem and the hard edge in the 1950's. A different lingo and though not exactly Raymond Chandler it was a very good book. Tigh and with a surprise and plausable ending. But we learned nothing of Detective Jones and Johnson.
Lyrical and brutal

LibraryThing member DaveWilde

A Rage in Harlem was the first of a series of nine hardboiled detective novels featuring Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, the two toughest police detectives you ever heard of. These books are fascinating because they are among the first to feature African- American detectives and are set in

Harlem and other central city locations in the 1950's. Besides telling a fascinating story, the writing is simply superb. Himes was first and foremost a writer and he could write in such poetic fashion that he simply transports the reader into a different world: Harlem in the 1950's.

At the heart of A Rage in Harlem (originally published as For Love of Imabelle are several confidence schemes and a femme fatale that has transfixed Jackson and bewitched him so that he doesn't realize who or what Imabelle, his woman he thinks, is. One confidence scheme is "raising money," that is you find a poor sucker like Jackson and tell him to bring all his money, you'll put it in the oven, and "raise" the denominations. Another scheme involves a gold mine in Mexico and shares are being sold for the mine. Jackson must have sucker written all over his face.

Jackson was "a short, black, fat man with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing," but Jackson took it seriously, at least until his twin brother, who went around town dressed as a nun seeking money for the Lord, set him straight.

"Imabelle was Jackson's woman. She was a cushioned-lipped, hot- bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled brown eyes of a teaser and the high-arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural born amante. Jackson was as crazy about her as moose for doe." He had only known her for ten months but he couldn't live without her and they were going to get married as soon as she got her divorce from that man down South.

The story takes Jackson through the bars, crap games, numbers rackets, schemes, and games of Harlem. Himes embodies this story with a flavor that few other writers can ever hope to match.
Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are not the main characters in this novel, but they are drawn quite vividly. "Both were tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men. They would yell "Straighten up" and "Count off" and everyone listened. They had no qualms about violence and were as tough and unyielding as the neighborhood they worked.

It is astounding that Himes is not more well known and more acclaimed than he is. His writing is that good.

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LibraryThing member abycats

Some books don't age well. For me,this is one of them.

LibraryThing member MarquesadeFlambe

Although he was able to do much more, Himes' Harlem Detective books ARE a hell of a lot of fun.

LibraryThing member Michael.Rimmer

A much-needed change of pace for me, and a book which (unusually for me) I finished in a day. Himes wrote the novel while in Paris, escaping from his bitter experience of racism in '50s Hollywood. He was asked to write a crime novel for the French market, and choose Harlem as his setting, despite

never having lived there, as he felt it would be most recognisable to his audience as a tough African-American neighbourhood.

Judging by the book's longevity in print, Himes did his job well, and I certainly enjoyed immersing myself into his milieu of petty criminals, con artists, casual murderers, crooked cops and tough detectives. Himes's darkly humorous tone is just right, and he delivered a couple of shock twists that had my jaw dropping.

I'm definitely up for exploring the other books in the series. A solid 4/5🌟

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LibraryThing member maneekuhi

“Outrageous, shocking, wonderful”, “…best black American novelist writing today!”

First let me say that the above blurbs, on the cover of “For Love of Imabelle”, aka “A Rage in Harlem”, are ascribed to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune respectively. Now let me further

describe the cover of my copy of the book. A very young woman wearing a very small, provocative red dress is sitting on a large black truck, modestly trying to cover her assets with her left hand. She is joined by a black, barefoot nun, leaning on a raised left foot which also rests on said trunk. In the right hand the nun is holding not a rosary, but a long barreled 45 caliber cannon aimed at sweet Imabelle. The book is a paperback, somewhat beatup; on an edge is stamped the publisher’s name, Dell, and the price, 75 cents. The copyright inside says 1965, but fantasticfiction.com lists the date as 1957.

I read a lot of crime fiction, mysteries if you will, maybe forty per year. Last year I got a bit interested in “classical” crime fiction, early stuff that not only helped establish the new genre, e.g., Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie but also the books which broke away from the mold and developed new styles, new subjects, eg Chandler, Hammett. Eventually I discovered Chester Himes, author of “Imabelle” – an interesting character in his own right. In 1928 at the age of 19, Himes was sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years for armed robbery and paroled after serving eight. “Imabelle” is the first of eight novels in his series about two black Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. At least three of the books were made into fims; “Cotton Comes to Harlem” is the best known.

You have never rad a book anything like “For Love of Immabelle”.

And for that reason alone it is probably worth your time to read it. It is funny, some of the lines are just hilarious, as when late night taxi driver is forced to haul some mean, heavily-armed, bad dudes uptown: “Even the back of the driver’s head looked scared”. Violence erupts unexpectedly, and it’s usually very bloody – lots of knives in this book. And finally, it is very, very politically incorrect. But Himes doesn’t discriminate at those he insults, both black and white take a lot of shots seldom heard in the 21st century.

The plot is a bit slapstick, lots of running all over the place. There’s a big con going on involving a trunk full of gold ore. And there are dupes all over the place, including a guy who drives a hearse for the local funeral parlor, and his twin brother who dresses as a nun and spends her (his) days dispensing suspect quotes from the Bible in exchange for coin, e.g., “And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, the sixth angel said.” Sometimes Sister’s patron’s take her quotes as divine suggestions for which numbers to play that day. Lots of characters, in every sense of the word. Interestingly, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger play small roles in this first book of the series.

Will I read another Coffin and Grave Digger? I think so, maybe “Cotton”, should be easier to find than this one….

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LibraryThing member burritapal

Awesome imaging. Himes lets you taste, smell and see Harlem.

LibraryThing member eas7788

Really strong sentences and creation of atmosphere.

LibraryThing member Stahl-Ricco

“Every time he struggled to get out, he went in deeper.”

Good first chapter, even though I have no idea how that counterfeiting process (The Blow) works! Neither does Jackson, who the story is about. He gets taken by that con, and then gets bounced about the city, trying to get his money

back.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed enter the story on page 44 (of the copy I read). They “…weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be to work in Harlem.”

The “Sisters of Mercy” are humorous throughout! As is Imabelle’s “trunk full of gold ore”! It's a really enjoyable read, very well written! I definitely will check out the next one in the series! Now, to get MY ashes hauled…!

“Don’t make graves.”

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LibraryThing member JazzFeathers

A tough story? Sure. Packed with callous characters acting brutally most of the time? Certainly. Still, I never found the story to be really disturbing, maybe because there's such a perfect balance between the brutality of the life in the black ghetto and the dark humour people still live with,

together with a sort of strong positivity coming from Jackson, the naïve main character. It's a perfect balance, hard to achieve.

The plot may be a bit unlikely, as some reviewers pointed out, but Jackson's naivety is also uncommon. Again, the balance between this uncommon quality and the incredible string of events happening in such short time, turns the plot into something surreal, and that's why it worked for me. After all, isn't Mr Clay, Jackson's employer, who talks to him turning his back, napping on the couch - clearly a surreal character?

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed do shine from the first moment they appear on the page. I wouldn't be able to say what they have that all the other characters don't (and you'll find a number of noticeable characters in here), but they do have that `something'. Many of the characters have a strong personality, still Coffin Ed and especially Grave Digger - who appears longer in the story - have something more. Maybe it's that mix of recklessness and morality that it's hard to find with this depth and this complexity. I understand why Himes then shifted his attention to them.

The plot is enjoyable on the whole, but there are episodes that really grab a reader. What to say of Coffin Ed unwittingly knocking out Grave Digger while being blinded by acid, desperately calling for him, fearing he's being killed? Or Billie offering money to Grave Digger if he leaves Coffin Ed's attackers alone, so not to ruin her business... which Grave Digger never takes as an option?
But my absolute favourit is the episode of the approaching train, a long, emotional episode: the train approaches the station and shakes everything on its way, tracks, houses, the very air, all the characters. It also shakes the story in a way that I hadn't expected. Powerful.

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LibraryThing member bjkelley

Heard the name Chester Himes for years, but never got around to reading any of his books. My lost! Great book with great characters and even comical in parts. Look forward to reading more Chester Himes.

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