Black Hornet was first published in 1994, seven years before James Sallis published the biography Chester Himes: A Life.
But Sallis was already into Himes’ work. In 1993, Sallis published Difficult Lives, a series of essays about Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and the aforementioned Himes.
But, wait. By 1993, Sallis had been reading Himes for 25 years. In a 2007 interview on the Compulsive Reader website, Sallis said he discovered Himes in 1968 at about the time he was turning away from science fiction and “literary” fiction (at least, at the time) and discovered Ross Macdonald, Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, and others of the crime fiction ilk.
So if you’re James Sallis, and if you enjoy playing around with the so-called rules of writing crime fiction, why not stick Himes in one of your novels too?
Especially if your main character is deep thinker Lew Griffin?
Here is Griffin in Black Hornet, thinking back about listening to Himes in a small auditorium at Dillard University in New Orleans:
“When the applause died and he looked up, his eyes were dark, intense and full, glimmers of emotion and understanding spilling out from them even as they swept in the finest details of the physical world around them.
“Vitriol? Impassioned speech? Anger?
“You better believe it.
“But at the same time a rare truth: this gentle cultivated voice at first so low we could barely hear it, urging us on toward what we might be, imploring us to settle for nothing less than the best within us. To recognize that we had been set against ourselves, turned into our own worst enemy. Whenever walls get torn down, he said the bricks are simply carried off elsewhere, another wall put up.”
And then Sallis gives Himes the microphone and, well, these few lines may be the heart of Black Hornet:
“If our plumbing for truth, whether as a writer, like myself, or simply as individuals looking back over our experience—if this plumbing for truth reveals within the Negro personality homicidal maniac, lust, a pathetic sense of inferiority, arrogance, hatred, fear and self-despite, we must recognize this as the effect of oppression on the human personality. For these are the daily horrors, the daily realities, the daily experiences—the life—of black men and women in America.”
(Did Himes actually utter those words? I emailed James Sallis and he confirmed that he might have tweaked a word or two but the words were from an address Himes gave at a university, though not Dillard.)
So we have one smart, meditative-minded fictional black erstwhile slacker young detective (Griffin) drinking in the observations of a real-life black crime fiction writer known for not holding back and also known for troubling, often militant commentary (Himes).
And Griffin, in this third novel in the series, is not only thinking about Himes he’s thinking, throughout Black Hornet, about the state of protest, the state of Civil Rights, and recalling what it was like to walk through front doors for the first time in his life. And he’s recalling that the struggle was just beginning. “We breathed the high, rich air of social challenge, justice, freedom, inalienable rights. But that road, we discovered, penetrated just so far into the wilderness.”
There is plenty of meditation in the Lew Griffin novels because Griffin is, as I mentioned, not an action hero. His movements are efficient, pointed. He is not afraid to stop. He’s got time to think whether it’s in a New Orleans bar listening to the blues or in his home reading Camus or Borges. Sallis lets Griffin take existentialist detours relating to identity, race, culture, class, oppression, and revolution. Or the topic of memory, which infuses many pages of Black Hornet.
As the story winds down,Griffin pulls out Juan Goytisolo’s autobiography, Realms of Strife.
(Oh, by the way, if you’re trying to whittle down your stack of books to read, avoid the Lew Griffin novels at your peril.)
Griffin summarizes:
“Memory, Goytisolo writes at the end of his story, cannot arrest the flow of time, it can only recreate set scenes, encapsulate privileged moments, arrange memories and incidents in some arbitrary manner that, word by word, will form a book. The unbridgeable distance between act and language, the demands of the written text itself, inevitably and insidiously degrade faithfulness to reality into mere artistic exercise, sincerity into mere virtuosity, moral rigor into aesthetics … Put down your pen, Goytisolo says, break off the narrative, limit the damage: for silence alone can keep intact our illusion of truth.”
Well, the brain’s perceptions of events over time has been one of Griffin’s concerns from way back on page five, when he started worrying about the “watery soup” of memory even as he goes on to recount the incidents in New Orleans in 1968 about tracking down an assassin known as The Rooftop Killer. (Black Hornet is a prequel of sorts.)
Yes, there is a plot for our chill Griffin, who is self-motivated in this story because the latest victim of the sniper was walking next to him when she was killed. Griffin figures stuff out in his own methodical, Type B way. He’s never too engrossed, however, to rise above the events and see himself in a bigger storyline while also acknowledging “that our lives have no plot … We are the things that happen to us, the people we’ve known, nothing more.”
Imagine if writers were prohibited from developing characters who didn’t conform to their own culture and background? We are so deep in Lew Griffin’s psyche, thanks in part to Chester Himes and Albert Camus as guiding lights to his soul, that we never doubt his three-dimensionality or his grounded yearning to understand, well, everything.
Here’s a thought—writers need more license, not less. As writers S.A. Cosby and Alex Segura discussed at a recent conference in San Diego, however, they need to put in the work and they need to be accountable for the words they write, the stories they cobble together. They need empathy, too.
Here’s another thought. This one is from James Sallis from that same interview mentioned above:
“Crime fiction … gives access to a straightforward skeleton of plot that’s able to hold as little or as much weight as you wish to pack on; and it’s connected more directly to the archetypes within us, which can be a source of tremendous power.”
Read Black Hornet and see if you can find one false note or anywhere that Sallis isn’t “plumbing for truth.”
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From the Publisher
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“James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir. Black Hornet is terrific.” —Lawrence Block |
“Poetic, complex and multidimensional, James Sallis's crime novels about New Orleans detective Lew Griffin . . . are unlike any you are likely to crack open.” —Los Angeles Times |
Discover all six Lew Griffin novels, now available from Soho Crime: Long-Legged Fly, Moth, Black Hornet, Eye of the Cricket, Bluebottle, and Ghost of a Flea. |
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