Customer Reviews

The Collected Stories of Chester Himes (Himes, Chester)

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Chester Himes is a master storyteller. He reveals the plight of black people in America. The stories are revealing as well as insightful.Truly being able to capture the sounds of the street is one of Himes' gifts, but he doesn't limit his themes to inner city life. Many writers have greater acclaim, but here is a true artist. Read his biography, and you will really appreciate how good a writer he was.

This collection is an uneven ride, which is perhaps to be expected in stories written over a thirty year period. I had high hopes for the stories about prison (Himes himself was in jail for seven and a half years according to Wikipedia), but found these disappointing. Also disappointing were stories from later in his career, when the racial politics became more heavy-handed, much to the detriment of the literary value, in my view. A final criticism. Himes has no clue about women. His strongest female characters are amoral and conniving. The rest are considerably worse.

That said, there's at least 100 pages of top flight stories that make the rest well worthwhile. Also, almost all the stories are quite short, and it's easy to get addicted to the bite size pieces. From here, I'm going back to Himes' detective stories, which I enjoyed even more. Still, I'm glad I read this side of this remarkable author.

Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Olivia Butler and... Chester Himes. All masterful African-American writers. All Amazon five-star writers.

All well known, acclaimed and awarded
writers. Except for Chester Himes.

The first five of that abbreviated list of African-American writers have become best selling authors, achieved Classic status. most even have had successful movie adaptations of their writings.

Chester Himes deserves praise as do those fine writers. But he was born abit too early. And born into Harlem. Earlier book reviewers praised Himes as doing for Harlem what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles. Two of his stories were made into major movies: Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes To Harlem Each rated five-stars at Amazon.

Reading the Collected Stories of Chester Himes certainly made me
agree with all the bygone praise for this relatively unknown author.
It's really a shame that more of today's readers haven't been exposed
to his writing.

He started his writing career while doing jail time. He lived the stories he wrote. His style is direct, unembellished, real. Readers will feel that reality
in this collection's 429 pages of 60 quick (each tale 5-10 pages), sharp short stories; I did.

If you like them, well, Himes also wrote
six novels and a dramatic autobiography.

We're in a literary and film milieu of fabricated fantasies. Stories
as good as these, based in reality, are a refreshing return to truth.
And really-good reads, too.

In reading The Collected Stories Of Chester Himes I was reminded of another short story writer who made his name in the 1930s and 1940s as a social realist writer, and then made his mark writing pulpy novels toward the end of his career. That writer was Irwin Shaw, and while he was a superior short story teller to Himes, Himes is still a good writer, whose shorter fiction deserves a wider audience. The thing that keeps Himes from the heights Shaw reached is that his tales are not as diverse in theme nor character development. The two main tropes in this book of sixty tales are war stories and prison tales. While the latter trope is one that is still almost terra incognita for most writers, the former is very well represented in fiction. The prison tales, as a whole, suffer a bit from Himes' own formula. While no one else was writing such tales, there was not much variance within the tales. They often go on a bit too long for their one or two points to ring clarion with the reader, and then there will be some violence. The best of the tales mix in humor with these tropes, and the results can be excellent. The war tales, too, are a bit formulaic, although they are not an internal recipe of Himes', merely his toeing the genre line. Himes simply repeats himself too often, and this lack of breadth limits his ability to delve as deeply into the subject matter as needed. Another general problem with all the stories is that, unlike Shaw, Himes is not particularly good at ending his stories well nor memorably. Tales should always have something that grabs a reader, holds a reader, then leaves a reader wanting more, or thinking about what they just read. Too few of Himes' stories do that, as most just peter out, with an indifferent shrug as a reaction....No critics seem to mention that Himes is a great example of damning the old MFA workshop injunction against `telling' a story, rather than `showing' it. In a simpleminded way, this is just shorthand for trying to genericize writing and reduce it all to mere description, rather than firmly grasping the narrative and telling in a lucid, compelling, and poetic style. Of course, `showing,' when it entails good poesy, metaphor, and imagery, can work, as well, but the very notion that stating, say, that the cologne a male character wears has an erotic effect on women is less effective than letting it be known the character dapples cologne on and then taking two pages to describe how several women proposition him, is silly; especially if the effect the cologne has is not the main point of the tale. Something that just sets a scene need not usually be rhapsodized over unless it is important to the narrative, develops a character's traits, or somehow makes a contribution, aside from mere description to describe. Description itself is not arresting- it's the how and why, within a tale, that determines its success. Himes understood this, and fortunately, the majority of his stories take that approach, even if most of them do not fully succeed. The Collected Stories Of Chester Himes may not be, to use blurbspeak, an `essential part of any literature lover's library,' but it can't hurt one's collection. His stories are enjoyable, quick-paced, and usually not too didactic. That they also illumine a forgotten part of American history- both really and fictively, as do Irwin Shaw's, is but a bonus. In an era where so few artists and works of art even come close to fulfilling their claims, that should put Chester Himes on the `to read' lists of anyone whose interest in him has extended to this period.