A Rage in Harlem – Book Post

I ought to be clever and make myself a separate page on this blog where I can stick book reviews and thoughts.

I’m just too bone idle to fiddle around with it for the moment. I may well get around to it one day, but in the meantime, if you’re not bookish, the last post might be considered vaguely amusing, and if you are bookish, stick around.

Amazon Vine, the cool, Amazon bit that sends me free stuff every month to review, sent me a copy of Chester Himes’s classic crime novel; ‘A Rage in Harlem’, to review.

I used to absolutely love crime novels.  I went through a phase where I read little else, shortly after I emerged from the bowels of university life.  I think it takes most of us that way.  I had a friend who was a lecturer in Eng Lit, and when he gave up his job, he spent six months sunbathing in his back garden reading Dorothy L Sayers entire oeuvre several times over.

And there’s nowt wrong with that.

Anyway, back to; ‘A Rage in Harlem’.

I didn’t know what to expect really.  Most of the black authors I’ve read tend to be more modern and rather aware of the burden of having to write under the label of being a ‘black author’.  I’m thinking of Toni Morrison here in particular. I love her work.  Beloved is one of my favourite books of all time, but you cannot get over the fact that it has an agenda.

Himes probably has an agenda too.  I imagine that when he was writing these novels, in the Fifties, from Paris, where he escaped to after being sick of being persecuted for his colour in the USA, that they were daring, and shocking and caused waves, politically and socially.

The trouble is that these things date, and what once shocked us, or wowed us with its newness, loses its shine.

So, what to make of a book that is now probably historical, rather than edgy?

Well, I loved it.  I absolutely devoured it.

I read the whole thing in a day, and if I didn’t have so many books waiting to be read I would have gone out and bought the entire rest of his work and read that too.

Surprisingly, it is set in Harlem, and tells the story of an innocent, god fearing man, duped by the infatuation he has with his girlfriend into scraping together his life savings and putting them into a get rich scheme that turns out to be a scam.

Not seeing that his girlfriend is in on it, he tries to get back his money, rescue his girl and save his reputation, all the while sliding deeper and deeper into the mire.

The book is funny, dark, savage and hugely entertaining.  If you like Elmore Leonard or Damon Runyon, this is the kind of book for you.

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