Dear Jim,
In response to your question about the origins of Chester's
detectives, it's quite true that when he began writing the
first novel, he was focusing on the crime and the marks. He
returned with a hundred pages or so, and Duhamel told him he
had to have police in a policier, so he put them in.
You're also correct that the cops were partly based on a
couple of actual cops Chester had met in earlier life.
Chester was always an intuitive writer, picking out threads
of what he'd done before and braiding them into new forms.
You see this clearly in the Harlem cycle, which begin as
fairly standard pulp fare and gravitate towards ever more
serious, engaged writing, culminating in the masterpiece
BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL.
I suspect that, yes, his Harlem was modeled on the Ohio
criminal underground of which, in his younger life, he'd been
so much a part. He had, however, spent considerable time in
New York and in Harlem, so I'm certain he did that magpie
thing we all do as writers, taking a bit of this, a bit of
that -- whatever he could use to make his nest.
Jim k
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