E. Borgers:
The elitist tone of the message below really troubles
me. I don't know what a "professional writer" is compared to
what. If someone pays you for the stuff, you are
professional. As for "real," that seems equally
ambiguous.
Dashiell Hammet was "real," and he wrote about the
seedy side of life that was a part of his experience. Ex-cop
writers like Joseph Wambaugh did the same.
Anyway, authors of "street lit" such as Zane [The Heat
Seekers], Teri Woods [True to the Game],Tracy Brown [Chyna
Black], or Shannon Holmes [Never Go Home Again] are no
different from John Grisham or any number of other authors
who write what they know. In fact, Shannon Holmes Bad Girlz
sold more than 85,000 copies. That might not mean much in
France, but the average U.S. fiction author would pine for
such numbers.
As for Himes, check out his memoir, The Quality of
Hurt. He did not see himself as either an expert or a guide
to the "black peoples' social life and underworld." He wrote
the "Harlem" novels because at that time most Americans
associated black with Harlem. That is the same way most
cities refer to their Asian cultural districts as
"Chinatown."
Himes was writing about America, even in the Harlem
novels. Someone suggested people check out The Priimitive. I
agree. The story is not a black story. The tale protrays the
conditions of humans in a color-coded world.
vincent f. a. golphin
"E.Borgers" <
webeurop@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>Steven,
>
>>It seems that I've read somewhere that
Hines'
>>fictional Harlem had much more in common with
the
>>Cleveland that he had experience with than the
real
>>Harlem. Can't remeber where I read that at
the
>>moment though.
>>
>>
Two things about Himes. First he was rather educated
(University level) and considered himself as a "real"
professional writer (proof were his novels before the Harlem
cycle). Even if he had some street and prison experience, I
cannot see him has a "street writer", mixed in a sub-class
with the occasional or
"primitive " writers basing all, or close to all, their
fiction on their own street and/or underworld experience,
having been themselves often at the outskirts of the law
limits. Second: he came only later to crime fiction, and do
not forget that he wrote most of his Harlem cycle when he was
in Europe (France for the first one), so the real Harlem was
really distant. Maybe he choose Harlem just to be sure that
foreign readers (published in France first, in Gallimard's
Serie Noire, starting in *1958*) understood that the stories
were totally immersed in the world of the Blacks. On the
other hand IMO it does not matter that his Harlem was
fictionalized, the important thing about the cycle was that a
Black writer made atypical fiction of quality- even if it was
linked to mystery lit. and when compared to it- about certain
aspects of the Black people's social life and underworld.
Not, once more, naturalistic novels about Blacks.
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
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