Chester Himes was born in Missouri in 1909 and died in Spain in 1984. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and later went to the Ohio State University in Columbus. He was expelled for playing a prank and a couple years later was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 20-25 years of hard labor at the Ohio Penitentiary. In prison he started writing. His first published story was in 1931. In 1936 he was paroled. He worked as a screen writer in LA but was pushed out because of his race. In the 1950s he moved to France and then in 1969 he moved to Spain where he died from Parkinson’s disease at the age of 75. He wrote some literary types of novels on his own experiences and issues relating to race and his time in prison. But he is mostly known for his hardboiled crime detective series featuring two black detectives operating in Harlem by the names of Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. There were eight entries in the series from 1957 to 1969. All Shot Up was the fourth book in the series.
The basic premise: In 1950s Harlem, a sailor and his girlfriend try and recover their brand-new stolen Cadillac while two detectives try and figure out who, how and why the three men dressed as police, robbed an up-and-coming politician, and left a trail of bodies along the way.
It’s a freezing cold Groundhogs Day on the city streets of Harlem New York. A man stealing a tire witnesses a giant gold Cadillac, hit an old lady crossing the street. The car is driven by a big man with a coonskin hat, a little pimp guy and a woman he thinks he recognizes. They drive off in a hurry. The woman gets up but then is run over by an unmarked police car with two black cops and one white cop inside.
The cops catch up with the Cadillac. They smack the little pimp guy with a blackjack and steal the Cadillac. The man in the coonskin hat is Roman, a hearty sailor who had saved up all his money to buy that Cadillac and he’ll be damned if anyone, even the cops are going to steal it. He and his girlfriend, Sassafras, and the unconscious pimp, Baron take off in the abandoned cop car and chase after.
Back at the police station the phone is ringing off the hook. There has been a shoutout outside a local gay bar and it involves a prominent man in the community who is running for office. The case is given to two black detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.
This book starts up right away and never lets up. The writing is pulpy and hardboiled with lots of dark humor. Random events occur that you think is just for comic relief but come back later on to weigh in on the plot. An example: the thief stealing the wheels of the car continues his work even after he has seen the lady run over twice. He knows she’s dead and he just witnessed a murder, but he has to grab that last wheel. He gets it off and, in his haste, he is rolling it down the hill. It gets away from him and rolls down the street into two beat cops. He takes off. Later on, while the detectives are looking for a witness, it comes out that the cops who were hit by the tire were too embarrassed to report it. If they had reported it, they would have known earlier on that there was a witness and could have helped solve the case. It wasn’t any grand revelation in the main plot and might not have made a difference, but that Himes made this little event matter was notable. Every character and incident in this is tough and coarse with more going on than what’s on the surface.
Back at the gay bar Coffin Ed and Gravedigger enter the bar to talk to the witnesses. No one wants to talk. They go through the bar one by one and essentially smack the shit out of them. They pull their guns and start shooting, until someone starts talking. The bartender speaks up. Three men in cop uniforms had a shootout with a lone gunman. One of the dead men outside was a drag queen named, Snake Hips. The gunman was a private detective. The man stabbed was Casper Holmes, a local businessman who has an office above the bar. Sometimes he frequents the bar. He was carrying a satchel of money. How did the hoods know he had it? Was it all random?
The main characters, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones reminded me of Denzel Washington’s character in the movie Training Day. They are violent and reckless, doing whatever needs to be done to get answers but unlike Washinton’s character, they aren’t crooked in the sense that they are monetarily profiting from the intimidation. All the people of Harlem refer to them as “the man.” They are of the people but separate. The other cops on the scene refer to them as cowboys. Two big dogs that make everyone they come across tense up when they are around. They are hard ex-military guys from the streets, driving around Harlem in an ice storm at 3am drinking a bottle of bourbon solving murder cases.
There is lots of brutality in this. A man is decapitated (in gory detail!) while driving a motorcycle in a police chase. But there is also humor. After the decapitation the body keeps on driving down the street. Simultaneously, across town, while having a conversation about the man, Sassafras states that he’s cool under pressure, and he won’t lose his head.
The characters are pulpy colorful with lots of great street names like Sassafras, Snake Hips, and Black Beauty, not to mention the main characters ghoulish nicknames of Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. The little pimp guy named Baron is described in a manner that it was hard not to picture Kat Williams. Casper the politician is slimy and crooked, making all kinds of backhanded deals in his quest for power. Roman the sailor is a simple straight man surrounded by crooks but even he stands out as a brute not to mess with.
I’m surprised this came out in 1960. If I had to guess I would have easily said this was a 1970s blaxploitation novel. It’s ahead of its time. There were only a few remarks on racism. The n-word shows up only three times. The first by a white cop. And then again by the same character. Until Coffin Ed threateningly says, “say it one more time,” and dude instantly shuts his mouth. Instead of mother fucker they say mother raper, which, is a hundred times worse. You can’t put the word “fuck” in a book, but the word rape is greenlit. Funny how society chooses what words are apprehensible and what are acceptable, eh? Also, the fact that a few of the characters are gay is never portrayed in a negative light. They just are. And that’s pretty cool.
This is one hell of a great crime book. The setting is dangerous, and the frozen weather just makes it even more bleak. It’s well thought out and all the strands tie up nicely at the end. You root for the main characters but in real life you wouldn’t want to run into them. And that’s how I like my heroes, terrifying.
For Black History Month this year I wanted to put together this little article featuring some black vintage genre fiction writers. The bulk of the output is from the pre-90s era though some of the writers continue to produce even to this day. I'm am in no way an expert and just like anything else on this blog I am just an amateur fan who wants to learn more about the fiction that I love.
I left off Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines as I intend to do a whole article/video about the publisher Holloway House and I will cover them in depth in that one. I am also posting a book review and bio of Chester Himes in the next post so go check that out.
There is a video version of this as usual, and it is right here:
Born 1947 and died in 2006. She grew up in Pasadena California and attended the Pasadena City College and then later would take writing classes through the UCLA and once attended a Writers Guild of America West workshop taught by Harlan Ellison who encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.
Her first story was published in 1971 for the Clarion Workshop and she sold another for Harlan Ellison’s anthology The Last Dangerous Visions which was not published until 2024.
In the mid-1980s she won Hugo and Nebula awards for her body horror Novelette, Bloodchild.
She published 14 novels including the Patternist Series about a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague.
She also wrote the Lilith’s Brood series, a post nuclear war has all but destroyed humanity and an alien races comes in to save the survivors but in order to do that the humans must mix their genetic makeup and become hybrids like the aliens, losing their humanity. the Parable series and two stand alones.
References:
Jessnevins.com
wikipedia
Born in 1946 in Pennsylvania and died in Nova Scotia Canada in 2020. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1968 with a degree in psychology. In 1969 he was drafted to fight in Vietnam but instead relocated to Canada.
He is most well-known for his character Imaro, a warrior of the plains of Nyumbani, a fictional version of Africa. Imaro is often compared to Conan and Saunders has said how he was influenced by Robert E Howard, but Imaro was also a reaction to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan. Saunders said in an interview published in the journal Black American Literature Forum published by John Hopkins University press, “I think he was born when I watched a Tarzan movie and fantasized a Black man jumping up and beating the hell out of (Tarzan actor) Johnny Weissmuller,”
Imaro was first published as short stories in Gene Day’s fanzine, Dark Fantasy. The first Iamro story was reprinted in DAW books first, Year’s Best Fantasy Stories edited by Lin Cater. DAW owner, Donald A Wollheim then encouraged Saunders to put together the short stories in a fix up that would become the first Imaro novel. There were 5 entries in the Imaro series, the first three published by DAW in the early to mid-80s and then he brought the character back in 2009 for one novel and another in 2017. The Imaro series is steeped in African locations, history, people, folklore and tribes, each with slight adjustments to add to the fantastical fiction world of Nyumbani. Unlike other characters and racial themes in this article/video, Imaro’s struggle is a personal one.
He has another character named Dossouye who is a female warrior that appeared in a short story anthology called Amazons in 1979. Dossouye was based on the Dahomey Amazons which were an all female military regiment that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey from the 17th century until the late 19th century. Three more stories followed in Marrion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. In 1986 Saunders wrote the script for the movie Amazons based off of the Dossouye stories but in the movie the warriors were all blond, white ladies so, yeah, loose adaptation. In 2008 he resurrected the character with a fix up novel of the previous stories and a completely new novel in 2012.
He had a few non-fiction books centered around his home in Nova Scotia. One piquing my interest the most is a book called Sweat and Soul: The Saga of Black Boxers from the Halifax Forum to Caesars Palace released in 1990.
And while doing the research for this I stumbled upon another boxing related Saunders authored book, Damballa from 2011, which is a black vigilante pulp style hero. It’s 1938 in Harlem and there is a heavyweight championship fight between the US champion and a German challenger. Saunders based the fight off one of the most important fights in boxing history which was the rematch of the Joe Louis- Max Schmelling fight. In this book the Nazis are rigging the match for their guy to win but Damballa has figured it out and set to put a stop to them.
References:
Ny Times article by Neil Genzlinger
Blackgate.com
Airship27.com
Youtube:
Secret Fire Books
David Books and Comics
Was born in 1933 in Baltimore and died in 2003 in New York. He graduated from Queens College with a degree in creative writing and history. He had an affinity of Japanese culture and thus trained in martial arts earning advanced degree black belts in karate and aikido.
His first published works were two non-fiction books. One is a biography of Black Panther political activist Angela Davis and the other a study on cocaine in 1970s New York. Through his investigate work he was introduced to many real world DEA and CIA agents which led him to his first fiction series, Narc.
Narc was written under the pseudonym Robert Hawkes and was a nine-book series which lasted from 1973 to 1975. It was a Men’s Adventure crime series about a white Narcotics Agent named John Bolt who kicks ass, gets ladies and takes on drug dealers.
The books of his that I was most aware of before doing this article were the Black Samurai series. This time under his own name and with a black protagonist hero named Robert Sand, an American GI stationed in Japan. He gets shot while trying to stop some baddies from attacking an old man. Turns out the man was a Samurai master who kicks the shit out of the assailants as Sand is passing out. Sand goes under his wing for Samurai training and within seven years he is a force of nature and also the first black man to ever take the oath of the Samurai. The Black Samurai series had 8 entries from 1974 to 1975 and was even made into a movie starring Jim Kelly.
In 1976 he started his Harker series about an investigative journalist named Harker who takes on corruption and crime. The series only had four entries lasting from 1976 to 1978.
He also had 17 standalone novels many influenced by his love of Japanese culture.
Horror novels- Book of Shadows and Poe Must Die
References:
Marcolden.com
Paperbackwarrior.com
Youtube:
David Books and Comics
Born in 1944 and died from brain cancer at the age of 62 in 2006. He joined the Air Force in 1964 and went to fight in the Vietnam War. Afterward he was veteran with a bullet scar in his neck. He lived in LA in Watts, the Crenshaw District and Inglewood. Joe wrote over 60 novels mostly put out by Holloway House whom he was also an editor for. He was also editor of Players magazine, a nudie magazine featuring black ladies which was the first of its kind. He was more a follower of the ideologies of Martin Luther King Jr than the militant aspects of 60’s black militant activism.
Joseph Nazel wrote a few series characters. One of them being: Black Cop under the pseudonym Dom Grober. Black Cop had four entries from 1974 to 1976 and stars a Vietnam veteran named James Rhodes who works for the LAPD narcotics division. The series seems to be a basic police procedural but with a black lead who has to not only deal with nefarious crime lords but racism within the department and out on the streets.
Iceman is a total men’s adventure series about a pimp secret agent named Henry Highland West. In his entourage are ass kicking, smoking hot lady sidekicks. In pulp hero staple style, he is uber rich, owns a million-dollar pleasure haven called the Oasis and with his own personal helicopter, travels the world annihilating evil doers including the usual suspects of the syndicate, South African slavers, and a Canadian extremist group among others.
He also wrote a lot of unauthorized biographies including, Richard Pryor, BB King, Langston Hughes (poet), Paul Robeson (professional football player, actor and singer).
It was difficult to find many black horror authors from the pre 90s era but Nazel was a name that kept popping up, mostly for the infamous Black Exorcist novel. The Black Exorcist was published in 1974 and then re-published in 1983 as Satan’s Master. It is about a Christian Reverend and a satanic voodoo priest battling it out for the people in the black community. It has lots of racial politics of the time battling it out on whether the best path is violence or love. But it also delivers in the horror aspects. You get zombies, mafia, voodoo, Satan, crime, sex, cults, possession and just plain old good versus evil.
Reference:
Paperback Warrior Blog
LA Times article by Emory Holmes
Jethrowegener.com
Jessnevins.com
Like I said I had a hard time finding black horror authors from before the 90s which is mind blowing because the post Stephen King explosion had every writer hacking out their bloated horror novel, so just by sheer numbers you would figure there would be some black authors. Maybe there is and I just couldn’t find them?
I did find this very interesting Glenda Dumas book titled, The Rootworker. Along with Joseph Navel’s Black Exorcist these seem to be two of the few horror novels published by Holloway House. I intend to make a whole video on Holloway House and was going to save this entry for that but we need the horror genre represented here so I’ll go ahead and mention it now.
There isn’t a lot of information about her but I believe Glenda Dumas is still alive. She put out a book called Visions of the Rapture and Unseen Realm in 2016 which according to her Authors Den profile is, “a book that describes how the Lord chose me to give an important message to His people. I was transported into the future and showed the Rapture by an archangel. I believe he was Michael, because he was extremely huge and Michael appears to have a major role in the end times. I must admit that he did not tell me his name. He did, however, show me how the Rapture will happen and let me know that most people are not ready to go up. This is a message that I need to get out.”
As for her 1983 novel The Rootworker, according to the back synopsis, it appears to be about a young woman falling in love with a man and her bringing him back to her small town in North Carolina where everyone in town, including her parents are in a secret cult that worships Satan called the cult of The Rootworker. There aren’t any reviews of the book online, so it looks like I’m going to have to pick up this book and rectify that.
Born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California and is still alive! He actually has a decent online presence where he is happy to chat about his writing, teaching the craft and isn’t averse to interviews. His first published piece of fiction was a 1979 collaboration with Larry Niven called The Locusts which was a Hugo nominee. Along with author wife Tananarive Due, they teach a course at UCLA called, “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black Horror Aesthetic.” His latest book was a Star Wars novel titled: Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss released in 2024.
He started out writing a science-fiction series with Larry Niven called Dream Park which had four entries from 1981 to 2011. Dream Park is an amusement park set in 2051. In the park, people can become characters in a live action role playing game. Similar to Dungeons and Dragons but you are essentially in a virtual reality. The story morphs into cyber-punk territory where the games are cutting edge technology, morphed into televised games and real murder and corruption going on in the background. This book inspired fans to create real world LARPing games based on the concepts.
His next series is the Aubrey Knight series which has three entries from 1983 to 1993. It takes place in a futuristic Los Angeles where ex-Cartel thug Aubrey Knight has left the gang to try and achieve his goals of being the null-boxing world champion. Null boxing is like MMA. The cartel sets him up for murder and Aubrey is sent to the Death Valley Maximum Security Penitentiary. There he kicks ass and fights for survival and freedom to enact his revenge on those who wronged him.
From a 2003 interview in Locus Magazine:
“When I wrote Streetlethal with a black guy and they put a white guy on the cover. My editor at the time was utterly mortified. Her editor-in-chief told me it was an art department decision, and the art department said it was marketing, and the marketing department said the truck drivers who put the books on stands would think it was some kind of 'Get Whitey', 'Shaft in Space' thing and refuse to handle it. No one would take responsibility. That's happened to tons of writers, black and white -- publishers wouldn't put a black character on the cover. Especially not a man. For Octavia E. Butler, I remember clearly when they would change her characters' race, would put green people on the cover, but not black people.”
Barnes has written over 30 novels and some screen plays for television including the reboot Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda and….Baywatch.
He doesn’t just write about kicking ass, he has many degrees in the martial arts including, a black belt in Kenpo Karate and Kodokan Judo. A brown belt in Shoenji Jiu Jitsu and lower belts in Tae Kwon Do and Akido. He is an instructor in Wu Ming Ta, Wu-style tai chi and Filipino Kalit stick and knife fighting. He also enjoys self-defense pistol shooting and Jun Fan kickboxing. And when he’s done kicking your ass, he can help you find your center again as he’s a Hatha Yoga instructor.
References:
Michaelaventrella.com (interview with Steven Barnes)
