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elijahkinchspector

Uncertain, Fugitive, Half-fabulous

Stories about people. People who must ponder the implications of their laser gun swords.

Currently reading

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond
Bill Campbell, Edward Austin Hall
Deathstalker War (Owen Deathstalker, Vol. 3)
Simon R. Green
Jews Without Money
Michael Gold
The Real Cool Killers - Chester Himes This is a deconstruction that doesn't feel like a deconstruction. You've got all the "good stuff" you expect from a hard boiled crime story (one of my favorite genres): violence, slang, a mystery, nicknames, sexual perversion, bad-ass protagonists, eccentric criminals, and so on. But it's all turned up too much, and that's the point. Let's start with our "heroes." Coffin Ed and Grave Digger (and yes, their names are very fitting) are two cops who show up in a bunch of Himes' novels: they're black cops in Harlem and for every moment in which they're bad-ass, capable, and full of righteous indignation, there's another in which one or both of them smack around innocent people, shoot at a car they want out of their way, and (in one of the book's earlier scenes) kill a mostly innocent gang member and non-fatally shoot an entirely innocent person while in a paroxysm of rage. Grave Digger describes his job, at least two times, as being "making Harlem safe for white people," and while he isn't particularly happy that that is his job, he goes about it terrifyingly. It's chilling, because these two are your standard 1950s, Mickey Spillane-style, anti-heroes, but amplified just enough for what they do to edge entirely into police brutality. Yet they manage to be better than the white cops and better than the lead villain... all while the worst person in the book, by far, is the murder victim himself.

As the investigation goes on, the reader also follows a group of white cops as they hassle people and generally be some racist motherfuckers in that special way that New York cops still can today. Even while they're technically on the side the reader should be rooting for, it comes down very quickly to preferring the utterly cold-blooded gang-leader Sheik, rather than the fine upstanding police officers who our "heroes" work with every day, simply because of the way we see them hassling people. And it is, naturally, never a missed point that the cops are only out in force because a white man was killed in Harlem.

But the worst (best) part is that the book is still so captivating and exciting. There's suspense and over-the-top violence and bad-assery and the reader is made complicit in everything, good and bad. The book drags you along through vivid prose and spins you around, making you doubt the side that you're used to trusting -- Hammett, Chandler, and many others have done the same, but it's different here, in large part because, in a Dostoevskian way, who the murderer is doesn't really matter. The reader is eagerly pulled through all of this, and it's thrilling and twisting and terrible and funny, and then it all ends on a surprisingly sweet note that doesn't tie everything together, but gives the reader a wonderful chance to breathe. A masterpiece of crime fiction.