Chester Himes

I own the movie and the book.

So shout out to Chester Himes, too, and Ozzie Davis for doing the movie.

Those are two great ones.

Shout out to Mr. McKinney.

Mickey Spillane.

Chester Himes.

Mysteries were exploding, too, and legal thrillers in the coming decades.

Police procedurals.

He's our buddy, Gary Lavisi.

And the book also contains biographies on David Goodis and Chester Himes.

Sounds amazing.

I got to get ahold of this thing.

I, I, I, I love a lot of, I tend to read a lot of crime fiction.

I really love, um, Chester Himes and John D. MacDonald.

My favorite series is the Parker series by Richard Stark.

Mm-hmm.

Let's see.

Blind Man with a Pistol by Chester Himes.

His whole... series is great the coffin ed and grave digger jones series um these these two um cops i think it's they would be the 1960s that's a great series that's fun you know i i don't watch as much tv so i don't know um as much of the cool stuff that's out but i did just re-watch both seasons of american vandal and i think that's one of the best things I've seen in like the last 10 years.

You know that one?

It completely defies standard logic, doesn't it? I mean, you would naturally assume that a writer needs to be completely immersed in the grid of a city to accurately capture its pulse on the page.

Right, but that is exactly the geographic contradiction of Chester Himes.

Today, we are unpacking the life of a man who went from serving time as an armed robber in a maximum security penitentiary.

To becoming a revered, award-winning literary icon in Europe.

What does it actually take to thrive in a system that seems purposefully designed to crush you?

That's a heavy question.

Chester Himes proved that sometimes fighting the system from the inside is a trap.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is entirely remove yourself from a toxic environment.

They love to do it, don't they?

Chester Himes happened to be in prison there at the time and has his very first piece of writing ever released, basically, was This Red Hell, a Somewhat fictionalization of his experience in that fire.

Byline to his prisoner number.

To what red hell is the name of it? Byline to his prisoner number, 59623.

George Kennan, the least sentimental of American diplomats, echoed Fanon, describing America as a prehistoric monster with a brain the size of a pin.

Yet even Fanon, who regarded America as a country of lynchers, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers like Richard Wright and Chester Himes.

America is a battlefield, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself in which the stakes are beyond measure.

Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, there has been one battle after another, both inside America and over the idea of America and its role in the world.