It Didn't Shine

        There were windows in the kitchenette apartments, but all from the top to the bottom floor had folding iron grilles which were closed and locked at that time of night and dark shades were drawn on all but three. The apartment house had a vertical row of small black openings one above the other at the rear. They might have been bathroom windows but no light showed in any of them and the glass was so dirty in didn't shine.

                                                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

       And then i thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.

excerpts from

Chester Himes

Blind Man with a Pistol

1969

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Bernice Abbott
                        https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359265.Blind_Man_with_a_Pistol

In the Dark Entrances

         Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debt, their gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers, and the evilness of white people.

Chester Himes

Difficult Lives

          Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought in drugstores and bus stations ................ stark, bonelike disturbing books.

No Exit Press
2018
                    http://www.noexit.co.uk/index1.php?imprint=1&isbn=9780857302564

Make Anybody Crazy

                    When you get to mixing sex and religion, it will make anybody crazy.

Chester Himes
Crazy Kill
1959

Chester Himes

Fall Too Hard

        Don't ever lean your whole weight on happiness, Jimmy. You fall too hard, too hard when it gives away.

Chester Himes
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
(Cast the First Stone)
1952

End of the Line

         This was the neighbourhood of the cheap addicts, whiskey-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam off Harlem ; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob ; but there wasn't anyone but each other.

Chester Himes

Chester Himes

             He had a broad flat face, rough reddish skin and little reddish eyes from which tears leaked continuously. He was called Red Johhny. He might have been related to Pinky.

              He wore a white silk shirt open at the throat, gren-and-red checked suspenders, tan gabardine pants, white and tan wing-tipped shoes, and the usual heavy gold jewellery denoting a successful pimp; gold ring with a huge milky stone of unknown origin, gold ring with three-quarter-carat yellow diamond, and a gold lodge ring with the outline of an owl with two ruby eyes.

            He crossed glances with Red Marie, standing to the left and behind Coffin Ed, then he spread his thick fingered hands and looked at the gun bulge on Coffin Ed's shoulder.

Chester Himes

The Heat's On

1961

  

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unknown

Chester Himes

Straight in the Eyes

        She held him at arm's length, looked at the pipe still gripped in his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her red full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled bedroom eyes.

The man drowned.

Chester Himes
A Rage in Harlem
1957

Close-Ups of Faces

          ........ hypersaturation of detail in the Harlem novels - ricocheting close-ups of faces, streets, store names, secret alleys and sideshow violence.

Robert Polito

on Chester Himes Harlem Novels

New York Times

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John Gutman

New Orleans

1937

Don't Complain

    He sat there listening to her, a big tough lumpy faced cop looking as though he might cry........ ''Well Sissie'' Gravedigger said, getting slowly to his feet. ''You made you're bed hard ; if it hurts lyin' on it, don't complain''

Chester Himes
Real Cool Killers
1959

More Himes

Mosaic Noir #53

Lady from Shanghai

The Lives of Others

Lost Weekend

Come Back Charleston Blue

Third Man

Nightcrawler

Harlem cycle

Chester Himes (left)

Harlem Noir

              Two rough looking men jumped about the floor, knocking over chairs and tables, cutting at one another with switchblade knives. The customers at the bar screwed their heads about to watch, but held on to their places and kept their hands on their drinks. The whores rolled their eyes and looked bored.

Chester Himes
A Rage in Harlem
1957

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Wayne F. Miller

Blind Man with a Pistol

             He stood well back in the recessed doorway of the United Tobacco store at the northwest corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, watching the sissies frolic about the lunch counter in the Theresa building on the opposite corner. The glass doors had been folded back and the counter was open to the sidewalk.

Blind Man with a Pistol
Chester Himes
1969
( Harlem Cycle #8 )

Chester Himes

              They were standing around the kitchen table. The window looked out on 142nd street. Snow was falling on the ice-locked piles of garbage stretching like levees along the gutters as far as the eye could see.
                                                         ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                                 
           Imabelle was Jackson's woman. She was a cushion-lipped , hot bodied , banana skin chick with the speckled brown eyes of a teaser and the high arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural born amante. Jackson was crazy for her as a moose for doe.

A Rage in Harlem
Chester Himes
1957

Top Twenty Hardboiled/Noir

     Here's the books i would nominate as my favourites. Some a little bit left-field and loosely fitting in terms of the Hardboiled or Noir fiction label.

Friends of Eddie Coyle- Geo V Higgins
Postman Always Rings Twice- James M Cain
The Grifters- Jim Thompson
The Hunter- Richard Stark
Long Goodbye- Raymond Chandler
Street 8- Douglas Fairbairn
New Hope for the Dead- Charles Willeford
The Getaway- Jim Thompson
Fat City- Leonard Gardner
Unknown Man no-89- Elmore Leonard
Red Harvest- Dashiell Hammett
They Shoot Horses Don't They- Horace McCoy
The Burglar- David Goodis
Nightmare Alley- William Lindsay Gresham
In Cold Blood- Truman Capote
Fast One- Paul Cain
Asphalt Jungle- WR Burnett
Pick up- Charles Willeford
Cool hand Luke- Donn Pearce
The Hustler- Walter Tevis

            There's some obvious others lurking in the shadows, around the edges .... like James Lee Burke, Chester Himes, Ellroy, Pelecanos, Woolrich, Block, Ross MacDonald, Moseley, Jason Starr, Derek Raymond and some one-offs like Falling Angel- Hjortsberg and You play the Red and the Black Comes Up.