The social concerns revealed by Himes's writing are suggested by the titles of his two volumes of autobiography: The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976). Himes, who once observed two black convicts knife each other to death during an argument as to whether Paris was in France or France in Paris, believes that the life of American blacks is characterized by violence, resulting in an absurd, or meaningless, existence. Moreover, he realized that the fantasy world of hardboiled detective fiction, which portrays human life as violent and irrational and human society as malevolent and corrupt, is actually very similar to the real life of urban blacks in America, at least, as he himself had experienced it.

Thus, Himes used his detective novels not only to entertain, but also to reveal the quality of life in the huge black ghetto of Harlem, where sordid violence...