A Case of Rape

Rating:
Summary: Shocking, excellent novel!
Review: I had heard of Chester Himes's novel "A Case of Rape" by reading Tyler Stovall's fantastic work on African American life in Paris, "Paris Noir". Himes paints a devastating portrait of racist french officials in this tour de force depiction of hypocritically racist French society. A must-read!

Rating:
Summary: Shocking, excellent novel!
Review: I had heard of Chester Himes's novel "A Case of Rape" by reading Tyler Stovall's fantastic work on African American life in Paris, "Paris Noir". Himes paints a devastating portrait of racist french officials in this tour de force depiction of hypocritically racist French society. A must-read!

Rating:
Summary: Notes for a novel about 1950s Paris Noir
Review: This book is a synopsis for a novel that Chester Himes never wrote with some extended notes about characters and plot rather than a novel. Its prime interest is in the sarcastic portraits Himes provided of fellow exiled African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

In addition to satirizing Wright, Baldwin (and less known African American exiles Ollie Harrington and William Gardner Smith), Himes was killing off a white woman Elizabeth Hancock, very like Willa Trierweiler, a married/separated woman with whom Himes had a long and tormented relationship (she is also the basis for Kriss in _The End of the Primitive_). This is the woman for whose rape and murder four African Americans have been found guilty by a French court. There was neither a rape nor a murder, though "[wo]manslaughter" seems a verdict that could be justified.

Those convicted of the crimes have carried to Europe the American lesson that "it is always best for any Negro to deny any charge lodged against him, to deny it totally and continuously, rather than try to explain the degree of his guilt." Himes indicts his own character for elf-defeating (hurt) pride, Wright for naiveté (and failure to appreciate the nobility of his relationship with Willa) and worldly success, and Baldwin for volunteering to be an "Uncle Tom."

As a semi-fictionalized document on the attitudes of one major expatriate African American writer, the book has some value, but don't expect much in the way of plausibility or narrative development.