The End of a Primitive

Kriss wakes up alone divorced, disillusioned, in her plush Manhattan apartment. They have nothing in common. Just one amazing, passionate weekend in Chicago and a desire to meet again.

Jesse Robinson wakes from his nightmare to dirty, fitful real life in a Harlem slum.

Publishers Weekly

In 1953, Himes, an important, provocative, yet largely forgotten African American novelist, left America for France in a deep depression over a lifetime of hardship to write this racially conscious roman noir. Himes (If He Hollers, Let Him Go) relates the story of two lonely, angry people in racially troubled McCarthy-era America whose lives intersect briefly in New York, an encounter that results in sex, violence and death. One character is an infertile, divorced white woman named Kriss Cummings (pun intended) who considers black men sexual trophies, of which she has many (" `Kriss is solving the Negro Problem in bed.' "). The other, Jesse Robinson, is a black writer rooming in Harlem who is on the outs with his publisher (his latest work is " `too sordid.... Why don't you write a black success novel?' ") The two, who met previously in Chicago, reconnect to smoke, swear, drink endless amounts of bourbon, and cut each other down. Their oddly sheltered world is one of sexual frustration, racial injustice and total despair. Himes's plot line is deceptively simple; the complex racial and sexual issues raised by this deliberately unshapely narrative are ugly and unresolved. Part of the Old School Books series of reprinted pulp fiction by black authors, the book has a hardboiled style with a racial twist that is both unsettling and addictive: "Black son of a bitch has got to have some means of joining the human race. Old Shakespeare knew. Suppose he'd had Othello kiss the bitch and make up. Would have dehumanized the bastard." (Jan.)

After arriving on the American literary scene with novels of scathing social protest like If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade,
Chester Himes created a pioneering pair of dangerously charming African-American sleuths, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who attempt to maintain some kind of order in a series of violent and funny page-turners.