The Heat Is On

Chester Himes was in his mid-40s when he began writing detective fiction. Having spent years and years trying to jump-start a literary career, he had found himself at something of an impasse. He had written some accomplished novels, but they had not achieved the financial and critical success that they deserved and that he also needed. At the suggestion of his French translator, Marcel Duhamel, who ran a line of crime novels called La Serie Noire for Gallimard, Himes turned his attention to genre fiction. What followed were some of his most brilliant, searing works, “raucous, ribald, absurd, and yet gritty and realistic,” writes Gene Seymour. They also blended modernist art with sharp-eyed social analysis. In them one finds “a thwarted, combustible, often embittered romantic…the kind of romantic capable even on his worst days of spinning stories about tough, sore men using fair or foul methods to keep—or find—peace.” Read “Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs”

A Downbeat Heist

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is, on its face, a heist movie: It concerns a robbery committed at a museum in broad daylight by a crew led by a disaffected artist named James Mooney. Set in the 1970s, the film is the director’s most political work: All throughout it are hints of the decade and the whiplash that came in the wake of rebellion and counterinsurgency. Mooney is an avatar of the time, a figure caught between the fresh air of revolution and a stale domestic atmosphere, who turns to crime to liven up his life. Politics, in one way or another, always animates Reichardt’s work, but usually in a reserved, understated fashion. In The Mastermind, Vikram Murthi writes in his review, she is far more explicit, anticipating “the moment when…simmeringc frustration—catalyzed by a decade of war, assassinations, and cultural upheaval—would eventually boil over.” Read “A Downbeat Take on the Heist Movie”