“Black Life Matters: Domestic Violence and the Claim for Law Enforcement in Harlem Domestic Series”

Hana Saliba-Salman

It is not surprising that the first ethnic detective to emerge is an African American and that this emergence coincides with the rise of the

hard-boiled fiction in the late 1920s that unleased the detective genre from its escapism to become more realistic. Chester Himes, whose fiction was published in the late 1950s, is considered a pioneering black hard-boiled fiction writer. By the time Himes is writing his domestic series, set in Harlem in the late 1950s, America was still racially segregated, which is dramatized and scrutinized in Himes’s fiction, set in the colored part of Northern America. Having personally been involved in criminal action before becoming a writer, Himes bears witness to the absurdity of a system that breeds crime. Himes’s sarcastic approach is made clear in contrasting the domestic violence and chaos in Harlem streets with the choice of “make-believeˮ Black detectives, giving claim to the urgency for law enforcement to secure the lives of African Americans.