The Real Cool Killers
Encyclopedia
The Real Cool Killers is a Hardboiled
Crime Fiction
novel written by Chester Himes
. Published in 1959, it is the second book in the Grave Digger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson Mysteries
. The protagonists of the novel, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are a pair of black detectives who patrol the dangerous slums of Harlem
. The book was originally published in French
under the title Il pleut des coups dur.
After the excitement of the altercation, the white man is again approached by a black man. Sonny was standing outside the bar, smoking marijuana with two friends. Sonny accuses the white man of messing around with his girlfriend and produces a pistol. The pair began to run through Harlem with Sonny chasing the still unidentified white man, and a crowd of onlookers trailing behind the pair. Finally the white man attempts to run across a busy street, almost being hit by a car. At that moment Sonny fired a shot at the man's back as he attempted to dodge past the car, sending the man to the ground face down.
At this point in the story we are introduced to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed as they speed toward the scene of the crime here the police fear outbreak of rioting. The men are described as tall and lanky, with short-cropped hair. The pair carry outdated police issue nickel-plated long-barrel .38 caliber revolvers in a belief that the large weapons are more impressive to the residents of Harlem than a small modern handgun would be.
At the arrival of the detectives the crime scene is flocked by onlookers. Sonny is still standing over the body of the man holding the pistol he was chasing him with. He tells the detectives that the man has just fainted and is not dead, but after inspection he is found to have been shot. Sonny is cuffed and prepared to be taken in when an altercation occurs between the detectives and a group of teenage gang members. The teens, dressed in robes, turbans, smoked glasses and fake beards begin harassing the two detectives. One of the gang members leans over and breaks wind at the officers, and another throws a vial of perfume on Coffin Ed. Having previously been horribly scarred by a man he'd arrested throwing acid onto his face, Coffin Ed's reaction was to shoot at the teen, killing him and wounding an onlooker. The teenage gangsters use the commotion after the shots to escape from the scene on the crime and take the handcuffed Sonny with them.
When the rest of the police force arrive they find Grave Digger and Coffin Ed wresting over the body of the dead white man, as Jones was trying to restrain Ed, who had become hysterical. Once the scene has been sorted out, and the chief of police was informed of the situation of the dead teen and the escaped suspect Sonny the chief puts Coffin Ed on a night's suspension and puts into motion a dragnet with the intention of locating Sonny who is the obvious suspect.
The teenage gang members, who have now been revealed to be known as the "Real Cool Moslems", have taken Sonny, bound in handcuffs and lead at knife point through the basement of a tenement, and led him to the apartment where they room, which is also the home of their friend Cecil who was just shot by Coffin Ed for the perfume throwing. It is revealed that the apartment is also the home of Cecil's grandmother, an ancient woman who is too old to see well and can barely hear. The Moslems intend to hide Sonny from the police, for reasons that their leader, known as Skeik does not reveal.
Grave Digger revisits the Dew Drop Inn where the commotion all started and finds out the identity of the white man. It is revealed that his name was Galen and he was a salesman for the King cola company. His sales district included Harlem, so he'd been seen around occasionally in the Dew Drop as well as hanging around another bar known as Bucky's. The bartender, under duress, tells Grave Digger that he'd been seen around with a small time pimp known as Ready, but asks him to not reveal that he was the one who gave him the information. Following the bartender's lead, Grave Digger visits Bucky's looking to find Ready. He meets resistance from the owner Bucky, who vehemently denies that his bar would harbor a pimp and wanted Grave Digger out. After roughing up the bartender of Bucky's and advancing on Bucky himself one of the women at the bar chimes in that she knows where Ready can be found. Grave Digger takes the woman with him to go find the place of a woman named Reba. The woman tells Grave Digger that the woman now known as Reba was once known as Sheba, and has been guilty of shooting her husband after throwing him from the window of their apartment, but she'd never been convicted. After giving directions to Grave Digger the woman gets away as fast as possible.
Grave Digger follows the lead to Reba's building, and finds her apartment. It is revealed once they see one another that Reba and Grave Digger know each other and have a history. While she is reluctant to admit it, she says that Galen had been a customer of hers at one time, but that she'd banned him for his aberrant behavior. She tells Grave Digger that he'd always brought the girls to the apartment himself and she'd only supplied the room. Galen had preferred very young black girls, still in high school. She'd suspected something was wrong when the girls he brought were making an unreasonable amount of noise, and she'd discovered that he liked to whip them with a small bullwhip. Reba says that many of the girls volunteered to take part in this because Galen was known to pay extraordinary rates for any girl he liked, so it had become common for girls to stake out places he was known to be at. Reba agrees to give Ready over to Grave Digger as long as he didn't rough him up in her apartment as she was afraid he would scare off her customers. After an altercation with Ready in Reba's kitchen he took the pimp down to his car for further questioning. Once out of the building Grave Digger warns Ready that if he finds out that he has withheld any information from him that he will be beaten so bad his girlfriend will never recognize him.
After they are joined at the apartment by two girls known as "Sissie" and "Sugartit" the Moslems create a plan to hide Sonny in plain sight as their dead friend Caleb when the police come searching the apartment, as they're going door to door. The Moslems have long since changed from their robe costumes so they have little danger of being recognized from the crime scene earlier. They decide that Sonny should go to the pigeon coop on the roof and pretend to tend to the birds to fool the cops into thinking he is simple-minded and has been here since before the murder. The gambit does pay off and the cops leave without recognizing Sonny. Though the police do learn that the girl known as "Sugartit" is Eveyln Jones, the daughter of Coffin Ed Jones.
Grave Digger and Ready visit the hospital in an attempt to question the man who'd tried to attack Galen in the bar, but the doctor informs them that the man had a rare blood type and was unable to survive the severed arm because a suitable transfusion did not arrive in time. ed looks through the man's possessions and finds a cryptic note from an unidentified "Bee" to a "GB" that seems to identify Galen as "The big john" and that he could be found at the Dew Drop. After the hospital Ready and Grave Digger find the car that Ready had described as Galen's parked under a streetlight near the bar he was last at. In the glove box Grave Digger finds photographs of many of the girls Galen had hired, all of them naked and whipped, as well as Galen's bullwhip. The pair go to the Dew Drop Inn to further question the bartender, Big Smiley. After being roughed up by Ed and shown the photos Smiley admits that he knew what Galen was doing to the girls. He'd also rented the basement to Galen after Reba has banned him from her apartment. He identifies a young girl in a booth in the corner with friends as "Good Booty" and says that he knows Galen had been with her at least once. Coffin Ed says that the Bartender and the manager are under arrest for contributing to the delinquency of minors and that the young teens in the corner are to be held for questioning. At this news Big Smiley punches Ready in the face he falls out of the stool he was sitting at and has a few teeth knocked out. Coffin Ed questions the girl known as Good Booty about Galen and after putting the clues together Ed realizes that the man who was trying to kill Galen in the bar originally was her father. He informs her that her father had been killed trying to attack Galen which sends the girl into hysterics.
After Grave Digger and Ready return to the Chief of police he admits that they searched the building that Sonny was suspected to be in but had not found him. Ready is able to identify Sheik, and this makes the chief realize that he should have taken they boy he'd searched earlier in as his instincts had told him to do. He sends in two officers in to attempt to arrest Sheik and Sonny. As this is going on Coffin Ed arrives on the scene, though still on suspension for the night. Shots are fired in the apartment of the Moslems, one officer was wounded, and the Moslem known as Choo-Choo was shot and fell from the fire escape, dying on the pavement below. The sheik takes Eveyln as a hostage and locks the apartment off from the police, threatening to kill her unless the demands he makes are met. He requests the gun of Grave Digger to be placed in the room and then he be given a getaway vehicle. It is revealed that Sheik believes he killed Galen. It has been found that the gun Sonny had been carrying was a blank gun, and was not capable of killing. Sheik admits that he saw the commotion, with Sonny firing at Galen and decided on a whim to shoot the white man to see if the zip gun he had just finished building worked. While the chief of police tries to convince Sheik to be honorable and give himself up, Coffin Ed gets into position, hanging in front of the room's window, suspended by his ankles. He waits for twenty minutes of banter until he saw the opportunity to shoot, hitting Sheik directly between the eyes and killing him instantly.
At this point in the story both Sheik and Choo-Choo are dead, Ready is hospitalized, and Sonny is under arrest. The police state that Sheik has been found as the killer and that since he his dead the case is closed.
Grave Digger is called to a meeting to go over the ballistics report that had finally been completed on the bullet that killed Galen. The report shows that it would have been impossible for the Sheik's zip gun to have been the murder weapon, as the slug extracted from Galen's skull was from a larger caliber handgun. The police decide that the story of Sheik being the killer had already been told to the press and they did not want to lose face and admit they had made a mistake. Grave Digger realizes exactly who the killer had been all along, but tells the chief that if they re-open the case and ask him to hunt the killer he will resign, so all agree to leave the case closed.
Grave Digger makes a visit to the hope of Sissie's aunt and uncle to talk with the girl. He tells her he knows that she is Galen's killer and says that she must get rid of the gun. She tells him that she threw it into the sewer after the murder. The truth comes out that Sissie had been the one who shot Galen all along. She had gone to the Dew Drop with the intention of killing the man. She has once been abused by Galen, at the instance of Sheik and wanted not only revenge, but wanted to protect Sugartit from the same humiliation at the hands of Galen. She arrived to see the commotion of Sonny chasing the man and fired a shot from the crown unnoticed in all of the chaos. After realizing that Sheik and the Moslems were there she fled the scene for fear of being recognized the threw the weapon into the sewer. Grave Digger tells her that he will not turn her in, and instead knows she will have to live with her choices.
The book closes with Sissie visiting Sonny in jail. He had been sentenced to six months for threatening Galen with the blank gun. Sissie brought him cigarettes because she did not know if he had a girlfriend or a woman in his life. He tells her that he doesn't have a girlfriend, and after a bit of talk he asks her if she'd be his girl. Sissie tells his that things are a little more complicated because she's pregnant with Sheik's child and will give birth before he is out of jail. Sonny replies that he'd better find a way for them to get married as soon as possible while he was still in jail.
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
Crime Fiction
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
novel written by Chester Himes
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels...
. Published in 1959, it is the second book in the Grave Digger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson Mysteries
Harlem Detective
The Harlem Detective series of novels by Chester Himes comprises nine hardboiled novels set in the 1950s and early 1960s:* For Love of Imabelle, AKA A Rage in Harlem* The Crazy Kill* The Real Cool Killers* All Shot Up* The Big Gold Dream* The Heat's On...
. The protagonists of the novel, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are a pair of black detectives who patrol the dangerous slums of Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
. The book was originally published in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
under the title Il pleut des coups dur.
Plot
The novel begins at night in a crowded Harlem bar. The establishment is primarily patronized by blacks, and there is a large white man at the bar as the sole exception. The man quietly surveys the room which is full of women dancing to the music from a jukebox. Very shortly after the scene is described an unidentified black man who is very inebriated advances on the white man at the bar saying that he will kill him for "messing with his little black girls". The man attempts to slash at the white man's neck with a knife and fails, only cutting his red tie off of his neck. The large barman attempts to reason with the man, himself getting slashed deeply across the left arm. After seeing the man is too drunk to reason with, and is a danger the barman pulls a fireman's ax from behind the bar and cuts the drunk's arm off.After the excitement of the altercation, the white man is again approached by a black man. Sonny was standing outside the bar, smoking marijuana with two friends. Sonny accuses the white man of messing around with his girlfriend and produces a pistol. The pair began to run through Harlem with Sonny chasing the still unidentified white man, and a crowd of onlookers trailing behind the pair. Finally the white man attempts to run across a busy street, almost being hit by a car. At that moment Sonny fired a shot at the man's back as he attempted to dodge past the car, sending the man to the ground face down.
At this point in the story we are introduced to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed as they speed toward the scene of the crime here the police fear outbreak of rioting. The men are described as tall and lanky, with short-cropped hair. The pair carry outdated police issue nickel-plated long-barrel .38 caliber revolvers in a belief that the large weapons are more impressive to the residents of Harlem than a small modern handgun would be.
At the arrival of the detectives the crime scene is flocked by onlookers. Sonny is still standing over the body of the man holding the pistol he was chasing him with. He tells the detectives that the man has just fainted and is not dead, but after inspection he is found to have been shot. Sonny is cuffed and prepared to be taken in when an altercation occurs between the detectives and a group of teenage gang members. The teens, dressed in robes, turbans, smoked glasses and fake beards begin harassing the two detectives. One of the gang members leans over and breaks wind at the officers, and another throws a vial of perfume on Coffin Ed. Having previously been horribly scarred by a man he'd arrested throwing acid onto his face, Coffin Ed's reaction was to shoot at the teen, killing him and wounding an onlooker. The teenage gangsters use the commotion after the shots to escape from the scene on the crime and take the handcuffed Sonny with them.
When the rest of the police force arrive they find Grave Digger and Coffin Ed wresting over the body of the dead white man, as Jones was trying to restrain Ed, who had become hysterical. Once the scene has been sorted out, and the chief of police was informed of the situation of the dead teen and the escaped suspect Sonny the chief puts Coffin Ed on a night's suspension and puts into motion a dragnet with the intention of locating Sonny who is the obvious suspect.
The teenage gang members, who have now been revealed to be known as the "Real Cool Moslems", have taken Sonny, bound in handcuffs and lead at knife point through the basement of a tenement, and led him to the apartment where they room, which is also the home of their friend Cecil who was just shot by Coffin Ed for the perfume throwing. It is revealed that the apartment is also the home of Cecil's grandmother, an ancient woman who is too old to see well and can barely hear. The Moslems intend to hide Sonny from the police, for reasons that their leader, known as Skeik does not reveal.
Grave Digger revisits the Dew Drop Inn where the commotion all started and finds out the identity of the white man. It is revealed that his name was Galen and he was a salesman for the King cola company. His sales district included Harlem, so he'd been seen around occasionally in the Dew Drop as well as hanging around another bar known as Bucky's. The bartender, under duress, tells Grave Digger that he'd been seen around with a small time pimp known as Ready, but asks him to not reveal that he was the one who gave him the information. Following the bartender's lead, Grave Digger visits Bucky's looking to find Ready. He meets resistance from the owner Bucky, who vehemently denies that his bar would harbor a pimp and wanted Grave Digger out. After roughing up the bartender of Bucky's and advancing on Bucky himself one of the women at the bar chimes in that she knows where Ready can be found. Grave Digger takes the woman with him to go find the place of a woman named Reba. The woman tells Grave Digger that the woman now known as Reba was once known as Sheba, and has been guilty of shooting her husband after throwing him from the window of their apartment, but she'd never been convicted. After giving directions to Grave Digger the woman gets away as fast as possible.
Grave Digger follows the lead to Reba's building, and finds her apartment. It is revealed once they see one another that Reba and Grave Digger know each other and have a history. While she is reluctant to admit it, she says that Galen had been a customer of hers at one time, but that she'd banned him for his aberrant behavior. She tells Grave Digger that he'd always brought the girls to the apartment himself and she'd only supplied the room. Galen had preferred very young black girls, still in high school. She'd suspected something was wrong when the girls he brought were making an unreasonable amount of noise, and she'd discovered that he liked to whip them with a small bullwhip. Reba says that many of the girls volunteered to take part in this because Galen was known to pay extraordinary rates for any girl he liked, so it had become common for girls to stake out places he was known to be at. Reba agrees to give Ready over to Grave Digger as long as he didn't rough him up in her apartment as she was afraid he would scare off her customers. After an altercation with Ready in Reba's kitchen he took the pimp down to his car for further questioning. Once out of the building Grave Digger warns Ready that if he finds out that he has withheld any information from him that he will be beaten so bad his girlfriend will never recognize him.
After they are joined at the apartment by two girls known as "Sissie" and "Sugartit" the Moslems create a plan to hide Sonny in plain sight as their dead friend Caleb when the police come searching the apartment, as they're going door to door. The Moslems have long since changed from their robe costumes so they have little danger of being recognized from the crime scene earlier. They decide that Sonny should go to the pigeon coop on the roof and pretend to tend to the birds to fool the cops into thinking he is simple-minded and has been here since before the murder. The gambit does pay off and the cops leave without recognizing Sonny. Though the police do learn that the girl known as "Sugartit" is Eveyln Jones, the daughter of Coffin Ed Jones.
Grave Digger and Ready visit the hospital in an attempt to question the man who'd tried to attack Galen in the bar, but the doctor informs them that the man had a rare blood type and was unable to survive the severed arm because a suitable transfusion did not arrive in time. ed looks through the man's possessions and finds a cryptic note from an unidentified "Bee" to a "GB" that seems to identify Galen as "The big john" and that he could be found at the Dew Drop. After the hospital Ready and Grave Digger find the car that Ready had described as Galen's parked under a streetlight near the bar he was last at. In the glove box Grave Digger finds photographs of many of the girls Galen had hired, all of them naked and whipped, as well as Galen's bullwhip. The pair go to the Dew Drop Inn to further question the bartender, Big Smiley. After being roughed up by Ed and shown the photos Smiley admits that he knew what Galen was doing to the girls. He'd also rented the basement to Galen after Reba has banned him from her apartment. He identifies a young girl in a booth in the corner with friends as "Good Booty" and says that he knows Galen had been with her at least once. Coffin Ed says that the Bartender and the manager are under arrest for contributing to the delinquency of minors and that the young teens in the corner are to be held for questioning. At this news Big Smiley punches Ready in the face he falls out of the stool he was sitting at and has a few teeth knocked out. Coffin Ed questions the girl known as Good Booty about Galen and after putting the clues together Ed realizes that the man who was trying to kill Galen in the bar originally was her father. He informs her that her father had been killed trying to attack Galen which sends the girl into hysterics.
After Grave Digger and Ready return to the Chief of police he admits that they searched the building that Sonny was suspected to be in but had not found him. Ready is able to identify Sheik, and this makes the chief realize that he should have taken they boy he'd searched earlier in as his instincts had told him to do. He sends in two officers in to attempt to arrest Sheik and Sonny. As this is going on Coffin Ed arrives on the scene, though still on suspension for the night. Shots are fired in the apartment of the Moslems, one officer was wounded, and the Moslem known as Choo-Choo was shot and fell from the fire escape, dying on the pavement below. The sheik takes Eveyln as a hostage and locks the apartment off from the police, threatening to kill her unless the demands he makes are met. He requests the gun of Grave Digger to be placed in the room and then he be given a getaway vehicle. It is revealed that Sheik believes he killed Galen. It has been found that the gun Sonny had been carrying was a blank gun, and was not capable of killing. Sheik admits that he saw the commotion, with Sonny firing at Galen and decided on a whim to shoot the white man to see if the zip gun he had just finished building worked. While the chief of police tries to convince Sheik to be honorable and give himself up, Coffin Ed gets into position, hanging in front of the room's window, suspended by his ankles. He waits for twenty minutes of banter until he saw the opportunity to shoot, hitting Sheik directly between the eyes and killing him instantly.
At this point in the story both Sheik and Choo-Choo are dead, Ready is hospitalized, and Sonny is under arrest. The police state that Sheik has been found as the killer and that since he his dead the case is closed.
Grave Digger is called to a meeting to go over the ballistics report that had finally been completed on the bullet that killed Galen. The report shows that it would have been impossible for the Sheik's zip gun to have been the murder weapon, as the slug extracted from Galen's skull was from a larger caliber handgun. The police decide that the story of Sheik being the killer had already been told to the press and they did not want to lose face and admit they had made a mistake. Grave Digger realizes exactly who the killer had been all along, but tells the chief that if they re-open the case and ask him to hunt the killer he will resign, so all agree to leave the case closed.
Grave Digger makes a visit to the hope of Sissie's aunt and uncle to talk with the girl. He tells her he knows that she is Galen's killer and says that she must get rid of the gun. She tells him that she threw it into the sewer after the murder. The truth comes out that Sissie had been the one who shot Galen all along. She had gone to the Dew Drop with the intention of killing the man. She has once been abused by Galen, at the instance of Sheik and wanted not only revenge, but wanted to protect Sugartit from the same humiliation at the hands of Galen. She arrived to see the commotion of Sonny chasing the man and fired a shot from the crown unnoticed in all of the chaos. After realizing that Sheik and the Moslems were there she fled the scene for fear of being recognized the threw the weapon into the sewer. Grave Digger tells her that he will not turn her in, and instead knows she will have to live with her choices.
The book closes with Sissie visiting Sonny in jail. He had been sentenced to six months for threatening Galen with the blank gun. Sissie brought him cigarettes because she did not know if he had a girlfriend or a woman in his life. He tells her that he doesn't have a girlfriend, and after a bit of talk he asks her if she'd be his girl. Sissie tells his that things are a little more complicated because she's pregnant with Sheik's child and will give birth before he is out of jail. Sonny replies that he'd better find a way for them to get married as soon as possible while he was still in jail.