What do you think?
Rate this book
Harlem Cycle #9
Plan B: A Novel
Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson's own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes's ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled Plan B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared Plan B for publication.
204 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
13 people are currently reading
522 people want to read
About the author
Chester Himes
123 books487 followersChester Bomar Himes began writing in the early 1930s while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery. From there, he produced short stories for periodicals such as Esquire and Abbott's Monthly. When released, he focussed on semi-autobiographical protest novels.
In 1953, Himes emigrated to France, where he was approached by Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard to write a detective series for Série Noire, which had published works from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Himes would be the first black author included in the series. The resulting Harlem Cycle gained him celebrity when he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for La Reine des Pommes (now known in English as A Rage in Harlem) in 1958. Three of these novels have been adapted into movies: Cotton Comes to Harlem, directed by Ossie Davis in 1970; Come Back, Charleston Blue (based on The Heat's On) in 1972; and A Rage in Harlem, starring Gregory Hines and Danny Glover in 1991.
In 1968, Himes moved to Spain where he made his home until his death.
In 1953, Himes emigrated to France, where he was approached by Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard to write a detective series for Série Noire, which had published works from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Himes would be the first black author included in the series. The resulting Harlem Cycle gained him celebrity when he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for La Reine des Pommes (now known in English as A Rage in Harlem) in 1958. Three of these novels have been adapted into movies: Cotton Comes to Harlem, directed by Ossie Davis in 1970; Come Back, Charleston Blue (based on The Heat's On) in 1972; and A Rage in Harlem, starring Gregory Hines and Danny Glover in 1991.
In 1968, Himes moved to Spain where he made his home until his death.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
December 18, 2015
The last Himes,unfinished, published after his death. But, was he able to finish it? Not sure. It begin very strongly, white cops died, revolution in Harlem. Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones died also. And after? Riot on Vth Avenue? Harlem vitrification? Too much violence, the death of his favourite characters, It is not surprising that he can not finish it. But the most interesting is not here. It make me thing to the last Harper Lee. At the end of their life, authors seem totally disinhibited. Miss Lee breaks his kindly image. Himes express his hate for police. Old age is not a wreck.
November 8, 2013
Fans of Chester Himes's great detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, may be tempted to pick up Plan B, Himes's last Harlem Cycle novel, published posthumously in France in 1984 and released in the U.S. a decade later.
Caveat lector!
Plan B was never finished by Himes. The book published under that name is the draft of a novel Himes was working on at the time of his death that has been kludged together with an ending contrived from the author's own notes. It is by no means a finished product, and it has so many obvious flaws that it is not clear that Himes would have been able to put it into publishable form had he lived another twenty years.
The novel starts in typical Himes fashion, with a tenement dweller named T-Bone Smith "laughing like an idiot at two blackfaced white minstrels on the television screen who earned a fortune by blacking their faces and acting just as foolish as T-bone had done for free all his life."
Smith, like many of the low-life characters that figure in Himes's novels, is the broadest possible a caricature of an urban black: a shiftless, ignorant man who lives off his prostitute wife.
In a typical Himes novel, we would follow him through a series of misadventures, possibly as a sidelight to a larger criminal plot, that culminates in a violent confrontation with Digger and Coffin Ed during which the bigger issues come to resolution and the loose ends are, if not neatly tied up, at least lopped off with a meat-ax.
But this is not your average Harlem Cycle crime programmer.
Almost as soon as he is introduced, a messenger delivers a package to T-Bone from an anonymous benefactor. Inside it he finds an assault rifle and enough ammunition to wage a minor war, along with these cryptic instructions:
Warning!! Do not inform police!!! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions!!! Repeat!!! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions!!! Warning!!! Do not inform police!!! Freedom is near!!!
T-Bone quarrels over the gun with Tang, the prostitute he lives with: he wants to turn it over to the cops, while she wants to keep it and follow the instructions. She seizes the weapon and tries to shoot T-Bone with it only to find the magazine is empty. The furious T-Bone kills her with his switchblade, police are summoned and Coffin Ed and Digger respond.
Here is where things get seriously strange: Digger, who is usually the more rational of the two detectives, explodes in rage and kills T-Bone for no good reason by smashing his skull with his custom-made long-barreled .38 Police Special. He is placed on suspension soon afterward and spends most of the rest of the book on the sidelines.
Coffin Ed, who is generally the more violent of the two detectives, remains on the job, but also ends up shunted out of action until the last few pages of the book.
Absent the two detectives -- who are the usual focal point of a Harlem Cycle story -- the remainder of the novel traces the history of a African-American militant named Tomsson Black and his forebears back to the Civil War era. It also follows a series of business transactions involving a company called Chitterlings, Inc.
These parallel stories unfold against the backdrop of a series of mass shootings involving disparate black men equipped with assault rifles almost identical to the one received by T-Bone Smith.
In each case, the gun was delivered without explanation by a messenger. The weapons have no identifying marks and their ammunition has been custom-made to eliminate features that would allow police to trace it back to its manufacturer.
Eventually, it becomes clear that the mass shootings are intended to provoke a racial war. Each massacre is described in gory detail, and each results in a violent counter-strike by white police officers or well-armed white racists.
Soon black citizens are issued identification cards, placed under strict curfews and restricted to their own black enclaves -- only to fall prey to roving bands of white people determined to eradicate them.
It is never explained why those who receive the weapons are so quick to use them in suicide attacks on whites. Because some of the gunmen are described as successful professionals, the reader is left to conclude that the only motivation that is necessary to turn any black man, rich or poor, into a race warrior is his pathological hatred for whites.
The random shootings, in any event, seems to backfire: instead of provoking a racial revolution, they result in a bloodbath that seems likely to end only with the extermination of the black minority by the white majority.
As the action proceeds, we come to understand that the mysterious Tomsson Black is behind the ten million guns that are flooding the ghettos and provoking racial Armageddon. But the only people who seem to be able to figure this out are Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, who confront Black in the final pages of the novel.
Plan B is by no means the first time Himes has looked at the seemingly intractable issue of conflict between blacks and whites in one of his books; in fact, it seems to be the central thread that runs through almost everything he ever wrote.
But this novel lacks the humor Himes brings to most of the rest of his hard-boiled Harlem novels, a bleak drollery that lampoons whites for their mindless racism at the same time as it spoofs blacks who conform to the stereotypes whites have assigned.
In Plan B, Himes is serious -- deadly serious -- about the inability of American blacks and whites to coexist. And in the final analysis Himes seems to conclude that the racial animosity that gives the novel its shape is actually insoluble -- even through the prophylaxis of violence.
"Tomsson Black would have liked to have had the time to organize the black race into effective guerrilla units, and the units into an effective force, in order to add weight to his ultimatum," Himes writes in the final chapter.
"He would also have liked to have granted white people the time for reflection and consideration before they made their choice. Somehow it had gotten out of his control. Now all he could do was complete the distribution of the guns and let maniacal, unorganized and uncontrolled blacks massacre enough whites to make a dent in the white man's hypocrisy, before the entire black race was massacred in retaliation."
But this passage seems as if Himes has suddenly realized that his plot has run off its tracks, and he tries to make up for inadequate story-telling by simply summarizing information that should have been explicated more thoroughly and skillfully as his narrative progressed, not thrown in at the very end.
But the worst is yet to come: Himes aware that he has painted himself into a corner with his fantasy of racial warfare, now cops out completely in a manner that is utterly incomprehensible to anyone who has read any of the other novels about Digger and Coffin Ed.
He has Digger, the most reasonable member of the team, come to Black's defense, while Ed, the man with the hair- trigger temper and the slippery hold on his emotions, inexplicably sides with the white racist status quo.
Given time enough, Himes might have worked out some mechanism that rationalizes this complete personality reversal, but not a word of explanation is offered.
Even more inexplicable is what happens next (spoiler alert!): Digger ends up shooting Coffin Ed, his long-time partner and closest friend, just before he is murdered himself by Black.
The novel ends with Black's unnamed companion, "a beautiful black woman," asking him why he shot Grave Digger since the detective was on his side.
Black lamely explains that Digger had to be eliminated "because he knew too much."
"I hope you know what you're doing," the woman tells him in the last line of the novel. It is a flat ending to a flat tale that is full of violence and mayhem, but to no particular purpose.
Unfortunately, Himes doesn't appear to have known what he was doing when he was writing Plan B. And the editors who pieced together the bits and pieces he left behind when he died seem to have been clueless as well. How else to explain such a radical transformation of Himes's two best-known characters and the holes that riddle the novel's plot like a sieve?
Plan B is a sadly unsatisfactory way to end the Harlem Cycle. Better that Himes hadn't bothered to start a final book at all than to have finished with this travesty that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of those who love his other work.
Caveat lector!
Plan B was never finished by Himes. The book published under that name is the draft of a novel Himes was working on at the time of his death that has been kludged together with an ending contrived from the author's own notes. It is by no means a finished product, and it has so many obvious flaws that it is not clear that Himes would have been able to put it into publishable form had he lived another twenty years.
The novel starts in typical Himes fashion, with a tenement dweller named T-Bone Smith "laughing like an idiot at two blackfaced white minstrels on the television screen who earned a fortune by blacking their faces and acting just as foolish as T-bone had done for free all his life."
Smith, like many of the low-life characters that figure in Himes's novels, is the broadest possible a caricature of an urban black: a shiftless, ignorant man who lives off his prostitute wife.
In a typical Himes novel, we would follow him through a series of misadventures, possibly as a sidelight to a larger criminal plot, that culminates in a violent confrontation with Digger and Coffin Ed during which the bigger issues come to resolution and the loose ends are, if not neatly tied up, at least lopped off with a meat-ax.
But this is not your average Harlem Cycle crime programmer.
Almost as soon as he is introduced, a messenger delivers a package to T-Bone from an anonymous benefactor. Inside it he finds an assault rifle and enough ammunition to wage a minor war, along with these cryptic instructions:
Warning!! Do not inform police!!! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions!!! Repeat!!! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions!!! Warning!!! Do not inform police!!! Freedom is near!!!
T-Bone quarrels over the gun with Tang, the prostitute he lives with: he wants to turn it over to the cops, while she wants to keep it and follow the instructions. She seizes the weapon and tries to shoot T-Bone with it only to find the magazine is empty. The furious T-Bone kills her with his switchblade, police are summoned and Coffin Ed and Digger respond.
Here is where things get seriously strange: Digger, who is usually the more rational of the two detectives, explodes in rage and kills T-Bone for no good reason by smashing his skull with his custom-made long-barreled .38 Police Special. He is placed on suspension soon afterward and spends most of the rest of the book on the sidelines.
Coffin Ed, who is generally the more violent of the two detectives, remains on the job, but also ends up shunted out of action until the last few pages of the book.
Absent the two detectives -- who are the usual focal point of a Harlem Cycle story -- the remainder of the novel traces the history of a African-American militant named Tomsson Black and his forebears back to the Civil War era. It also follows a series of business transactions involving a company called Chitterlings, Inc.
These parallel stories unfold against the backdrop of a series of mass shootings involving disparate black men equipped with assault rifles almost identical to the one received by T-Bone Smith.
In each case, the gun was delivered without explanation by a messenger. The weapons have no identifying marks and their ammunition has been custom-made to eliminate features that would allow police to trace it back to its manufacturer.
Eventually, it becomes clear that the mass shootings are intended to provoke a racial war. Each massacre is described in gory detail, and each results in a violent counter-strike by white police officers or well-armed white racists.
Soon black citizens are issued identification cards, placed under strict curfews and restricted to their own black enclaves -- only to fall prey to roving bands of white people determined to eradicate them.
It is never explained why those who receive the weapons are so quick to use them in suicide attacks on whites. Because some of the gunmen are described as successful professionals, the reader is left to conclude that the only motivation that is necessary to turn any black man, rich or poor, into a race warrior is his pathological hatred for whites.
The random shootings, in any event, seems to backfire: instead of provoking a racial revolution, they result in a bloodbath that seems likely to end only with the extermination of the black minority by the white majority.
As the action proceeds, we come to understand that the mysterious Tomsson Black is behind the ten million guns that are flooding the ghettos and provoking racial Armageddon. But the only people who seem to be able to figure this out are Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, who confront Black in the final pages of the novel.
Plan B is by no means the first time Himes has looked at the seemingly intractable issue of conflict between blacks and whites in one of his books; in fact, it seems to be the central thread that runs through almost everything he ever wrote.
But this novel lacks the humor Himes brings to most of the rest of his hard-boiled Harlem novels, a bleak drollery that lampoons whites for their mindless racism at the same time as it spoofs blacks who conform to the stereotypes whites have assigned.
In Plan B, Himes is serious -- deadly serious -- about the inability of American blacks and whites to coexist. And in the final analysis Himes seems to conclude that the racial animosity that gives the novel its shape is actually insoluble -- even through the prophylaxis of violence.
"Tomsson Black would have liked to have had the time to organize the black race into effective guerrilla units, and the units into an effective force, in order to add weight to his ultimatum," Himes writes in the final chapter.
"He would also have liked to have granted white people the time for reflection and consideration before they made their choice. Somehow it had gotten out of his control. Now all he could do was complete the distribution of the guns and let maniacal, unorganized and uncontrolled blacks massacre enough whites to make a dent in the white man's hypocrisy, before the entire black race was massacred in retaliation."
But this passage seems as if Himes has suddenly realized that his plot has run off its tracks, and he tries to make up for inadequate story-telling by simply summarizing information that should have been explicated more thoroughly and skillfully as his narrative progressed, not thrown in at the very end.
But the worst is yet to come: Himes aware that he has painted himself into a corner with his fantasy of racial warfare, now cops out completely in a manner that is utterly incomprehensible to anyone who has read any of the other novels about Digger and Coffin Ed.
He has Digger, the most reasonable member of the team, come to Black's defense, while Ed, the man with the hair- trigger temper and the slippery hold on his emotions, inexplicably sides with the white racist status quo.
Given time enough, Himes might have worked out some mechanism that rationalizes this complete personality reversal, but not a word of explanation is offered.
Even more inexplicable is what happens next (spoiler alert!): Digger ends up shooting Coffin Ed, his long-time partner and closest friend, just before he is murdered himself by Black.
The novel ends with Black's unnamed companion, "a beautiful black woman," asking him why he shot Grave Digger since the detective was on his side.
Black lamely explains that Digger had to be eliminated "because he knew too much."
"I hope you know what you're doing," the woman tells him in the last line of the novel. It is a flat ending to a flat tale that is full of violence and mayhem, but to no particular purpose.
Unfortunately, Himes doesn't appear to have known what he was doing when he was writing Plan B. And the editors who pieced together the bits and pieces he left behind when he died seem to have been clueless as well. How else to explain such a radical transformation of Himes's two best-known characters and the holes that riddle the novel's plot like a sieve?
Plan B is a sadly unsatisfactory way to end the Harlem Cycle. Better that Himes hadn't bothered to start a final book at all than to have finished with this travesty that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of those who love his other work.
April 24, 2019
This is the final book that Chester Himes wrote for the Harlem Cycle and was published posthumously and incomplete. While the book remained unfinished, Himes lays out a thought experiment in which an apocalyptic black revolution takes hold in America and games out a prediction of how utterly savage the white ruling class would respond in a quickly eroding America. The book manages to weave in fascinating characters and histories of southern black life from beginning of the Civil War to mid-20th century life in Harlem. At only 200 pages, Plan B reads like a true pulp crime novel with absolutely grim themes. While undoubtedly, I still think the pinnacle of Himes' writing sits with the race and class based noir "If He Hollers Let Him Go" this book should still sit very high in his canon
February 15, 2021
Whoa!
Wild. Unflinching. Visceral. Unrepentant. Revolutionary. And sadly unfinished.
The latter makes it hard to review.
Wild. Unflinching. Visceral. Unrepentant. Revolutionary. And sadly unfinished.
The latter makes it hard to review.
August 14, 2016
More like 2 1/2 but I'll give it 3 for creativity. Takes place in Harlem in the 80's where random African-American residents find themselves recipients of packages containing assault rifles and other weaponry. This is seemingly setup from the mind of one very militant individual who seeks to violently write a new path for black people to be heard in a society where they're reduced to second class status. Needless to say things get out of hand quickly. Unfortunately, the book is unfinished and right around 150 pages in things, narratively speaking, start to break down in broad strokes of exposition.
August 1, 2021
An unfinished novel that is a bit incoherent at times, but the anger Himes must have felt throughout his life is palpable. On the other hand, I suspect he enjoyed indulging in this violent revenge fantasy against white people. And I can’t blame him for that.
August 5, 2007
Let's say this is the most revolutionary novel ever printed
in the U.S. No stretch at all, not even a little bit. I'm
just waiting to see how long before it "disappears" out of
print...
in the U.S. No stretch at all, not even a little bit. I'm
just waiting to see how long before it "disappears" out of
print...
October 7, 2007
Blacks get guns. Kill white cops. What's not to like?
April 3, 2009
f-ing amazing. though, as it was published posthumously, the ending is a teeny disappointing and probably not what Himes would have wanted.
For any reader interested in imagining race wars.
For any reader interested in imagining race wars.
December 15, 2019
One of the best books I have ever read. My favorite book of the year.
September 2, 2025
Wonderful writing. I only gave 4 stars because it's listed as the final book in The Harlem Cycle (Gravedigger and Coffin Ed). They barely appear. Interesting book, but just not the one I expected.
April 25, 2024
Since I am generally a completist, and had read all previous eight volumes of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, I finally got my hands on the ninth, Plan B, which was published in French in 1983 and published in English in 1993. The series is set in the sixties and focuses on Harlem, seen through the perspective of two angry, frustrated and sometimes violent black detectives. The action is often raucous, profane, hilarious, insightful, rough around the edges with flashes of brilliance and offense. I read them in part because I had read Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series set in LA which was said to be in part inspired by Himes: Books that explore a range of black experience in the context of crime. And Himes was always on my tbr list; I am only now (2024) getting t him, and he's great, on the whole.
Himes began Plan B in 1967-68, but it was never completed. He wrote what I thought to be the completion of the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, in 1969, and both books have some similar themes, so I think of Pistol as a somewhat tamer view of the late sixties civil unrest than Plan B. Neither of these books are really detective fiction, though both include Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. Working with Himes’ notes that describe the intended ending of Plan B, Michael Fabre and Robert E. Skinner “finished it.” Himes died in 1984, having worked, in his waning years, in declining health, to complete it, but he came up short, and many feel he may never have really decided how to finish it.
Plan B is a pull-out-all-the-stops apocalyptic novel describing a violent black uprising or revolution inspired by his reading the news from France about the late sixties riots, and other racial violence, such as the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In an interview, Himes said he had wanted to "depict the violence that is necessary so that the white community will also give it a little thought, because you know, they're going around playing these games. They haven't given any thought to what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise."
The book is apocalyptic--uber-violent, including lots of killing and sex. War is societal breakdown, and this is all about that. It begins with a chapter ending in a angry killing by Gravedigger of a pimp, and another early chapter depicts the chaos that might defy American textbook depictions of post-slavery “Reconstruction” as a kind of chaotic destructive occasion of rage on the parts of both Southern Confederate whites and freed slaves.
2024 brings us a film seen as shocking but not unrealistic, Civil War, but that film is a relatively tame vision compared to Plan B. The book details the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to ignite violence in Harlem in order to create a radical change in racial relations. Whites do counter-attack, as one might expect, so thus it becomes all-out war.
If you are easily offended, do not even consider reading this book, because it is meant to offend. And shock. Himes uses humor to deflect criticism in his earlier books in the series, but there’s not much humor here. Mostly rage. But there are some remarkable passages in it, to be fair. Some brilliance, and lots of disorder, within a big outrageous mess that comes close to what I think Himes intended it to be, his masterpiece, though he also doubted anyone would actually have the courage to publish it. Percival Everett says it, even unfinished, or finished by others, is one of his three best books.
Himes loves Harlem and its people, but the whole series is a solid indictment of a society that created Harlem in the first place, a place of poverty and despair and fraudulent preachers and drug addicts and all.. So for inspiration for violence Himes loved Faulkner, but it reminded me of some Cormac McCarthy works at their most racially violent. Dystopian fiction. But worth a look if you take a deep breath and hang on.
I don’t know how to rate it, frankly. Some parts are 5 stars, no question. Some of it seems indefensibly nihilistic, by far his darkest vision of the world. And he never finished it, so can you say it is a great book? Kafka wrote some unfinished novels we now call classics, but none of them such as Plan B where Himes destroys the very world he set out to create in his series. Crazy book. Maybe a kind of warning? I guess today I’ll say 3 stars.
Himes began Plan B in 1967-68, but it was never completed. He wrote what I thought to be the completion of the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, in 1969, and both books have some similar themes, so I think of Pistol as a somewhat tamer view of the late sixties civil unrest than Plan B. Neither of these books are really detective fiction, though both include Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. Working with Himes’ notes that describe the intended ending of Plan B, Michael Fabre and Robert E. Skinner “finished it.” Himes died in 1984, having worked, in his waning years, in declining health, to complete it, but he came up short, and many feel he may never have really decided how to finish it.
Plan B is a pull-out-all-the-stops apocalyptic novel describing a violent black uprising or revolution inspired by his reading the news from France about the late sixties riots, and other racial violence, such as the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In an interview, Himes said he had wanted to "depict the violence that is necessary so that the white community will also give it a little thought, because you know, they're going around playing these games. They haven't given any thought to what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise."
The book is apocalyptic--uber-violent, including lots of killing and sex. War is societal breakdown, and this is all about that. It begins with a chapter ending in a angry killing by Gravedigger of a pimp, and another early chapter depicts the chaos that might defy American textbook depictions of post-slavery “Reconstruction” as a kind of chaotic destructive occasion of rage on the parts of both Southern Confederate whites and freed slaves.
2024 brings us a film seen as shocking but not unrealistic, Civil War, but that film is a relatively tame vision compared to Plan B. The book details the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to ignite violence in Harlem in order to create a radical change in racial relations. Whites do counter-attack, as one might expect, so thus it becomes all-out war.
If you are easily offended, do not even consider reading this book, because it is meant to offend. And shock. Himes uses humor to deflect criticism in his earlier books in the series, but there’s not much humor here. Mostly rage. But there are some remarkable passages in it, to be fair. Some brilliance, and lots of disorder, within a big outrageous mess that comes close to what I think Himes intended it to be, his masterpiece, though he also doubted anyone would actually have the courage to publish it. Percival Everett says it, even unfinished, or finished by others, is one of his three best books.
Himes loves Harlem and its people, but the whole series is a solid indictment of a society that created Harlem in the first place, a place of poverty and despair and fraudulent preachers and drug addicts and all.. So for inspiration for violence Himes loved Faulkner, but it reminded me of some Cormac McCarthy works at their most racially violent. Dystopian fiction. But worth a look if you take a deep breath and hang on.
I don’t know how to rate it, frankly. Some parts are 5 stars, no question. Some of it seems indefensibly nihilistic, by far his darkest vision of the world. And he never finished it, so can you say it is a great book? Kafka wrote some unfinished novels we now call classics, but none of them such as Plan B where Himes destroys the very world he set out to create in his series. Crazy book. Maybe a kind of warning? I guess today I’ll say 3 stars.
July 7, 2025
Unfinished novel in which Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson become embroiled in a black uprising across the USA. Spends a little too long establishing the accursed provenance of a patch of land on which a chitterling factory is erected. Himes' obsession with the sexual depravity of white people might exceed the reasonable; he's just too pissed off here to pull off the comedy that a defter hand like Ishmael Reed could manage. Some grotesque sex scenes naturally. But some really great Manchette-esque sniper scenes where police commissioners get shot to jelly. The ending (pieced together by editors) is very sketchy and underdone given what happens. (ROT13: Tenir Qvttre xvyyf Rq naq gura vf uvzfrys xvyyrq).
Still - what a series, probably the greatest thriller series in US literature.
Still - what a series, probably the greatest thriller series in US literature.
January 26, 2021
Chester Himes' final book Plan B is a grandly , grotesque phantasmagoria through the American racist landscape. The book is the final chapter of the Harlem Cycle of crime novels which had as its anti heroes a pair of steely Harlem detectives, Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson. But in this final installment they are rendered to the background & the protagonist called Tomsson Black is the straw that stirs this bitterly brutal & unfortunately unfinished tale of racial apocalypse in NYC. This story is quite incendiary & definitely not for everyone yet its overtones of racial conflict remains prescient today & fans of the preceding eight stories in the Harlem series will find a sense respite, rather than regret in this denouement.
August 29, 2024
The banner over the author's name, the front cover's headline, is "A Harlem Detectives Novel," and I expected a novel about detection in Harlem. This was not to be.
Instead, after an opening scene featuring a murder in a squalid Harlem apartment, the story spirals off into a complex fantasy about race relations in America and a race war of epic proportions. It's well written. It's interesting. But it's not a detective novel.
In fact it's not quite a novel at all. At the bottom of page 155 the reader is advised that Chester Himes left his novel unfinished and the book concludes with a few pages (according to information buried in the back cover blurb) "completed from the author's notes by two editors."
Instead, after an opening scene featuring a murder in a squalid Harlem apartment, the story spirals off into a complex fantasy about race relations in America and a race war of epic proportions. It's well written. It's interesting. But it's not a detective novel.
In fact it's not quite a novel at all. At the bottom of page 155 the reader is advised that Chester Himes left his novel unfinished and the book concludes with a few pages (according to information buried in the back cover blurb) "completed from the author's notes by two editors."
September 5, 2024
This is a book I think everyone should read. I was introduced to it by the Luke Cage reading list online, and I am really glad I read it. It is a challenging book to read because it is a dystopic novel about a race war in America. There is great violence and anger throughout the book, and the very concept of the story caused me to think about a lot of aspects of life. This novel was published after the author's death, so there is an unfinished and slightly loosely connected quality to it. However, I think it has a lot of merit. I do look forward to reading more of Chester Himes' books in the near future.
December 9, 2020
Some strong material in here, but it really is unfinished and just stops, except for a posthumous and utterly unconvincing conclusion tacked on. The better bits are mostly set far from Harlem, whether Fifth Avenue or Alabama. The violence is described in Pekinpah-esque slow motion detail. The bits that ostensibly tie this to the Gravedigger Jones/Coffin Ed material are particularly clunky and forced. Interesting for the Himes completist, but best avoided by everyone else.
Read
October 28, 2024This one has to go unrated as it wasn’t truly a complete book by the author.
I think there were a lot of great things said in here and I do think that Himes writing and activism lends well to the detective fiction form.
This book does extremely undermine women and the things they can bring to the revolution besides food. It wasn’t as terrible as I thought that aspect would be but they were pretty much invisible.
I think there were a lot of great things said in here and I do think that Himes writing and activism lends well to the detective fiction form.
This book does extremely undermine women and the things they can bring to the revolution besides food. It wasn’t as terrible as I thought that aspect would be but they were pretty much invisible.
November 26, 2017
An incredibly dark story with a bleak take on humanity that also manages to be wildly over the top, even cartoonish, without losing too much believability. In some ways this makes “Plan B” most similar to the first book in Chester Himes’s Harlem Cycle, “A Rage in Harlem;” another similarity is that the nominal heroes of The Harlem Cycle—Grave Digger and Coffin Ed—are barely a part of the story. But whereas the rest of the Harlem Cycle is a granular look at the lives and miseries of the citizens of Harlem, “Plan B” is a reckless dive into an American race war. While enjoyable, the book is also deeply problematic, with the main character beating and raping a woman, who loves it. The critic Noah Bertlasky recently wrote that we seem to like certain male authors not despite their misogyny but because of it, and “Plan B” reveals an ugliness toward women that is more subtle in the rest of the Harlem Cycle but no less troublesome.
September 19, 2022
Der Roman ist eine Art Mischung aus Groteske und bitterböser Gesellschaftskritik. Manche Kapitel sind wirklich genial, andere jedoch haben den Charme eines Sachbuches. Wer sich für Werke von Richard Wright und James Baldwin interessiert, kann es auch einmal mit diesem Büchlein von Chester Himes versuchen. Fans von Kriminalromanen würde ich jedoch eher von der Lektüre abraten.
September 25, 2022
A literary blitzkrieg, an apocalyptic satire, an unrelenting disclosure of Himes’ political id in exile. This unfinished novel is richly written in lush, approachable prose, balancing pointed racial satire with “picaresque” historical sketches. Then Himes switches gears towards a more spectacular mode of end-times / dystopian bleakness. A brutal little book.
July 25, 2025
I liked the detective works so well; the satire and the fury blended in to the noir. This is just satire, so raw and raging, but psychologically keen. I just wish we could have left a tiny window of optimism open for Grave Digger and Coffin Ed - yesterday's heroes might still make good on their visions tomorrow. Although looking around today, I wouldn't say that we have gotten there yet.
March 8, 2018
This book has filled me with an overwhelming sense of repulsion and misanthropy. Not due to the content itself, but rather views of the author that are presented by it. The gruesome experiences of racism seem to left him twisted and corrupted.
July 21, 2019
Plan B was an uncompleted novel by Chester Himes and stayed unfinished for a reason. It sets a scorched earth policy towards race relations and doesn't let up at any point. Himes decries racism but there isn't one halfway normal African-American character in the whole novel.
Another problem I had with Plan B was its flight from logic. We're never told why Tomsson Black went from being a prosperous executive to a militant sniper shooting at policemen from an apartment window in the ghetto. It doesn't make a bit of sense, and Himes painted himself into a corner.
While his criticisms of race relations in the United States are well-stated they're bookended by so many gory scenes of rape and violence the message gets swamped by its own luridness.
Another problem I had with Plan B was its flight from logic. We're never told why Tomsson Black went from being a prosperous executive to a militant sniper shooting at policemen from an apartment window in the ghetto. It doesn't make a bit of sense, and Himes painted himself into a corner.
While his criticisms of race relations in the United States are well-stated they're bookended by so many gory scenes of rape and violence the message gets swamped by its own luridness.
Read
January 9, 2023Himes' last and unfinished novel, Plan B is a stirring, bold, uncompromising, thought-provoking and yet deeply flawed work.
No other book I've encountered (except perhaps Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ) so excellently captures the political and social conditions of racial oppression and militant response. Much of the African-American literature that preceded and followed it (including the rest of Himes' own work) seems wholly focused on merely reporting the degree of American racism and apartheid, often presented through either broken and victimized narrators or angry, black men who vent their rage wherever they can (Richard Wright's novels). That approach (which either subtly ignores or blatantly rejects the possibility for a radical response to racism) is ultimately an ineffective, unrealistic and politically debilitating way of presenting American racial dynamics.
Plan B partially corrects that flaw by presenting one of the most vividly realized literary accounts of racial unrest and revolution ever conceived. The novel is at its best when describing the murder of cops, the massive and genocidal overreaction by police and military to comparatively limited rebellion, the eventual assassination of leaders of the white establishment, and the political and social conditions that caused all this to happen in the first place. What makes the novel so good is that these conditions are pretty exactly the state of American in the late 1960s. You get the sense that a full out race war could have happened so very easily under slightly different circumstances.
Where Plan B fails is in the chapters about a black businessman/philanthropist's ancestry and upbringing, which alternate with the chapters about civil unrest and ultimately make up half the book. While these two strands do unite at the end of the novel (albeit very weakly, as the conclusion of the unfinished novel was cobbled together from sparse notes after Himes' death), it still seems as though Himes was writing two separately stories without really knowing how to best combine them.
Those lesser chapters are somehow more brutal and unsettling than the chapters about full-out race war. In scenes reminiscient of Voltaire's Candide , Himes recounts lynchings and rapes in a way that's supposed to make them cleverly funny. Even though I could see what Himes was trying to accomplish, I had a very hard time stomaching these descriptions. There's something too miniature and personal about this satire, which renders it much more disturbing and unsuccessful than Himes' satire of race relations on the national scale.
Rather than buying a copy of this book, I decided to just photocopy the chapters (roughly half the book) that dealt with rebellion, while doing my best to forget about the other ones. The result is, in my opinion, a much stronger, coherent novel with a clearer and more direct sense of purpose. I'm sure, though, that others would disagree with me.
As far as I know, there's only this one edition of the book in print, which is published by the University Press of Mississippi. That makes it expensive to buy but ultimately more rewarding to read, as UPM has included a lengthy introduction that places this work in context, explains how Himes came to write it and gives a stronger sense of how this unfinished novel would have been completed.
In short, it's an unsettling, uneven, ultimately unsuccessful novel that happens to include the most stirring and radical scenes of rebellion I've ever encountered in liturature and one of the best examples of social satire from the Black Power era ever written. It's an exciting yet troubling artifact from an exciting yet troubling time.
No other book I've encountered (except perhaps Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ) so excellently captures the political and social conditions of racial oppression and militant response. Much of the African-American literature that preceded and followed it (including the rest of Himes' own work) seems wholly focused on merely reporting the degree of American racism and apartheid, often presented through either broken and victimized narrators or angry, black men who vent their rage wherever they can (Richard Wright's novels). That approach (which either subtly ignores or blatantly rejects the possibility for a radical response to racism) is ultimately an ineffective, unrealistic and politically debilitating way of presenting American racial dynamics.
Plan B partially corrects that flaw by presenting one of the most vividly realized literary accounts of racial unrest and revolution ever conceived. The novel is at its best when describing the murder of cops, the massive and genocidal overreaction by police and military to comparatively limited rebellion, the eventual assassination of leaders of the white establishment, and the political and social conditions that caused all this to happen in the first place. What makes the novel so good is that these conditions are pretty exactly the state of American in the late 1960s. You get the sense that a full out race war could have happened so very easily under slightly different circumstances.
Where Plan B fails is in the chapters about a black businessman/philanthropist's ancestry and upbringing, which alternate with the chapters about civil unrest and ultimately make up half the book. While these two strands do unite at the end of the novel (albeit very weakly, as the conclusion of the unfinished novel was cobbled together from sparse notes after Himes' death), it still seems as though Himes was writing two separately stories without really knowing how to best combine them.
Those lesser chapters are somehow more brutal and unsettling than the chapters about full-out race war. In scenes reminiscient of Voltaire's Candide , Himes recounts lynchings and rapes in a way that's supposed to make them cleverly funny. Even though I could see what Himes was trying to accomplish, I had a very hard time stomaching these descriptions. There's something too miniature and personal about this satire, which renders it much more disturbing and unsuccessful than Himes' satire of race relations on the national scale.
Rather than buying a copy of this book, I decided to just photocopy the chapters (roughly half the book) that dealt with rebellion, while doing my best to forget about the other ones. The result is, in my opinion, a much stronger, coherent novel with a clearer and more direct sense of purpose. I'm sure, though, that others would disagree with me.
As far as I know, there's only this one edition of the book in print, which is published by the University Press of Mississippi. That makes it expensive to buy but ultimately more rewarding to read, as UPM has included a lengthy introduction that places this work in context, explains how Himes came to write it and gives a stronger sense of how this unfinished novel would have been completed.
In short, it's an unsettling, uneven, ultimately unsuccessful novel that happens to include the most stirring and radical scenes of rebellion I've ever encountered in liturature and one of the best examples of social satire from the Black Power era ever written. It's an exciting yet troubling artifact from an exciting yet troubling time.
January 24, 2016
Just not my kind of book, I guess. Very violent, more like an experiment in shock value than any real societal observation / commentary. Interesting in some parts, but the narrative stream is always interrupted by gore...
September 9, 2012
Written as a synopsis in the way some Richard Matheson stories are.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews