Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Chester Himes emigrated to Paris where he struggled to publish, just as he had in the United States, until the 'Harlem Domestic Series' transformed the author into a cult figure for a generation of Parisian readers who appreciated the blend of absurdist humor and violence. For African authors, these novels also modeled an escape from a high literary paradigm inherited from the colonial experience. Himes’s ambiguous role as a famous 'French' writer paradoxically also made him an effective means of escaping the centripetal pull of the Métropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione’s 1982 La Vie en spirale depictions of Senegal’s marijuana smoking subculture and ending with Mongo Beti’s 2001 Branles-bas en noir et blanc that displaced Himes’ Harlem to Yaoundé, Cameroon, these works turned their backs on France and its ideological and anthropological criteria of literary success and embraced a new aesthetic. In the process, the Francophone African authors of noir became less motivated by Fanonian cultural nationalism and more with entertaining the reader while making a living. Noir Atlantic demonstrates why and how we should consider this move to a 'frivolous literary' as a profoundly significant moment in Francophone African literary history that lead the way to more recent developments such as Littérature Monde.

The Noir Atlantic is a captivating book in which Pim Higginson carves out new terrain through absorbing readings of the under-explored corpus of francophone African crime writing. Readers will be stimulated by the numerous insights provided into the multi-directional nature of cultural and political networks that have historically shaped relations between Africa, Europe, and the United States, and appreciate the far-reaching implications for diaspora, francophone, and postcolonial studies.

Dominic Thomas Source: UCLA

It will be useful not only to scholars of African literature in French but also to readers of Chester Himes’s novels and crime fiction in general. In short, this book makes interesting and important connections between Francophone African and African American literature. It is also, like the crime fiction it discusses, a very good read.

Nicki Hitchcott Source: University of Nottingham