The present chapter continues to follow the ways in which Chester Himes’ Harlem series models a new and important frivolous literary outlet for Francophone African writing. The 1980s novel La Vie en spirale, discussed in Chapter 1, sketched out the terms of a Francophone African noir that maintained a kind of African realism while nevertheless unapologetically appealing to the needs of its reading public. And although it is possible to identify in this novel many Himesian tropes, there is not an overt or explicit intertextuality. Rather, La Vie en spirale shows that the American functioned as a generic model for Ndione as he tried to find new ways to explore the reality of a rapidly urbanizing contemporary Senegal.

By contrast, the intertextual relationship with Himes’ Harlem novels is obvious in Cameroonian author Simon Njami's 1985 novel Cercueil & cie. As critic Ambroise Kom avows:

In addition to being the first explicitly to dialogue with Himes, Cercueil & cie is also the first example of an African, Paris-based “polar d'immigration” that in the 1990s would find new energy in the works of Achille Ngoye and Bolya, whom I discuss in later chapters. While Ndione and Njami both appropriate noir, Ndione locates his narrative in a broader Francophone literary universe only obliquely, humorously, and anecdotally. Njami on the other hand engages in the paradoxical— indeed impossible—task of deconstructing and reversing the persistent epistemic exclusion of African writing from French letters. The whole arc of Simon Njami's career from this, his earliest novel, to his more recent work as a publisher and art critic, has aimed at penetrating the Parisian intellectual and artistic market. Cercueil & cie, published by Lieu commun in Paris, was his first attempt to break into this segregated universe. He recognized the limitations imposed on him by a publishing industry that continued to classify its production by the ethnicity of the author. His solution is a systematically articulated escape from French literary hegemony through the frivolous literary by what might be called “minor mistranslation.”