There is a fundamental predicament to biography that few practitioners seem willing to address. Namely that what you do, at best, is sketch a life for the unfortunate victim. Only perhaps autobiography is able to approach with anything like photographic sincerity, but then we have to contend with the soft light of hindsight; no one chooses to play the monster.

In this, his long-awaited critical (and, yes, that is an important qualification) biography of the great black novelist Chester Himes, James Sallis is well aware of the contradiction. But then it could scarcely be otherwise from the author of the extraordinary Lew Griffin cycle – dense, allusive literary novels about the nature of memory and, yes, biography, masquerading as simple crime writing. Thus, Chester Himes: A Life signals early that it is a mediation between a life lived and almost 400 pages of carefully layered prose. Sallis’ powerful authorial voice runs parallel throughout the book; a devil always on our shoulder.

Long seen as simply an extension of American crime fiction, Sallis is intent on proving Chester Bomar Himes "America’s central black writer". Born Jefferson City, Missouri, July 29, 1909, to a surprisingly well to do (for a black) family, Himes fell into crime early, beginning his writing in gaol on an armed robbery conviction. Early works like If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade – the bulk of Sallis’ analysis – are less well known than the later Harlem cycle of vaguely surrealist crime capers, but remain no less remarkable now than they ever were. Works that, as Sallis has it, put Himes "squarely at the crossroad of tradition and innovation." The Primitive, his astounding taboo-baiting 1956 novel about the fractious relationship between a black man and white woman, is for Sallis simply a "neglected masterpiece, one of American literature’s great novels."

As ever in these situations though, the distinction between fact and fancy is blurred. This writing, says Sallis, was driven by pride and anger. "Chester Himes was never a free man," he concludes. Delivered into the black middle-class, Himes himself claimed that he "simply hadn’t accepted my status as a ‘nigger’." Fear, says Sallis, was the great motivator, and offers us a portrait of a complex, contradictory talent, as hamstrung by his own belligerence as any bigotry, real or perceived. There was, his biographer explains, a deal of self-mythology to offset the undeniable whoring, womanising and hard drinking that provided Himes’ foundation. He was a man – a writer - mired in struggle, both against big publishing’s resistance ("Chester was always there at the station too early, taking the train alone") and himself. He lived the life, be it in his dalliances with women – many many women – or literature or radical politics: "he perceived himself to be in the purest sense witnessing, to be setting down truth, gospel, word."

As with so many artists before him, it was a life lived out in Europe. Like Jim Thompson, a prophet seldom recognised in his own land, Himes’ stock abroad, especially in France, was high. Only at the end, married to Lesley – English and white – his health failing, did he finally taste a measure of the success so long postponed.

Chester Himes: A Life is no less than the book its subject demands. As a literary critic, Sallis more than punches his weight, his analysis rigorous and respectful but never shy of landing a blow. There is the unspoken feeling that, no matter how great they are (and Himes never wrote a book that was less than fascinating), somehow his talent was squandered on the Harlem novels - books, at least initially, written to order. Sallis is a friend to Himes rather than his acolyte and the result is serious and scholarly but also playfully self-aware; a convincing, loving portrait of the ornery, contradictory, gifted man he sadly never met. Two great writers, one exceptional biography.