A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.
Himes wrote nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished instalments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world peopled with conniving con men, gut-toting gangsters and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground, enriched by deft plotting and scintillating dialogue, is both riotous entertainment and penetrating enquiry into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.

About the Author
Chester Himes was born in 1909 in Missouri and began his writing career while serving in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery (1929-36). From his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Himes dealt with the social and psychological repercussions of being black in a white-dominated society. In 1953 Himes moved to Europe, where he met and was strongly influenced by Richard Wright. It was in France that he began his best-known series of crime novels - including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) - featuring two Harlem policemen. As with Himes's earlier work, the series is characterized by violence and grisly, sardonic humour. He died in Spain in 1984.

Reviews
These wholly original, occasionally disorienting and sometimes surreal books are a must for all crime fiction aficionados * Guardian *
Chester Himes is perhaps the most singular American novelist of the past century, whose insight and innovation are still only beginning to be recognised * Independent *
Himes's Harlem saga vies with the novels of David Goodis and Jim Thompson as the inescapable achievement of postwar American fiction * The New York Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9781841594170
Author Chester himes
Format Hardback
Page Count 712
Imprint Everyman's Library
Publisher Everyman
Weight(grams) 736g
Dimensions(mm) 210mm * 135mm * 37mm