The Heat's on - Softcover

Himes, Chester

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749001003 ISBN 13: 9780749001001

Publisher: Allison & Busby, 1992

Synopsis

From the start nothing goes right for black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Grave Digger is shot, both are disciplined for using excessive force and the bodies still keep piling up. Yet the detectives still can't find an albino called Pinky and $3 million-worth of heroin.

About this title

Review:

The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler (Sunday Times)

Outrageous, shocking, wonderful (New York Times Book Review)

Himes wrote spectacularly successful entertainments, filled with gems of descriptive writing, plots that barely sidestep chaos, characters surreal, grotesque, comic, hip, Harlem recollected as a place that can make you laugh, cry, shudder. (John Edgar Wideman)

Chester Himes is one of the towering figures of the black literary tradition. His command of nuances of character and dynamics of plot is preeminent among writers of crime fiction. He is a master craftsman. (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)

A fantasia with a hard brilliant core (Evening Standard)

A fine crime writer of Chandlerian subtlety though in a vein of sheer toughness very much his own (The Times)

Chester Himes is the great lost crime writer, as well a great American dissident novelist per se, and an essential witness to his times. Every one of his beyond-cool Harlem novels is cherished by every reader who finds it. (Jonathan Lethem)

Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis (The New York Times)

He belongs with those great demented realists ... whose writing pitilessly exposes the ridiculousness of the human condition (Will Self)

That he could channel this pain and misery into some of the greatest crime novels ever written is a testament to his skill as a writer and his spirit as a man. If this is the first Chester Himes novel you will read then, believe me, you are in for a treat. (Noel "Razor" Smith)

About the Author:

Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1909 and grew up in Cleveland.

Aged 19 he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 20 to 25 years in jail. In jail he began to write short stories, some of which were published in Esquire.

Upon release he took a variety of jobs from working in a California shipyard to journalism to script-writing while continuing to write fiction. He later moved to Paris where he was commissioned by La Série Noire to write the first of his Harlem detective novels, La reine des pommes/A Rage in Harlem, which won the 1957 Grand Prix du Roman Policier. In 1969 Himes moved to Spain, where he died in 1984.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allison & Busby
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0749001003
• ISBN 13: 9780749001001
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174