The Essential Harlem Detectives (Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics) - Hardcover

Himes, Chester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841594172 ISBN 13: 9781841594170

Publisher: Everyman, 2024

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841594172
• ISBN 13: 9781841594170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 712